Page 26 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Almost.

“I miss you,” he says later, quieter, no performance left in it at all. “I know that’s stupid. It hasn’t even been that long.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“You don’t believe that. You think everything about this is moving too fast for a sensible man your age.” There’s no malice in it, just an accuracy that catches me somewhere under the ribs. “I don’t care. I like how it feels. I haven’t liked how anything feels in a long time.”

I want, more than I have wanted almost anything in my adult life, for that sentence to be entirely true and entirely simple. I want it so badly that for one long, traitorous moment I manage to believe it is.

“Come round again soon,” he says. “If you want to.”

“I want to.”

It’s the truest thing I say in the whole conversation, which feels like it should worry me more than the rest of it does.

He’s quiet for a moment, picking at a loose thread on the blanket, and when he looks back up at the camera something has shifted in his face, younger and less certain than anything I’ve seen from him before.

“Can I tell you something stupid?” he says.

“Always.”

“I keep thinking you’re going to get tired of me. Or work out I’m not actually worth the trouble I’m clearly causing you.” He laughs, short and unconvincing. “Forget it. That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”

“It’s not ridiculous.”

“You don’t have to be nice about it.”

“I’m not being nice. I’m not very good at nice.” I mean it as a joke and it doesn’t quite land as one. “I’m still here. That should tell you something.”

Something settles in his face, relief or something close enough to it that I can’t tell the two apart anymore, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all, just looking at each other through two screens and several miles of London between us.

We talk for another twenty minutes about nothing, his channel, my appalling taste in takeaway food, a film he wants me to watch with him that I have absolutely no intention of sitting through, and by the time we hang up my face aches from smiling and my stomach is in a knot I can’t untie.

I sit in the dark outside my own front door for a long time afterward, the phone gone black in my hand, replaying two streets in Walworth over and over until the words stop sounding like anything at all. I run through every other explanation I can think of, the channel, the wandering, the simple fact that a person who spends his whole life exploring this city’s forgotten corners would naturally know more of its geography than most. Every one of them is plausible. Every one of them is exactly the kind of plausible a guilty man would need ready.

I want him to be innocent so badly it has started to feel like a physical need rather than a professional judgment, the kind of want that bends every fact toward itself if you let it. But I’ve spent years learning not to let it, learning that wanting something to be true has never once made it true, and somewhere underneath the warmth still sitting in my chest from his voice, the detective in me is quietly, patiently building a case I don’t want to read.

Chapter thirteen

Lennox

It is not a good morning.

I know this before I even get to my desk. The incident room has a particular energy when things are going badly, a tightness in the air, everyone looking at their screens a little too hard. Farah gives me a look the second I walk in, and it is not a good look.

“Hendricks wants you,” she says.

Detective Chief Inspector Hendricks. My boss. A woman who has the patience of a saint until she doesn’t, and then God help you.

“Now?”

The look Farah gives me answers that question.

I haven’t even taken my coat off.

Hendricks is behind her desk when I knock, which is never a good sign. She’s the kind of woman who paces when she’s thinking and sits very still when she’s angry. Right now she is very still.

“Close the door,” she says.