Page 1 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Chapter one

Lennox

Ipull my coat tighter against the cold and climb out of the car onto a street that could be any I have walked a thousand times before. Except this street has blue and red light bouncing off the wet tarmac, and a uniform standing guard by a strip of tape that means somebody’s whole story just ended.

“Detective Lennox.” The young constable at the perimeter says my name carefully, like getting it wrong might cost him something. He won’t look at me properly, eyes sliding off toward the tape, the wall, anything that isn’t my face. New enough to still be rattled by a scene like this one, maybe, except his hands aren’t shaking at the body behind him. They’re shaking at me.

“What have we got?”

“Male. Found by a drunk looking for somewhere to piss around three. SOCO’s been through twice already, said you’d want eyes on it before they bag him.”

I duck under the tape, and the smell hits before anything else does. Copper and rot and the particular sourness of a body that’s been outside a few hours in this weather. I’ve smelled it enough times that it barely registers as a smell anymore. Just information. Time of death plus elements. My brain doing the math before I’ve even looked at the man.

The alley runs behind a row of shuttered shops, bins overflowing, somebody’s abandoned shopping trolley rusting against the wall like it gave up trying to leave too. And there, in the middle of all that ordinary rubbish, lit stark white by the SOCO lamps, is the body.

He’s naked.

He’s been arranged.

That’s the word that comes to me before any other, before victim, before deceased, before any of the careful, clinical language I’ve trained myself into over twenty-two years on the job. Arranged. Knees folded under him, head pressed into the wet tarmac, hips raised so the whole ugly shape of him is on display for whoever found him first. Whoever did this didn’t just want him dead. They wanted him found exactly like this. In the worst, most humiliating position a body can be left in.

And across his back, deep enough to be visible even in this light, is the message. Neat, unhurried letters carved into skin that was alive a few hours ago.

I crouch down. My knees complain about it the way they always do now, the way they didn’t used to.

CALLUM DOYLE.

The alley tilts. Just slightly. Just for a second, like the ground underneath me has decided it doesn’t want to hold still.

I know that name. I have known that name for six years. Callum Doyle, fourteen years old, found strangled and dumped behind a lockup two boroughs over, after we worked out he’d spent the last stretch of his life being sold around a string of men who used him until he aged out of being wanted, then put down like a dog the moment he stopped being useful. I worked that case for the better part of eighteen months. Every lead went cold the exact same way, like something was always one step ahead of me, quietly closing doors before I got anywhere near them. We never charged anyone. I never charged anyone. The file got boxed up and shelved in the place where unsolved things go to be slowly forgotten by everyone except the detective whose job it was to solve them.

I look at the dead man’s face properly for the first time. His head is twisted to the side. Dead eyes staring at me, features still twisted in pain.

Underneath the death, the face is soft, unremarkable. The kind of face that wouldn’t earn a second glance on the tube. Forty odd, going thin on top, a wedding ring still on his finger though I’d put money on the marriage not surviving whatever’s coming once we dig into who he was.

Whoever he is, he is wearing Callum’s name on his back like a brand. That has to mean something. I just don’t know yet whether it means I finally have a thread to pull, or whether somebody got there first and left me nothing but ash.

Farah Khan picks her way down the alley toward me, gloves already on, the only person on my team who looks more awake at four in the morning than she does at four in the afternoon. I’ve never understood it and I’ve stopped asking.

“Sleeping Beauty here have a name yet?” she says, crouching beside me with the easy economy of someone who’s done this dance more times than she’d like to count either.

“Nope.”

Her phone pings. She grins. “That will be our boys delivering.”

She pulls out her phone, taps through something, and goes still in a way I recognize. I’ve seen that stillness on her face exactly twice before. Both times it meant something was about to get a lot worse.

“Graham Pell,” she says.

The name doesn’t mean anything to me. Not yet. Then she turns the phone so I can see it, and there’s his face from some local paper archive, fifteen years younger and smiling at a school fete, a banner behind him that says something cheerful about a summer fair.

“Convicted in two thousand and nine,” she says. “Indecent images. Got eighteen months, served nine. CAIT had him flagged as part of something bigger almost from the start. A network operating across a couple of boroughs, kids getting passed round. They tried twice more to make something stick. Twenty-fourteen, contact offenses against a boy under his care at a youth club. Case fell apart before it got anywhere near a jury. Chief witness wouldn’t testify in the end. Pell walked, same as he always walked.”

I don’t say anything. I’m too busy doing the math in my head, the dates, the boroughs, whether Pell’s name ever crossed my desk six years ago and I simply didn’t know it yet.

“He’s been living about a half mile from here ever since,” she goes on, like the silence is making her fill it. “Under a different surname for a while, then he just stopped bothering. CAIT never stopped looking at him though. I know a couple of them. Spent years trying to find who else is in that ring, and Pell was always the thread they thought would unravel it, if they could ever get enough on him to make him talk.”

“And now somebody’s carved Callum Doyle’s name into his back instead.”