The next day I met Sadie in front of her favorite place in the entire world. The London Library is a members-only institution that boasts decades of high literary tradition, dating back to its opening. Sadie Mae became a member before she’d finished registering for her first set of classes at our school and bought me a membership of my own for my sixteenth birthday. Even at the student rate, I was pretty sure it was a spendy gift.
Sadie Mae couldn’t be bothered with menial things like money, which meant she’d always had plenty. Though she’d more than once protested loudly about how much it cost to own even a tiny flat in London, comparing it to the palatial mansion she could own in Georgia for the same price. But a library membership was worth every penny, she assured me.
The minute we stepped through the little glass gate and into the main hall, Sadie breathed in deeply. “I’m home,” she whispered, with all the quiet reverence most might reserve for only the holiest of chapels. I was entirely sure she was talking to the books. “Meet me at our spot in twenty?”
It really was like picking up where we’d left off. Sadie had spent our first few visits trying to convince me to read novels—as if I hadn’t been forced to read enough of those in school. So this became our tradition, go our separate ways to gather what we needed, then sit together and read or study until they kicked us out. “Better make it thirty. I’ve actually got a few things to look up in periodicals.”
Sadie made a face at my clearly inferior choice. “If I didn’t know you meant the science journals, I might get my hopes up.” She ran off toward the stairs up to the literature section. At least, that’s where I assumed she was going. Sadie managed to find fiction in every building where there were books. Or magazines. Or words. I pulled my hands free of my pockets, then trotted off to start my search.
I spun my mother’s coin across the table with one hand while typing in search terms with the other. I should have been studying, of course. The class had almost caught up to where I’d left off in trigonometry a month ago. My mind, however, wandered continually back to the photo, to Mr. Patel’s death in the park. Had he even had time to think about his daughter before the short sword paralyzed him?
For all its boasts of subscriptions to 750 periodicals, the London Library didn’t supply me with any plain news. They were all very dignified and posh journals of higher learning, which is to say, complete rubbish when it came to gossip. I tried first to do a search of my mother’s name, and then her maiden name, but there were only a few hits and none seemed to have anything at all to do with her. I spun the coin once more, only this time toward me, and when it finally landed, the glow of the monitor made the clover stand out from its background.
On a whim, I typed “four-leaf clover” into the search bar and stared at it awhile, knowing it wasn’t near enough to get anything other than garden and superstition responses. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. So far, I only knew that every man who had been in Mum’s photo had died, and they’d all been in trouble for the same thing.
I quickly added the words “coin,” “theft,” and then “robbery,” just in case.
Most of the hits were rubbish, but about halfway down the second page was a link to a journal article on unsolved crimes that contained the words “named for the clover seen on a coin” and “the robbery of four major targets.”
I checked my watch while the article loaded, noting my thirty minutes were nearly up, and clicked print, to read it later. I pulled up a new tab and glanced over my shoulder before typing “serial murder” in the search bar. The results were a mix of articles on “How to tell if your child will be a serial killer” and lists of the traits and characteristics known serial murderers exhibit—none from any kind of reliable source. Until I found the U.S. FBI report from some kind of symposium about serial killings.
I was lost in that for a time, skimming through points about psychopathy and motivation, through myths and misunderstandings, through pages and pages of theories all punctuated by the truth that there is no one reason or one pattern of behavior for a serial killer. They all do what they do for their own reasons and in their own way.
“Comforting, that,” I said quietly.
The word “ritual” jumped off the page at me, however. Ritual seemed to be the one most common trait. As the paper stated, the ritual was the way most serial killers were identified. They killed with the same weapon or left behind a calling card. Our killer was still a mystery, and we didn’t know enough to identify his ritual. Or hers. Perhaps Regent’s Park was the ritual.