“Whatever,” she grumbles.
“—then I’d go with the revenant angle.”
“Really?” Jess perks up.
“Yeah, I know it’s crazy, but hey.” He gestures to the scrapbook. I must look bewildered. “A revenant,” he explains gently, “is kind of like a vicious vampire. . .”
Jess nearly snorts out her tea. “No, it’s not!”
“OK, what is it then?”
“It’s more like a ghost, a romantic, yearning. . .”
“It really isn’t.”
“It is! Haven’t you read those Amy Plum books? The ones set in Paris?” Jess fake swoons and Will starts to argue with her.
I sigh and google “revenant”.
“A revenant,” I read aloud in a flat monotone, “is an animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living. It comes from the Old French ‘revenant’, the ‘returning’ or ‘renvier’, ‘to come back’.” I put my phone down and thank the gods of Wikipedia. “Sound about right?”
“Whatever,” says Will. “Anyway, revenants have this connection with people, this ability to bring them back.”
“Er, OK. So why is he doing the opposite? Why is he hurting people?” I hurry to correct myself. “I mean, if you’re right, which would be very, very weird. Why has he been attacking girls?”
“Girls who look like you,” Will corrects.
“No,” I protest. “Not all of them. Me and Jess look nothing alike.”
“Yeah, but I was attacked for a different reason,” says Jess. “He was different. Cold. Almost . . . dead behind the eyes. He must have known that I recognized him, that I’d match him up with the microfilm pictures eventually.”
“Which you did,” I say.
Jess nods. “He thought I was going to tell you about all this and he wanted me out of the way.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Not only are they telling me that one of the people I trusted most while I was here has been behind all of this, but that he is some kind of ancient, bloodthirsty undead person, too.
The real problem is, I think I’m starting to believe them.
“There are more pictures, Niamh,” Jess says quietly. She flips to another one. There he is again, head slightly down but unmistakable.
“Are you sure they’re not all long-lost relatives?” I try.
“They could be, I guess,” Jess says quietly, flipping to yet another picture, the background of which I recognize. The museum. It’s in colour, this one, but the outfits are all shades of yellow and brown, so I mark it down as some time in the seventies. It’s the front of the museum and an old man is proudly cutting a ribbon with some huge, metal handled scissors. “This one did make me wonder, whether it was a relative or not, but here’s one more.”
She flips to a magazine article, this one definitely from the nineties. It shows a nightclub, a lush, velvet sofa, and a slim brunette, sat on his lap. I recognize the woman and flip back to a page in the Will’s eerie scrapbook. Yes, there she is. A perfectly symmetrical, angular face stares out at me, lips lined in nineties brown, her hair long and shiny, parted in the middle. “Remembering the tragic teenage supermodel, Caitlin Cooke, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her murder.”
“No,” I whisper, pushing the book away. “No.”
“Niamh, don’t you see? I think he’s in these photos on purpose. Can you imagine how hard it was to get on a photograph back in Victorian times? When Jane died they were only just being invented! He could have done it to keep some kind of warped record of his existence. He must have a weird obsession with them – I mean, all those pictures of you asleep. He must have taken them. Then deleted them when you were downstairs.”
So he was there all the time. I shiver.
“But. . .” My phone begins to flash, making me jump. It’s just Meghan trying to FaceTime.
“Ignore it,” I say, shaking my head. I’ll call her later.
“OK,” Jess ploughs on, “and Will told me this morning he has noticed something else.”
