Page 34 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“My son’s name is Oliver,” she says. Not hello. Not thank you for seeing me. Just that, the only thing that matters. “He’s been missing for four years. He was fifteen when he went.”

I sit down.

She opens her phone before I’ve said anything else and holds it across the table to me. Oliver looks out at me from the screen, school photo, blazer slightly crooked, the kind of grin that’s trying to look cool and just looks young. Brown eyes. A small scar through one eyebrow. Fifteen in the photograph and fifteen when he disappeared, and fifteen is such an awkward age, too old to be obviously a child and too young to be taken seriously as anything else.

“He was a good boy,” she says. “I know every mother says that. I’m saying it because it’s true.”

“I believe you,” I say. And I do.

“I always knew,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake. I think the shaking stopped a long time ago and what’s left is harder and more permanent. “What happened to him. I always knew it wasn’t runaway, wasn’t gangs, wasn’t any of the things they tried to tell me. He was being passed around by men who should be in prison. I knew it from the start and I said it from the start and nobody did a single useful thing about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because it’s true and because there’s nothing else.

“I don’t want sorry,” she says, without anger, which is almost worse. “I want to know if someone out there knows about my son. If someone carved his name.” She looks at me steadily. “Because if they did, at least that means somebody knew. At least that means he wasn’t forgotten.”

I tell her the truth. Three victims, three carved names, and Oliver isn’t one of them.

I watch the thing that crosses her face when I say it, and I have to look at the table for a second, because it is grief and relief in the same breath, the unbearable mathematics of a parent who is both glad and devastated that her child wasn’t noticed by the person doing the noticing.

“Is it going to?” she asks. Her voice has gone very quiet. “Is his name going to turn up? On the next one?”

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I don’t know who is on the Vigilante’s list, or how long it runs, or whether Oliver Osei’s name is sitting somewhere in a mind I’ve never managed to get close enough to read.

“I can’t tell you that,” I say.

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Can’t. Genuinely.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Then she says, “What are you going to do?”

Three words. Flat. Direct. The question sits on the table between us and it doesn’t move.

What am I going to do? I have a name on a board that doesn’t belong there. I have evidence I’ve looked sideways at and instincts I’ve overridden and a case that’s going nowhere while the one person I can’t stop thinking about may or may not be the reason it’s going nowhere. What am I going to do?

“Everything I can,” I say.

She looks at me like she’s heard that before. She has, of course. She’s heard it from every officer who ever sat in this chair across from her and either meant it or didn’t, and made no difference either way.

“You know what’s funny,” she says, and her voice has changed now, something harder coming up under it like bedrock. “Not funny. Wrong word.” She puts her phone back on the table, face up, Oliver still looking out of it. “You know what the truth is. In the last few weeks, whoever this Vigilante is, he has done more to protect boys like mine than the entire Metropolitan Police has managed in the last twenty years. He’s done more in a few weeks.” She says it with a fury so controlled it barely sounds like fury at all. “And you’re trying to catch him.”

I don’t say anything.

There isn’t anything to say.

“My boy is out there, and sometimes I pray he is dead because the alternative is he is still suffering every day. Still hurting. Still wondering why no one has come to help him.”

The pain in her eyes is an awful thing to witness. I can’t imagine what it is like to bear it.

To my shame, I look away.

She leaves twenty minutes later, the tea still untouched. I sit in the interview room after she’s gone and look at the wall, and I don’t move for a while.

Oliver Osei. Fifteen years old. Missing four years. Probably dead, probably in a way that would make Mrs. Osei glad she doesn’t know the details. And nobody has carved his name into anyone’s chest.

Possibly because whoever is doing the carving never knew he existed, which means either the ring got to him and finished with him before anyone could notice him at all, or the ring never got their hands on Oliver Osei.

Or maybe his name is going to be on the next victim. Or the one after that. Perhaps every missing child is going to get their gravestone of revenge.