Page 27 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I close the door.

“The Guardian ran a piece this morning.” She turns her monitor to face me. The headline is large enough to read from across the room. VIGILANTE JUSTICE. And underneath, in slightly smaller letters, Are London’s predators being hunted?

My stomach does something unpleasant.

“They’re calling him the Vigilante,” she says, sounding far calmer than I suspect she is. “Three victims,” she continues. “All with prior complaints of child sexual abuse. All cases that went nowhere. The press have got hold of the victims’ histories and now the whole internet knows it. Graham Pell’s convictions. Trevor Sallow’s football club. Robert Fenn’s boxing gym. There are forums. Fan accounts. Someone has made a tee shirt.” She says it without inflection, which is somehow worse than if she’d shouted. “The Guardian piece this morning has over forty thousand shares. The comments are not what you’d call supportive of our position.”

“I can imagine.”

“Can you?” Her eyes don’t leave my face. “Because from where I’m sitting, what I have is three murders, no suspect, no forensic leads that go anywhere, a colleague from CAIT who has filed a formal complaint about the handling of this investigation, and a press who are making the Metropolitan Police look like they’ve been actively protecting pedophiles for years. Which, in at least two of these cases, it could be argued we were.”

I don’t say anything. There isn’t a lot I can say to that.

I made the mistake of reading those comments on the drive in. The support for the Vigilante is extraordinary. The public isn’t asking who did this. The public is asking why we’d want to catch him. Three men who touched children and walked free, and now three men with names carved into them like receipts for a debt everyone agreed was owed. The comments aren’t subtle about it.

I don’t blame them. That’s the horrible truth sitting in my chest that I have the sense not to say out loud.

“Farah tells me there’s a person of interest.”

There it is.

“There was,” I say. “He was looked at and cleared.”

“Cleared based on what?”

“Footage placing him at the second scene before the murder occurred.”

Hendricks is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means she is choosing her next words very carefully.

“Farah also tells me this person of interest has no documented existence prior to six years ago.”

“People change their names.”

“People change their names,” she repeats, pleasantly. “Yes. That’s one explanation. Another explanation is that a young man with no documented past, was found at scene two by one of my detectives, and was cleared on the basis of footage he himself provided from his own phone.”

When she puts it like that it sounds bad. I am aware of how it sounds. I’ve been trying very hard not to think about how it sounds.

“Put him back on the board,” she says.

“There’s nothing connecting him to the murders.”

“There’s nothing connecting anyone to the murders. That’s the problem.” She folds her hands on the desk. “Put him back on the board, Lennox. I need to give the press something that isn’t three unsolved homicides and a public who are openly asking why we should be trying very hard to catch whoever’s doing this.”

She isn’t wrong about the public.

Greaves is waiting for me in the corridor when I come out.

Of course he is.

“She putting your boy back on the board?” he asks.

“He’s not my boy.”

Greaves makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Fenn was ours for eighteen months. Did Hendricks tell you that? Eighteen months of very careful, very quiet work. He ran that boxing club as a recruiting ground. Four boys we know of, probably more we don’t. Used Sallow as the referral. Passed them on to Pell when he was done with them.” He stops. His jaw is tight. “The youngest was nine.”

Nine.

I look at the wall for a moment and breathe.