Page 12 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Then I stand there for an embarrassingly long time, just looking at him from the doorway, before I make myself leave.

The concierge downstairs gives me a look that says he’s seen plenty of men leave this particular lift looking exactly like I currently do, and has developed a professional immunity to commenting on it. I nod at him like a man with dignity intact. He nods back like a man who knows better. Outside, the street is doing that grudging early morning thing where the sun’s clearly up but hasn’t yet convinced the cold to leave, and I stand on the pavement for a second, deciding whether I feel like myself or like somebody wearing my coat.

I don’t do Ubers, not on a detective inspector’s salary, so I take the Overground, changing onto the Victoria line at Highbury and Islington for the run south. The carriage is half full with the kind of people who got up properly for work instead of doing the walk of shame across half of London in last night’s shirt. A woman in a sharp blazer clocks me, clocks the state of my collar, and very deliberately looks back at her phone. Nobody else looks at me twice. I look like exactly what I am, a tired man in his forties who clearly didn’t sleep at his own address, and London is far too busy minding its own business to care.

I catch myself grinning at my own reflection in the dark window opposite and have to look away.

This is ridiculous. I am sitting on the Victoria line grinning like a teenager because a man half my age let me sleep in his bed and didn’t ask me to leave the second we were finished. I think about the noises he made. I think about the way he’d looked up at me afterward, lazy and wrecked and pleased with himself, and said something filthy enough that I’m fairly sure my ears went red in front of him for the first time since university.

Mostly, though, I think about the moment when I first met him, and his face when I told him it was a murder scene. The way his eyes had gone enormous, the fear so total and so unguarded that every careful instinct I have left had screamed at me to step closer instead of further away. I think about that more than I think about anything that happened after last night, which probably says something uncomfortable about me that I am choosing not to look at directly.

Somebody capable of looking that frightened, that young, that completely without armor, cannot also be capable of what was done to Graham Pell and Trevor Sallow. The two things don’t fit in the same body. I have spent my entire career learning to read people who are lying, and he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been. I’d stake my whole career on it, which is, I realize as we pull into Highbury and Islington, possibly exactly what I am doing.

I run through it again, methodically, the way I’d run through any other suspect, except every conclusion keeps arriving exactly where I want it to, which should worry me more than it does. He’d been delighted by my badge, not frightened of it, and guilty men don’t usually light up like that at the sight of a warrant card, they go careful and quiet and start measuring their words. He’d given his name, his number, his whole easy cooperative manner without me having to ask twice for any of it, and people hiding something tend to hold a little of themselves back, even the good liars, especially the good liars. And whoever carved those names did it with hands steady enough to take their time over it, patient and precise in a way that doesn’t sit anywhere near a man who flinched and apologized and wrapped his own arms around himself at the mere idea of a body twelve feet away.

He’s clean on paper too. Whatever Greaves thinks of my methods, whatever Farah isn’t quite saying out loud, I ran every check I’m allowed to run and several I’m not, and there’s nothing there. No record, no flags, no history of violence, nothing but a YouTube channel, Instagram, OnlyFans, and a stupid amount of charm. People who carve names into men with that kind of precision do not also blush when a badge gets pulled on them. It isn’t logical. It isn’t how guilty people behave.

He’d talked too, last night, after, in that loose unguarded way people only manage right when their guard is fully down. About nothing important. A building two boroughs over he’s been wanting to explore, an argument with whoever edits his channel about which take to post first, an utterly indefensible opinion about pineapple on pizza that he defended with the same delight he brings to everything else. None of it sounded rehearsed. None of it sounded like material gathered to play a role. It sounded like a man talking simply because he wanted to keep talking to me, which is its own kind of evidence, even if it’s not the kind that would survive cross-examination.

It hits me somewhere around Vauxhall, one stop from home, that I don’t actually have a way to reach him at all. We didn’t swap numbers last night, too busy with much more interesting things, and I left this morning while he was still asleep. The number he gave me at the hospital is still sitting in my notes, technically, but using it would mean explaining to myself why I’m using police data for personal reasons. A breach of data protection, as well as a breach of Micah’s consent. He gave Detective Inspector Lennox his phone number, not the man he hooked up with last night.

I could call him in instead. Formally. On the record. A witness statement about the hospital, nothing that would alarm anyone if Greaves ever asked why. It would be entirely defensible. It would also mean seeing him again. An opportunity to ask if he wants to see me again, unprofessionally.

Unbidden, a memory uncoils from last night. Micah spread out on his sheets, body rising up to meet me, a soft, carnal cry on his lips, eyes wide and astonished as if he didn’t know it could be so good.

My spine tingles.

I think he will want to see me again.

For physical reasons, if not romantic ones. But if I get to spend time with him, I can work on the latter. And I remember being in my twenties, I remember how much of a driving force of my actions the former was.

He’s going to want to see me again. I’m quite confident of that.

I grin to myself. Everything is looking rather hopeful. Rosy even.

I’m already composing the request in my head. Routine follow up. Nothing that would look like what it actually is, which is a grown man inventing paperwork so he can look at someone’s face again. I imagine the interview room, the recorder running, Micah leaning back in the chair across from me with that same unbothered smirk, and have to physically stop myself grinning like I’ve lost my sanity on a packed train in rush hour. I am, I reflect, an absolute disgrace to twenty-two years of professional conduct, and I cannot bring myself to mind even slightly.

I surface at the station into warm daylight, blinking, my phone shuddering back to life in my pocket with the small, violent flood of everything London’s tunnels don’t let through. An email about overtime forms. A reminder about a dental appointment I’d forgotten existed. Three missed calls from a withheld number that’s probably just the surgery confirming the same appointment. The ordinary debris of a morning I slept straight through.

One from Farah, sent forty minutes ago.

Got the swabs back from scene one. Micah Vee’s DNA is all over it.

Everything I spent an entire train journey building, carefully, piece by reasonable piece, comes apart in the time it takes to read one sentence.

I stand completely still in the middle of the pavement, people moving around me on both sides like I’m a rock in a river, and read it three more times in case it says something different the fourth time.

It doesn’t.

Chapter seven

Lennox

I’ve sat across the table from a lot of people in my life. Men who’d done things I can still see when I close my eyes. Women who hadn’t done anything at all and still flinched like the room itself was accusing them. I know how to do this. Too many years of knowing how to do this, and none of it is any use to me right now, because the person walking through the door with a uniformed officer at his elbow is the same person whose mouth was on mine eleven hours ago.

I made the call myself. I told myself it was procedure, the only responsible thing to do once Farah’s text landed, and I half believed it right up until I actually had to say his name out loud to the custody sergeant and felt my own voice betray me by going careful around the edges of it.

Micah sits down across from me like he’s settling into a restaurant booth, not an interview room with a recorder already running and Farah standing against the wall with her arms crossed, watching both of us with an expression I can’t read and don’t want to.