Page 35 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I think about Graham Pell. About Trevor Sallow. About Robert Fenn with his boxing club and his space heater knocked over on the concrete floor of a lockup at half-past three in the morning, and I notice, sitting in the blue-gray quiet of a room that smells of old coffee and institutional carpet, that I feel nothing about any of them. No professional outrage. No grief for the loss of a human life. Not even the basic, structural impulse that’s supposed to underpin this job, the belief that murder is wrong because it has to be wrong, because without that belief the whole thing falls apart.

I’m rooting for the Vigilante.

That’s the truth of it, flat and ugly and undeniable. I sit in the interview room where Mrs. Osei sat with her untouched tea, and I look at what I actually feel, and what I feel is something close to satisfaction that Graham Pell and Trevor Sallow and Robert Fenn are dead. I feel it like a fist unclenching somewhere behind my ribs. I feel it the way you feel something you’d been holding very tight finally put down.

Then I feel sick.

Because I am a police officer. Because I spent twenty two years believing in something, actually believing in it, not performing the belief but carrying it around like a weight I chose because the alternative was chaos. Justice is not one person’s to decide. That’s not an abstraction or a platitude, it’s the whole foundation, it’s the reason you have courts and juries and rules of evidence and the right to a defense, because the moment you let one person decide who deserves to die you’ve handed civilization over to whoever happens to be the most certain, and certainty has never once required being right.

Murder is wrong. Full stop. Not complicated. Not conditional. Wrong.

I know that.

I believe that.

And I sit here in this room where a mother just told me her missing son’s name is Oliver, and I believe it the way you believe something you can no longer feel, which is starting to seem like it might not be belief at all.

What am I becoming?

I’ve been asking myself that question since the first alley, since Graham Pell’s name on my lips and the flat empty absence where outrage was supposed to be. I’ve been watching myself make one decision after another that the man I was two months ago would not recognize, and telling myself it was the case, or the fatigue, or the weight of too many years doing this.

It isn’t. Or it isn’t only that.

I’m becoming someone who feels relief when bad men die. Someone who looks away from evidence because he’s sleeping with the person it points to. Someone who stands in front of a board and feels the wrongness of a name like a physical thing, and lets that feeling override everything he was trained to do.

I am, quite possibly, not a good person anymore.

The thought lands with a weight I wasn’t ready for.

I take my phone out.

I don’t decide to. I just do it, the same way I got in the car and drove to Hackney that first night, my hands doing something before my brain has signed off on it, and Micah’s name is already on the screen before I’ve finished processing what I’m doing, and my thumb hits call before I can argue myself out of it.

I hold the phone to my ear.

Three seconds. Four.

I am going to hang up. I shouldn’t be doing this. This is not appropriate. I am a detective inspector in an interview room in a South London police station having a crisis of professional faith, and the appropriate response to that is not to call the man whose name is on my board because hearing his voice might make it better somehow. I’m going to hang up.

He answers on the fifth ring.

“Hey.” Just that. Quiet and immediate, like he picked up mid-thought. And then, after a fraction of a pause so small I almost miss it, “What’s wrong?”

Not a question. A recognition.

“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know why I called.”

“Yes you do.” He says it gently, no performance in it. “What happened?”

I look at the empty chair across the table. At the cold mug of tea. At the particular absence a person leaves in a room.

“There was a mother,” I say. “Looking for her son.”

He’s quiet. Just present, the particular quality of his attention that I’ve started to recognize, the way his silence isn’t empty.

“Was it…” he starts carefully.

“No. His name isn’t one of them.” I lean back in the chair. “He’s just gone. Nobody’s carved his name anywhere. Nobody’s done anything about him at all.”