Page 61 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

This victim fought. He struggled and scraped and fought for every breath while someone who knew exactly what he’d done watched him lose.

Farah was right. It’s bad.

Not bad in the way that means wrong, not the professional bad of something unexpected or forensically challenging. Bad in the way that means Micah was angry with this one. More than the others. Something about this man specifically made this personal in a way that the careful posing of the other scenes didn’t quite show, and I stand in the doorway of this hotel room and I feel it land in me like a stone.

He did this last night.

That’s the thought that arrives first, not the professional inventory, not the case facts, just that. He did this last night. I was sitting in my flat at quarter past ten, reading the same page of a book over and over, and across London, in a hotel room that smells of expensive nothing, this was happening. And then he came home. He came home, and I pressed the buzzer without checking the intercom, and he folded his jacket over the back of my sofa and went to bed, and he slept. I felt him sleeping beside me. The slow even breathing of a man at rest.

I could have stopped this.

That’s the second thought, and it lands harder than the first. I had him. I had him in the alley with blood on his hand, and I turned the torch off. I had him in my flat last night, and I watched him walk out the door. I made active choices, plural, deliberate, each one pointing in the same direction, and this hotel room in this state is the direct result of every one of those choices. This man is dead because I kept choosing not to act on what I know, and I can dress it up however I like, but that is the plain arithmetic of it.

Farah appears beside me. She’s looking at the room rather than at me, which is unusual for her because she usually watches me at scenes the way she watches suspects in interview rooms.

“Time of death puts it late last night,” she says. “Between eleven and one.”

Between eleven and two.

He came home at twenty past one.

“Lennox.”

“I’m here.”

“You look like you’re somewhere else.”

“I’m here,” I say again, and make myself take a proper step into the room, because standing in the doorway is exactly what a man does when he has a guilty conscience, and I am supposed to be in here doing my job, and the fact that the man who did this is currently sleeping in my bed is not an excuse, even though it’s the only thing in my head.

I look at the body. I make myself look at it the way I’ve made myself look at bodies for twenty two years, with the professional detachment that’s supposed to create distance between the work and the person doing it. It doesn’t work as well as it used to. It stopped working somewhere around the time I started spending my evenings eating better food than I’ve ever cooked myself.

Images from last night won’t leave me alone. Micah coming in at twenty past one with his hands in his pockets and his jacket on and the particular closed-off quality of his face.

And I think, what are you? I’ve asked myself that question before, and I’ve always answered it in the way that lets me keep him, but standing here, now, looking at this, the answer feels more complicated than it has. What are you, really? Is the man who slept beside me last night the same man who came to this hotel room, and if he is, what does that make me?

What does that make me?

“The victim’s name is David Carrow,” Farah says, coming to stand beside me with a tablet. “No record. No complaints. He ran a charity that placed vulnerable young people into internship programs.” She says this in a tone that means she’s already looked further than the surface. “He had an office near the Houses of Parliament. Very well-connected.”

“Of course he was.”

“On the face of it, nothing.” She swipes to something else on the tablet. “But forensics found something in the room safe. A hard drive. Password protected, but they’ve already got into it.” She pauses. “Lennox. There’s a lot on this drive. Years of it.”

Something in my chest goes very still.

“What kind of material?”

“The kind that made the guy from CAIT vomit.” She glances at me sideways. “The kind that tells you whoever killed him knew. Not just suspected. Knew, with specifics, the way you only know something if you were there or you got it from someone who was.”

I look back at the body. David Carrow, who had a charity near Parliament and nothing on record, who was hiding something so awful that a hard drive locked in a hotel safe was the safest place he knew to keep it.

I’m still standing motionless when the forensics lead comes over and tells Farah they’re done with the chest. She nods. One of the SOCO team crouches beside the body with a cloth and carefully, methodically, wipes away the blood.

The name is underneath.

Oliver Osei.

The room does something to itself. Nothing changes physically, the carpets are still expensive, the body is still there, Farah is still standing beside me, and something shifts in the air anyway, something enormous and quiet.