Page 24 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

My stomach drops somewhere around my shoes. “And.”

“He doesn’t exist before about six years ago.” She says it flat, professional, but there’s something underneath it that sounds almost like an apology, like she knows exactly what she’s about to do to me and is doing it anyway because that’s the job. “No school records under that name. No National Insurance activity. Nothing on the electoral roll, nothing on a tenancy agreement before that, nothing anywhere that puts a Micah Vee on this earth before he was roughly seventeen, eighteen years old. Then suddenly there’s a bank account, a National Insurance number issued, a flat. Like he started existing as a fully formed adult.”

“People change names. Run from things. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe.” She doesn’t sound convinced, and I don’t blame her, because I’m not convinced either, not really, not underneath the part of me that’s currently working very hard to talk myself out of believing what I’m hearing. “But we ran into him at the first scene, completely by chance, urban explorer with a camera and no priors of any significance, and now we know he has no documented past.”

“You think he’s involved.”

“I think there’s something off about that boy, and I think you’ve decided not to see it.” She says it gently, which somehow makes it worse than if she’d said it cruelly. “I’m not stupid, Lennox. I’ve watched you found him at the first scene. I know what’s going on, or I know enough of it to make an educated guess, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed.”

I don’t say anything, because there’s no version of denying it that wouldn’t be an obvious lie, and Farah’s never once let me get away with an obvious lie in eleven years of working together.

“I’m not judging you for it,” she says, quieter now, and there’s something almost kind in it that I don’t deserve. “I’m telling you because I need you to actually look at this properly, instead of looking away from it, because I think you’re the only person on this team capable of seeing something the rest of us are missing, and right now you’re choosing not to.”

I want to tell her. The words sit right there at the back of my throat, ready, I was with him last night, ask me anything, I’ll tell you exactly where he was every minute he was with me. And I can’t, because the only way to clear him is to admit I was in his bed. For the second time. Sleeping with someone who was on the board. Someone whose name should never have been taken off the board. I’ve been compromising every single thing I’ve ever claimed to stand for, and some small, cowardly part of me would rather let her suspect him a little longer than say that out loud.

The pathologist calls Farah over before I can answer at all, and I’m grateful for the interruption in a way that makes me feel even worse than the conversation did.

It’s another forty minutes before the rough window for Fenn’s time of death gets confirmed, somewhere between half six and half eight last night, narrow enough that the pathologist seems almost pleased with himself about it, body temperature and lividity and a neighbor in the next lockup along who remembers locking up and leaving sometime before seven and not noticing anything wrong.

Half six. Half eight.

I do the math without wanting to, the same way I’ve done the math on every case I’ve ever worked, automatic, relentless, impossible to switch off even when switching it off is the only thing that would let me keep breathing properly. Last night. I was parked outside Micah’s building from somewhere around quarter past seven, sitting there working up the nerve to either drive away or make a fool of myself, and it can’t have been more than ten, fifteen minutes later that he came jogging round the corner in those ridiculous shorts, earbuds in, slightly out of breath.

I’d thought nothing of the breathlessness. Of course he was breathless. He’d been running.

Except a fifteen minute run doesn’t actually prove anything about where someone started from, only about where they ended up, and Walworth to Hackney isn’t an impossible distance if a person had a car, or even just the last stretch covered on foot to arrive exactly the way he wants to be remembered arriving. Normal. Glowing. Completely innocent to anyone who happened to see him.

Except I happened to see him.

And he seemed pleased to see me.

That’s the part I can’t put down once I’ve picked it up. Not whether he could have made the journey in time. Whether a man could carve a name into another man’s chest, leave him posed on cold concrete, and then jog the rest of the way home with his pulse settling, his face arranging itself back into delight, and invite the very detective investigating his murders up for dinner within the hour. Cook for him. Touch his hand across the counter and ask him to stay the whole night, easy as anything, like none of it cost him a single thing to set aside.

I don’t know which thought frightens me more, that he could do something like that and feel nothing, or that I spent the whole evening with him and felt nothing wrong either.

I stand there in the gray morning light outside a lockup with a dead man inside it, the smell of Micah’s coffee still faintly on my hands, and I have never in my entire career felt so completely, thoroughly, irreversibly sick.

Chapter twelve

Lennox

Bilal doesn’t exist. Not in the way that matters.

I spend the better part of the afternoon trying to find him properly, surname, last known address, a school record, anything that turns a half-remembered name into a person, and the system gives me almost nothing back. No misper file. No safeguarding flag. Not so much as a mention in Jordan’s own paperwork, which should have been the first place anyone thought to look three years ago and apparently wasn’t. Eventually I find him buried in a school admissions database under Bilal Hussein, attendance dropping off two terms before Jordan’s did, no exclusion notice, no transfer record, no explanation at all for where a fourteen-year-old boy went when he stopped turning up.

Jordan at least got a file. A thin one, a badly worked one, but a file. Bilal got nothing. Nobody ever even noticed he was gone long enough to write it down, which means whoever’s doing this knows things about that estate and those boys that no official record could have told them. I run his full name through every database I’ve got access to. No address past the school roll. No National Insurance number ever issued. No death certificate either, which should be a relief and somehow isn’t, because it just means there’s a fourteen-year-old boy somewhere in this city’s history with no paper trail at all, the same shape of nothing Farah found when she went looking for Micah.

I notice the parallel and don’t let myself sit with it.

I sit with that for longer than I should, the incident room emptying out around me as the shift changes and everyone else goes home to whatever ordinary lives they’ve still got waiting for them. Farah stops by my desk on her way out, coat already on.

“Anything on Bilal?” she asks.

“Nothing official. He fell through every crack the system has.”

“Sounds about right.” She studies me a second longer than the answer needs. “You look terrible, by the way. Go home, Lennox. Sleep in your own bed for once.”