Page 33 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

We talk. About nothing that matters. About everything that is. He tells me about the building he wants to film next week, an old lido somewhere in South London that’s been shuttered since the nineties.

Breakfast arrives faster than it has any right to. Micah disappears to collect it from the concierge and comes back with a bag that smells extraordinary, and for a few minutes we’re both just occupied with the business of it, cartons and cutlery and the small domestic negotiation of working out who is having what, and it’s so ordinary I nearly say something and then don’t, because saying something would make it a moment and right now it’s better than a moment, it’s just a morning.

“Here’s the lido,” he says, holding up his phone so I can see a photograph. An outdoor pool, glass and steel roof long since caved in, the water inside it turned the color of old jade by decades of algae and rain. It’s genuinely beautiful in the way only truly ruined things manage to be. “I’ve been trying to get access for months.”

“Will you get it?”

“Probably.” He sets the phone down, picks up his fork. “I’m very persistent.”

“I’ve noticed.”

He grins at that.

We eat. He tells me about the narrow window of time he’s found where the security guards are between shifts and a quiet visit might go uncontested. He says all of this with a complete absence of guilt that I find I’m unable to replicate even as an audience, because I am a police officer and what he’s describing is technically trespass.

“Don’t tell me the details,” I say.

“I already have.”

“I’ll forget them.”

He laughs and I feel it somewhere it has no business reaching.

He asks me then about the best case I ever worked that ended well. It takes me a moment to find one, not because there aren’t any, but because the ones that ended well tend to be complicated in their own ways, justice and outcome not always being the same thing. I tell him about a case from eight years ago, a woman who’d spent eleven years waiting for justice for her son, and the look on her face in the corridor outside the courtroom the afternoon it was over.

He listens the whole time. Properly listens, his fork set down, his eyes on my face, not waiting for his turn or composing a response. Just listening.

“You remember her face,” he says when I’ve finished.

“I remember all of them,” I say. “The ones who got something at the end. There aren’t as many as there should be.”

He’s quiet for a moment, looking out over the railing at London doing its morning thing below us. The light catches the side of his face and does the unfair thing it always does.

“You’re a good man,” he says. He says it simply, the same way he said remarkable yesterday, like a finding rather than a compliment. “I don’t think you know how unusual that is.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I look at my coffee instead.

We don’t touch. No hands finding each other across the table, no knees touching, nothing that could be called anything other than two people sharing breakfast on a roof in the early spring cold.

We didn’t touch last night either. Not so much as a kiss. Nothing more than a chaste brushing of shoulders as we sat under a blanket on a sofa together.

This is the longest stretch of time I’ve spent with another person in years without either of us trying to be anything in particular, and I have no idea what to do with that except sit here and let it keep happening.

I’ve gone home with a fair few men over the years. Every one of them a transactional evening that ended in the same careful transactional way, everyone getting what they came for and nobody getting anything else. I’ve always told myself that was fine. That’s how hookup culture works. And I’m not built for more than that. The job takes too much and leaves too little of me for anything softer.

But now, sitting here with the sun on my face and Micah’s voice in my ear and a completely unremarkable morning doing something remarkable to me without any effort at all, I think perhaps I was wrong about that.

Perhaps I’ve been wrong about that for a very long time.

Chapter sixteen

Lennox

She’s already in the interview room when I arrive, a mug of tea going cold in front of her that someone has made and she hasn’t touched. Late forties. The kind of tired that isn’t about sleep. She has her hands folded on the table and her eyes on the door, and when I come in she looks at me with the expression I’ve seen on the faces of parents for twenty two years, the one that says please and brace yourself in the same breath.

She found out about the murders from the news. She’s been following it, the way parents of missing children follow everything, just in case, just on the remote, terrible chance that something surfaces that tells her something she doesn’t already know. She heard about the carved names. She needs to know.

“Mrs. Osei,” I say. “I’m Detective Inspector Lennox.”