Page 5 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

That gets me a real laugh, quick and startled out of him, gone again almost as fast as it arrives. “No promises.”

I radio to uniform to expect him at the side gate and to let him pass.

He flashes me a grin. Then he winks at me. A simple movement of his eyelid that does something unholy to my insides.

I watch him go, hugging his arms around himself like the cold has only just caught up with him, and I stand there a beat too long after he’s vanished, like some part of me is waiting for him to look back.

He doesn’t.

It isn’t until I’m halfway down the corridor toward Farah and the body and the carved name I don’t recognize that the thought finally surfaces, too late to be useful.

He gave me everything. Name, number, the works, the second a badge made it clear I was someone worth giving things to. As if he had nothing to hide.

But I still found him at a murder scene. At three o’clock in the morning. Not dressed appropriately for the weather. Claiming to be filming for Youtube.

And he didn’t have a camera.

I should have caught that while he was still standing in front of me. I didn’t. I’m already starting to suspect I know exactly why.

Chapter three

Lennox

The incident room is too bright for half-past eight in the morning, fluorescent light doing nothing for the three hours of sleep I managed before deciding sleep wasn’t worth chasing anymore. There’s a coffee going cold by my elbow and a file open on my desk that’s already too thin for what it needs to be.

Trevor Sallow. Fifty-one. No convictions. Just three historic complaints filed against him over eleven years by three different families, every single one of them quietly closed for lack of evidence, the way these things always seem to close when the only witnesses are children nobody bothered believing properly the first time. He ran a five-a-side football club out of a community center two boroughs over. Of course he did. They always run something. A club, a charity, a youth group. Something that puts them in a room full of kids and calls it generous.

Two bodies now. Two men the system looked at properly, more than once, and let walk anyway. I don’t know yet whether that’s a pattern, or a coincidence dressed up to look like one, but my gut has stopped pretending it’s the second option.

Farah drops into the chair across from me without asking, which is just as well since I wasn’t going to offer it.

“Got an ID on Jordan Marsh,” she says. “The name carved into Sallow.” She adds as if I could possibly forget.

“And.”

“Fifteen at time of disappearance. Reported missing three years ago from the Effra House estate in Brixton. Still open on paper, but barely. Last proper action on the file was fourteen months ago.”

I read through the misper notes while she talks, and my stomach does something slow and unpleasant. Known to run. Three previous missing episodes, all resolved when he turned back up on his own within a week. Family described as uncooperative. Mother working two jobs while caring for her three younger children, and unable to attend the initial interview, rescheduled twice, never actually happened. Whereabouts of father unknown. No school attendance for the four months prior to his disappearance. Risk assessment marked medium, then quietly downgraded to low after the second week, with a note that reads, in its entirety, subject has history of self-resolving absences. The file reads like somebody decided what kind of boy Jordan Marsh was before they’d even finished writing his name down, and then built an entire investigation around not having to try very hard.

“Fifteen years old and they wrote him off as a habit,” I say.

“Cheaper than writing him up as a victim.” Farah says it like she’s tasting something sour. “Easier too. Victims need following up on. Habits just need closing.”

I know Effra House without needing the file to tell me. One of the old LCC blocks from the thirties, all concrete stairwells and walkways that never quite escaped the damp, the kind of estate that gets a paragraph in the local paper every few years, always about mold or a broken lift, never about anything that happens to the kids who grow up there. Easy enough for a busy desk to decide a boy from a postcode like that was always going to be the sort who ran and was never going to amount to much anyway.

“Nobody looked for him,” I say. It isn’t a question.

“Somebody looked for him for about a week.” Farah’s voice has gone flat in the specific way it does when she’s furious and not letting herself be. “Then they decided he’d run off again and stopped bothering.”

“And now somebody’s gone and carved his name into a dead pedophile’s chest because we never did.”

She doesn’t argue with that, because there isn’t a version of it that isn’t true.

The door to the incident room bangs open before either of us can sit in it any longer, and Detective Inspector Malcolm Greaves fills the gap like he’s been built specifically for doorways, wide through the shoulders, a nose that’s been broken at least twice and never quite reset right, the kind of permanent red in his face that comes from decades of being too angry for his own blood pressure. CAIT, going on fifteen years now, the last six of them spent specifically on the network Graham Pell was supposed to be the way into. He’s got a takeaway coffee in one hand and he uses it to gesture with, jabbing it in my direction like punctuation he doesn’t trust words alone to provide.

“You absolute muppet,” he says, by way of greeting.

“Good morning to you too, Malcolm.”