Boo walked quickly, turning off Whitechapel and heading down a side road, turning again and again, so quickly that within five minutes I knew I could never find my way back on my own. Boo began to wave frantically at someone over in the playground across the street. I looked over and saw a young woman dressed in a brown wool suit. It looked like an old-fashioned kind of uniform—a female soldier’s uniform, but not a modern one. Her dark brown hair was tightly made up in a retro style, medium length and done up in tight curls around the edges, under her hat. She was picking up trash from the playground and throwing it away. No one got that dressed up in some kind of 1940s outfit to clean streets.

Boo glanced both ways and ran across the street, barely missing a car. I stepped behind a big red mailbox and watched her talking to the woman, guiding her over to a more secluded spot. After a minute or two, a police car came down the street. It slowed and pulled up next to the playground. Out of it stepped the young policeman from the day of the murder, the one Jazza thought was a reporter.

I felt myself go cold all over.

“What the hell?” I said out loud.

Now it was the three of them—the woman in the brown wool uniform, the young policeman, and my roommate—all in a very animated conversation. It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.

I tried to make sense of the scene. The policeman had to be a real policeman. If he was a reporter, as Jazza suspected, he couldn’t go around in a disguise all the time. He wouldn’t have a police car. Boo had come into the school right after the murders. Boo went everywhere I went. As for the woman in the uniform, I had no idea who she was, and I didn’t care. The fact that Boo and the policeman were talking together in secret was enough.

And then, one of the many other people coming down the street walked through the woman in the uniform.

Through her.

In response to this, the woman simply turned and glanced over her shoulder with a kind of “Well, that was rude” look. This was all I needed to see. There was something wrong with me, no question. I couldn’t stay there hiding behind a mailbox. The little green man came up on the street-crossing sign, so I crossed, my head swimming. I walked right at them. I needed help. I could feel my knees weakening with every step.

“There’s something wrong with me,” I said.

The three of them turned and stared at me.

“Oh, no,” the policeman said. “No . . .”

“I didn’t!” Boo said. “She must have followed me.”