Page 23 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Nothing has ever felt this good. I’m right on the edge, but I can’t fall over, so the ecstasy is rolling on and on and on.

“Lennox!” I keen, unintentionally this time, but no regrets.

His hips go all jerky. He swears. Groans. I feel a splash of heat through the condom. He swears again and pulls out.

Did he really not want to cum until I had gone twice? What kind of man is he? An angel, that’s what he must be. No mere mortal man is like this.

Three broad fingers fill my empty hole. I make an unholy noise and buck my hips. He fucks me with his fingers. Hard. Ruthlessly, but still somehow gently. Giving me as much as I need, as much as I can take, but no more.

My spine bows. A silent scream blocks my airway. His fingers keep working and my cock spurts and spurts until my balls are empty.

Oh. My. God.

Who is this man and where has he been all my life?

Chapter eleven

Lennox

Iwake up alone, which is how I know before I even open my eyes that something’s wrong with the morning, except it isn’t, not really, not in any way I can name yet. The sheets on Micah’s side are cool, properly cool, like he’s been gone a while. I lie there a minute, listening for the shower, for the kettle, for any of the ordinary sounds of a person being somewhere in a flat this size, and get nothing back. Through the window, the sky’s doing that pale, undecided thing it does before it commits to a color. My body still aches in places it had no business aching at my age, and for one full, stupid minute I just lie there enjoying it, enjoying the soreness and the warmth and the ridiculous, undeserved fact of having woken up here at all.

I find a note on the kitchen counter eventually, his handwriting looping and confident. Gone for a run, didn’t want to wake you. Help yourself to coffee, you’ve earned it. And then, underneath, the 11 digits of a UK mobile number. There’s a small drawing of a heart next to it that should probably embarrass a grown man more than it embarrasses me.

I make the coffee. I drink it standing at his window, looking out over a London that looks almost gentle from this height, and for ten whole minutes I let myself be a man having an ordinary morning rather than a detective on the worst case of his career.

I’m still standing there in last night’s shirt, smiling at a piece of paper like an idiot, when my phone goes off in my coat pocket.

Farah. Another one. Get here.

The address she sends is a lockup behind a row of garages two boroughs over, not somewhere I’d ever have reason to be on an ordinary day, and the drive there gives me far too much time to think about the fact that I have left a man’s flat in last night’s clothes to go look at a body, which is not a sentence that exists anywhere in the version of myself I used to recognize.

The morning’s gone properly gray by the time I get there, the kind of low, flat London light that makes everything look like it’s already given up. Farah’s waiting when I arrive, arms crossed, watching SOCO move around a corrugated metal door propped half open on a padlock somebody’s already cut through. Two uniforms stand at the mouth of the row, keeping a small knot of onlookers back, the usual mix of dog walkers and people who clearly live close enough to have heard something but not close enough to have done anything about it.

I duck under the tape. Through the gap in the door, I can see a shape on the concrete, posed the same way the others were, careful, deliberate, meant to be found exactly like this. A space heater’s been knocked over near his feet, the kind people keep in lockups that were never meant to be lived in or worked in this many hours a day, and the whole place smells like engine oil and concrete dust and, underneath it, the same copper sourness I’ve come to recognize without wanting to.

“Robert Fenn,” Farah says before I’ve even asked. “Greaves’s lot have had eyes on him for the better part of a year. Ran a boxing club for at risk kids out of a community center near Walworth. Three complaints over the years, nothing ever stuck.”

“Of course they didn’t.”

“Same MO. Posed, carved.” She nods toward the body without looking at it again, the way you stop looking at something once you’ve already seen it enough times to know it’ll be in your head regardless. “Name on his chest this time isn’t a dead body or an official misper.”

“Whose then?”

“Bilal.”

Something in my chest goes very still and very cold at once. Bilal. The name the old woman half remembered at Effra House, the boy Jordan was thick as thieves with, the one nobody could quite recall properly except that he was always there, trailing after Jordan like a shadow nobody bothered naming.

“That’s Jordan’s friend,” I say. “From the estate.”

“Looks that way.” Farah’s watching my face very closely now, the kind of attention she usually saves for people she’s deciding whether to trust. “Which means whoever’s doing this either knew Jordan and Bilal personally, or spent enough real time around that estate to know things about those boys that were never written down in any file either of us has access to.”

I don’t have an answer for that, because every answer I can think of isn’t one I’m prepared to say out loud in a car park at seven in the morning.

“I need to talk to you about something,” Farah says, and the shift in her voice tells me this isn’t about Robert Fenn at all. “Walk with me.”

We move away from the lockup, past the tape, out toward where the cars are parked, and she pulls out her phone before she says anything else, scrolling to something she’s clearly already had open more than once this morning.

“I went digging on Micah Vee properly. Not the surface stuff. Properly. Birth records, school admissions databases, the lot.”