Page 47 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Nothing,” I say.

He studies me for a second with that particular attention of his, the one that sees more than most people’s does, and then a slow smile spreads across his face and he turns back to his screen without saying anything else.

I go back to my book.

Outside, London carries on. The case is out there. The one I’ve already solved but decided to keep secret. Farah is out there. Hendricks and Greaves and all the things I’ve done and chosen and will have to live with are out there, waiting with the patience that difficult things have, the certainty that they’ll still be there whenever I come back to them.

I know that. I’m choosing this morning anyway. I’ll make that bargain as many times as it’s offered.

I turn the page and I stay.

Chapter twenty-two

Lennox

The full scene report for the fourth murder, has so far taken me forty five minutes to write, which is roughly forty minutes longer than it should.

The problem is not the facts. The facts are straightforward enough. Body found in a lockup behind Walworth Road, male, fifties, staged in the manner consistent with the previous three victims, name carved into the chest. Time of death consistent with the early hours of the morning in question. Lennox arrived on scene at approximately two forty five and conducted an initial assessment before SOCO took over.

Approximately two forty five.

I was there earlier than that. I parked at two twenty, walked for five minutes, spent ten minutes in an alley I am not going to mention in this report, and then walked to the scene. Two forty five is technically defensible if nobody looks too hard at the parking records from the cameras on that street, which I’m going to have to hope they don’t, because if they do, the gap between my car arriving and me arriving is going to require an explanation I don’t have.

I write approximately two forty five and move on.

The name carved into the fourth victim is Tyler Cooke.

I run Tyler Cooke through every database I have access to. Again. Just in case. But the results still take me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. No misper file. No murder victim. No safeguarding flag, no school record that disappears, none of the now-familiar shape of a boy who went quiet and stayed quiet. Just one record, eighteen months ago, a brief one, a homeless nineteen-year-old found dead of a drug overdose under a railway arch in Peckham, no fixed address, no next of kin located, buried by the council. A short life with almost no official footprint, ending in a way that kills boys like him without anyone writing much down about it afterward.

I sit with Tyler Cooke for a long time.

He got out. That’s what the overdose record tells me, in the grim language of official documents that don’t know what they’re actually saying. He got out of whatever happened to him, physically at least, walked away from it somewhere around thirteen or fourteen given the ages, ended up on the streets, ended up under a railway arch at nineteen. Got out of the room but never free of the damage. I’ve seen that story enough times to know exactly what it looks like and I’m looking at it now, compressed into half a page of database records and a council burial reference.

Then I look at the fourth victim.

Raymond Holt. Fifty four. Worked at a children’s residential care home for sixteen years. No complaints. Not one. Not a whisper of a complaint in sixteen years, no disciplinary action, no investigation, nothing that would raise a flag on any system I have access to. References described him as dedicated, patient, the kind of man who remembered every child’s birthday and kept in touch with care leavers for years afterward. His colleagues wept when they were contacted. His manager couldn’t speak for a minute when she was told the news.

Everyone loved Raymond Holt.

And someone who knew exactly what Raymond Holt actually was has carved a dead boy’s name into his chest.

I lean back from my screen and do the arithmetic that my brain has been refusing to do for weeks now, laying it out flat and looking at it the way you look at evidence you’d rather not have found.

The Vigilante knows about Tyler Cooke. Tyler Cooke appears in no official record connected to abuse, to trafficking, to anything except dying young and broke under a bridge. No investigation ever linked Tyler Cooke to Raymond Holt. No database I have access to connects them. Greaves’s team, who spent years mapping the network, never once mentioned Raymond Holt. Nobody knew. Nobody official knew.

The Vigilante knew.

Which means the Vigilante’s information didn’t come from police files or leaked documents or investigative journalism. It came from somewhere else. Somewhere inside. Either the Vigilante was part of the network, which makes no sense given what’s been done to the network’s members, or the Vigilante was on the other side of it.

The Vigilante was a victim.

I have known this, I realize, in the part of myself that does the detective work before the rest of me is ready to hear it. I have known it the way you know things you’re not looking at directly, carried the shape of it around for weeks without letting it resolve into a name. But it resolves into a name now and there is nothing I can do about that, because I am a detective and this is what detectives do, we follow the evidence wherever it goes even when it goes somewhere we would give a great deal for it not to go.

More of a curse than a blessing, as it turned out.

That’s what Micah said about his good looks.

I nearly throw up at my own desk. A quiet, controlled, professional nearly. The kind where you go very still and breathe through your nose for a moment and nobody around you notices anything, but it is there, the lurch of it, the full physical weight of what I am now looking at landing in my stomach all at once.