Page 49 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“The Vigilante has insider information on the ring,” I tell Hendricks. “I’m pursuing the connection.”

“Good,” she says. “The press have been quiet this week. I’d like them to stay quiet. Any movement on Vee.”

“I’m keeping eyes on him.”

This is technically true. My eyes haven’t stopped being on him since the first time I saw him. They were on him two nights ago at two in the morning in an alley, and then in a different sense they were on him for the rest of that night and all of the following day and most of yesterday and all of this morning. I am absolutely keeping eyes on him.

“Good,” Hendricks says again, and sends me back to my desk.

The afternoon is a sequence of small tasks, all of which feel like swimming through something thicker than water. I answer emails. I review the SOCO report from scene four, which tells me things I already know and nothing I can use. I take a call from a journalist I’m not supposed to talk to, tell her nothing, and hang up. I look at the board where Micah’s name is still sitting in my handwriting, exactly where Hendricks made me put it, and I think about the fact that if I were doing my job, actually doing it, that name would be circled three times with arrows pointing to every piece of evidence I’ve buried.

At half past seven Farah puts her coat on and comes to stand at my desk.

“Go home,” she says.

“In a while.”

She looks at me, and this time the careful look is entirely gone, and what’s underneath it is grief. The specific grief of watching someone you respect make choices you can’t stop them making.

She holds it for a moment. Then she picks up her bag. “Go home,” she says again, gently, and leaves.

I sit at my desk in the emptying incident room and look at the board and look at his name and try to remember, just for a second, the man I was twenty two years ago, the one who joined for the right reasons and meant it.

He feels a very long way away from here.

I turn the light off. I get in my car. I sit there for a moment, thinking about Tyler Cooke all alone under that bridge, and Micah asleep with his hand curled against his chest, and the men in Paraguay and wherever else they’ve scattered to.

Then I drive to Hackney.

Chapter twenty-three

Micah

The concierge calls up at quarter past eight to tell me I have a guest, and I already know who it is before he says the name, the same way I've started to know when Lennox is coming the way you know weather is changing, a shift in the pressure of things, some part of me tuned to a frequency I didn't use to have.

I tell him to send him up and then I stand in the middle of the loft and do three seconds of something that might be panic and then isn't, because Lennox is coming and that means everything is going to be fine, which is a sentence I could never have said about another person arriving at this door.

I catch myself in the dark reflection of the window, one hand raised, fingers combing through my hair. I put my hand down. Then I think about it for a second and put it back up again, because it is slightly ridiculous to not care what I look like for the one person I actually want to look good for, and then I put it back down because he's seen me in far worse states than this and chosen me anyway, which is the whole point, which is the extraordinary and barely believable thing.

The lift opens.

He looks terrible.

Not the exhausted-but-functional terrible he looked the morning after the alley. This is something deeper and quieter, hollowed out rather than wrung out, like something has been sitting on him all day and he's brought it home without meaning to and doesn't quite know what to put it down yet. He's still in his work coat. His eyes find me and some of the tightness in his jaw releases, which does something to my chest I don't have a name for yet.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi," he says.

I step back and he comes in, and I close the door, and I look at him standing in the middle of my loft with all that London behind him and I think, whatever happened today, I'm going to fix it if I can.

"Sit down," I tell him. "I'm going to cook."

I don't ask what happened. I've learned that Lennox unpacks things in his own time and asking him to do it faster only makes him go quiet in the specific way that means he's closed a door that I'm going to have to find my way around later. Instead, I put music on, low, something with no words in it, and I start pulling things from the fridge with the focused competence that cooking gives me, the one part of my day that is always exactly as complicated as I decide it's going to be, no more.

Tonight it's cacio e pepe. Simple on paper, unforgiving in practice, the kind of dish that requires you to keep moving and not look away for longer than thirty seconds, or the whole thing seizes up into something you can't save. Which suits me fine. It gives my hands something to do while my brain does whatever it needs to do with the fact of him being here, in my space, looking like that.

I set the pasta water on to boil. I toast the black pepper in the dry pan until the kitchen smells sharp and warm and extraordinary, and I grate the pecorino, more than you think you need and then more still, because the cheese is the whole architecture of the thing and you can't be timid about it. When the pasta goes in I start the sauce, pasta water and cheese and the pepper, the whole thing requiring constant attention, a continuous small negotiation between heat and liquid, and I am aware the entire time of him on the sofa behind me, the particular quality of that awareness that's become its own kind of comfort.