Page 60 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Good,” I say.

“Come to bed,” he says.

Not a question. Not quite an invitation. Just the statement of what’s going to happen next, offered in the voice he uses when he’s decided something and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

I put the book down.

We go to bed. He’s asleep within minutes, the specific fast drop of a person whose body has decided it’s done for the day regardless of what their mind might have to say about it, and I lie in the dark next to him and look at the ceiling.

He’s warm. His breathing is slow and even. He turns over and his forehead is almost touching my shoulder, not quite contact, just proximity, and I’m lying here in the specific quiet of two in the morning in Brixton and I’m thinking about what I am and what I’m choosing and whether those two things are going to be reconcilable at some point or whether they’re simply going to keep sitting next to each other in the dark the way they are now, neither one winning.

I take a deep breath. It’s time to stop ruminating. If I’m doing this, I have to be at peace with it.

And just like that, everything is suddenly clear. Easy.

The choice is simple. The same choice I’ve been making, over and over, in different rooms and different lights, since the night in the alley.

I choose this.

I close my eyes, and eventually, despite everything, I sleep.

Chapter twenty-eight

Lennox

Micah’s still asleep when the call comes in.

I lie there for a moment with the phone in my hand and Farah’s text on the screen and Micah’s forehead still almost touching my shoulder, and I do what I’ve been doing for months now, which is hold two entirely incompatible things in my head at the same time and somehow keep breathing anyway.

Another one. Scene address and a single line. You need to see this one.

I get up carefully. He stirs but doesn’t wake, just shifts and sighs and settles deeper into the pillow, and I stand at the side of the bed in the gray morning light and look at him. He is sleeping with his whole body, the absolute surrender of someone whose conscience isn’t keeping them up, and I don’t know what to do with that, so I get dressed in the hallway so I don’t disturb him and I leave him a note on the kitchen counter.

Gone to work. Back later. The coffee beans are in the cupboard above the kettle.

I stare at it for a second. Then I put my coat on and go.

The scene is a hotel on Clapham High Street. Not a budget one, the kind with a doorman and a marble foyer and the particular hush of expensive carpets, and there are two uniforms outside the service entrance trying to look like nothing is happening while a SOCO van takes up half the loading bay. Farah is waiting for me by the lift.

“How bad,” I say.

“Bad,” she says. “Same MO. Same staging. But.”

“But what?”

She looks at me the way she’s been looking at me for weeks. “Come and see.”

The room is on the fourth floor. I smell it before I see it, the particular copper-and-fear smell that indoor crime scenes have, different from the clean cold of a body found outdoors. Farah stops in the doorway and lets me look.

The victim is on the bed. The staging matches the others in its deliberate humiliation, but this one is different in a way that hits me before I can catalogue why. Then I see his face.

He didn’t go quietly.

He died in terror. Eyes still wide. The specific contortion of a face that ran out of air, that fought for it and lost. There is a large sex toy still in place, rammed far down his throat, stretching his mouth obscenely wide. The method of death unmistakable once you understand the staging, and there are deep cuts on his wrists where he struggled against the handcuffs pinning him to the bed.

His chest is a bloody mess. Something has been carved into it. I know from the other scenes that it’s going to be a name, but at the moment it’s simply knife ones and congealed blood.

The victim’s heart was racing harder than the others. Or he was on warfarin. Probably both.