Page 28 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“We had a witness. Fourteen years old when it happened to him, twenty-one when we finally found him. Took two years to get him to the point where he’d consider testifying. Two years of meetings, of building trust, of convincing him the system might actually do something useful for once in his life.” Greaves’s voice hasn’t changed pitch but something in it has flattened out entirely. “He pulled out the week we were going to charge. Said he couldn’t go through with it. I don’t blame him. I never blamed him. The defense would have destroyed him on that stand.” He looks at me. “Fenn walked. Sallow walked. Pell walked. And now all three of them are dead and the ring they were part of has gone to ground, and I’m going to be doing this for another ten years trying to find the men we can’t see, and I am very, very tired, Lennox.”

There’s nothing I can say to that either. It’s been a good morning for things I can’t say anything to.

“The ring is gone for now,” he continues, pulling himself back into something more professional. “Three days after Fenn’s body was found, every name we had flagged went quiet. Burner phones. Cleared accounts. One of them is on a flight to Paraguay as we speak, and there’s nothing on him officially, there’s never been anything on him officially.” His voice has gone flat in a way I recognize from men who’ve been grinding away at something for years and just watched it dissolve. “Whoever your Vigilante is, he’s smart enough to know that killing the men we could see was going to scatter the men we couldn’t.”

“Unless that wasn’t the point,” I say.

Greaves looks at me.

“Unless justice for the boys was the only point. Not dismantling the ring.”

He stares at me for a long time. There’s something in his face I haven’t seen before. Not quite agreement. Not quite grief. Something between the two that he doesn’t want me to see and isn’t quite fast enough to hide.

“Put your boy back on the board,” he says quietly, and walks away.

I stand in the corridor for a minute. The fluorescent light above me is doing that thing where it flickers imperceptibly unless you stare directly at it. I’m staring directly at it.

I don’t want to put him on the board.

That’s the simple truth I’ve been dressing up in professional language for days now. Not I don’t have enough evidence, not there’s insufficient basis for suspicion. I don’t want to. Because he’s sitting at home in that ridiculous loft with his YouTube channel and his OnlyFans and his cooking and his looping, confident handwriting, and he looked at me across a kitchen counter and listened like what I was saying actually mattered to him, and I am so completely and utterly done for that it should probably be investigated as a crime all of its own.

My boy.

The number is in my phone. I still have the paper he gave it to me on. The one with the little heart drawn next to it. I am standing in a police station corridor thinking about a drawing of a heart on a piece of notepaper and I am in serious, serious trouble.

I go back to the incident room. I pick up the marker. I stand in front of the board for a long time, long enough that Farah glances over once and then looks carefully back at her screen.

Then I write his name.

Micah Vee.

I stare at it.

It looks wrong there. That’s what I notice first, before I can stop myself noticing it. It looks wrong in a way Graham Pell’s name wouldn’t look wrong, in a way Trevor Sallow and Robert Fenn could never look wrong. This name doesn’t belong next to theirs. This name belongs on a different board entirely, the one in my chest where I’m keeping all the things I’ve decided not to examine.

Which is, I’m aware, exactly what a compromised detective would think. A man whose judgment has been steering him by the heart and who has no business deciding whose name belongs where.

The incident room carries on around me. Phones ringing. Someone’s printer jams again. The particular smell of this floor at this hour, stale coffee and someone’s lunch and the background hum of a building full of people trying to solve things that mostly don’t get solved.

Somewhere in London, Micah is probably making something beautiful out of a derelict building, narrating softly to a camera about peeling paint and forgotten places, laughing at something off frame. Looking exactly like a man with nothing to hide.

Or he isn’t.

I don’t know which thought is worse. I don’t know anything anymore, and I’ve spent my long career being a man who knows things, and the ground underneath that has been shifting for weeks and I haven’t let myself look down until right now.

I’m looking down now.

It’s a long way to fall.

Chapter fourteen

Lennox

My phone buzzes with a text. I pull it out, stare at the screen and feel a jolt zap all the way through me when I see it’s from Micah.

A subscriber sent a letter to my home address. Everything official is a PO box so I don’t know how they got it. Probably nothing. But I have popcorn and a film I’ve been threatening you with. Come over?

I stare at it for longer than I should.