Page 37 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I believe in the law, I have organized my entire life around the law, I gave up everything soft and good in my life to the law over a period of two decades, and now I’m lying in the dark in my own flat understanding, clearly and finally, that I no longer entirely believe in what I gave it all up for.

And then, because the day wasn’t already enough, I felt the full weight of it and I picked up my phone and I called him.

It should horrify me. It does horrify me, and underneath the horror there’s something that’s been growing quietly for a while and doesn’t care about being horrifying at all, because Micah answered on the fifth ring and said hey in the particular way he says it, like he was already thinking of me, and something in my chest unknotted itself so immediately and so completely that I sat there in that interview room with its cold tea and its ghosts and felt, for about forty seconds, better.

Micah made me feel better.

That’s what my life has become. The thing I reach for, in the dark, when I’ve finally admitted something true and terrible about myself, is the man whose name is on my board.

Suddenly, light spills across my ceiling. My phone is ringing. I grab it, thinking of Micah, but it’s Farah’s name on the screen.

The address Farah sends is a warehouse conversion three miles south. I know the street. I’ve been on it before. I dress without turning the light on, muscle memory and habit, and then I’m in the car and London is doing what London does at this hour, which is reveal itself as a completely different city, all the noise and press of it stripped away, just the roads and the orange light and the occasional figure who could be anyone for any reason.

I think about murderers knowing their locations.

I’ve believed this since early in my career, before it became fashionable to say it in training manuals. They come back to places they understand. Places they know and are familiar with. Locations that speak to them.

You can feel it in a scene, sometimes, the ease of someone who already knew where everything would be.

It’s why I park two streets away.

I’ve been getting lazy. Pulling straight up to the tape, stepping straight into the formal geometry of a scene that’s already been organized and contained, and missing the thing you can only get from the approach. The approach is information. The approach tells you what someone who chose this place already knew about it.

Murderers and their locations are connected. Get a feel for one and you can get a feel for the other.

The man I used to be parked two streets away every time.

I lock the car and I walk.

The street is the quiet kind of quiet that only happens at this hour in London, the great city temporarily reduced to the sound of my own footsteps and a fox somewhere a few gardens over going through a bin with no shame whatsoever. Blue light strobes ahead of me, two streets up, where SOCO is already doing what SOCO does. I have a few more minutes before I need to be there. Before it becomes official and bounded and someone hands me a scene report and the geometry of what happened gets reduced to measurements and photographs.

I take the long way round.

The alley runs perpendicular to the main street, narrow, a hundred years of shortcut in its bones. I don’t know exactly why I turn down it. Instinct. Hard-earned years of instinct, the same reflex that made me notice a window cord in a derelict hospital weeks ago, the same radar that never entirely switches off no matter how much of everything else has.

Something moves at the far end.

A figure. Dark clothes. Hoodie pulled up. Moving along the top of the wall with a confidence that belongs to someone who’s done this before, hands finding the holds without hesitation, body angled away from me into whatever is on the other side.

My torch is in my hand before I’ve made the decision.

“Freeze. Police.”

The figure stops.

Every muscle stiffens, the specific stillness of someone who’s run out of options. Then slowly they drop, both feet to the ground, both hands go up, open, palms out, and the figure turns around.

I already know. I think I already knew when I turned down the alley.

It’s Micah.

He’s breathing hard, a strand of hair across his face that he can’t move with his hands up. He stands in the torchlight and looks at me, and his face is something I’ve never seen from him before. Not charm. Not fear. Not that quick, cold thing I occasionally catch underneath everything else. Just still.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

“Scoping a location.” He tilts his head very slightly toward the wall. “For a video. There’s an old printworks through there. Been derelict since the eighties.”

I look at him.