Page 2 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Farah’s expression flickers, the practiced blankness slipping for just a moment. “The trafficking case. Yours, from six years back.”

“Mine.”

I look back down at Graham Pell, lying there with his naked arse up in the air, a name carved into his back, agony carved into his face.

I wait for the outrage. The grief. Even just the professional itch of this isn’t right, nobody gets to do this.

The thing I’m supposed to feel. The thing every fiber of my training and every year of believing in the law tells me I should feel looking at a murdered man, regardless of what he did or didn’t do, regardless of what some failed prosecution couldn’t prove in a courtroom that isn’t supposed to matter to me anyway.

It doesn’t come.

What comes instead, quiet and unwelcome and so much worse than outrage, is nothing. A flat, empty nothing where sympathy is meant to live. And underneath the nothing, if I’m honest with myself, which I generally try to be even when it costs me, there’s something that isn’t nothing at all. Something small and ugly that looks almost like relief, sitting right next to a dead boy’s name I’ve carried around for six years without ever once being able to do anything useful with it.

I stand up too fast and my knees punish me for it.

“You alright,” Farah asks, watching me with the kind of attention she usually saves for suspects.

“Fine.”

I’m not fine. I’m a detective who has spent over two decades believing, actually believing, that the law matters more than how any individual case happens to make you feel, that the system is worth defending even when it fails, especially when it fails, because the alternative is men like whoever did this deciding who deserves to live. I believe that. I have built my entire life on believing that. A flat with no one in it, a marriage I let die slowly because the job came first, a string of partners who eventually got tired of competing with overtime. I gave it all to this belief.

And here I am standing over a corpse, looking at the name of a dead boy I could never get justice for, carved into the back of a man CAIT spent years trying to nail, and the only thing my body wants to do is shrug.

When did that happen?

When did I stop being the man who would have looked at this scene and felt sick on the victim’s behalf, no matter who the victim was. I used to be that man. I’m fairly sure I used to be that man. Twenty-two years is a long time to keep a flame lit in weather like this, but I always thought mine was different. Sturdier. I thought I was the cop who’d still believe in it when I was sixty, gray and creaking and still showing up to scenes like this one because somebody decent has to.

Twenty-two years since I signed up at the recruitment centre, eighteen of those as a detective. The first four were uniform, walking a beat at two in the morning convinced every shift was the one where something would finally go right. I don’t remember the exact day uniform turned into CID and CID turned into this version of me, just that I looked up one morning and the boy who joined for the right reasons had quietly been replaced by someone wearing his face.

Now I’m forty-four and looking at proof that I’ve already started rotting from the inside, slow and quiet, the way everything in this job rots you if you let it.

“We need the boy,” I say, mostly to give my mouth something to do that isn’t thinking. “The one who wouldn’t testify. If he’s still local, somebody should talk to him.”

“On it,” Farah says, though her eyes haven’t left my face. “Lennox. You sure you’re alright?”

“I said I’m fine.”

She doesn’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe me either. But she lets it go because that’s the kind of partner she is, and I’m grateful for it in the same complicated way I’m grateful for most things lately, which is to say I’m grateful and exhausted by the cost of being grateful all at once.

I think about the young constable on the perimeter, the way his eyes wouldn’t settle anywhere near my face. Word travels fast on a job like this one. Maybe it’s already traveled far enough that people don’t need to see what’s behind the tape to be careful around me. Maybe I’ve become the thing new recruits get warned about before their first scene. Watch out for Lennox, he’s a bad one.

I look at Graham Pell one more time before they bag him. At Callum’s name carved so carefully into his back, the kind of careful that takes time and isn’t rushed by fear of getting caught. Somebody wanted me to read it. Somebody wanted whoever found him to understand exactly why.

I memorize the scene before forensics cover him over, even though I know I’ll have it on a file within the hour. Some habits don’t care whether they’re necessary anymore.

The sky is starting to go that thin gray that passes for dawn this time of year, the streetlights losing their argument with the morning one degree at a time. I should go home. I should sleep. I know from twenty-two years of experience that I’ll do neither.

Instead, I stand in the alley a while longer, breathing in copper and rot and rubbish, waiting for the horror to come back online the way it’s supposed to.

It doesn’t.

And that, more than the body, more than Callum’s name, more than any of it, is the thing that’s going to keep me up tonight.

Chapter two

Lennox

My phone buzzes against the nightstand at half-past two, and before I even pick it up, I already know my night is over.