Page 62 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Oliver Osei.

I see her face. The specific face of a woman who has been carrying something for so long the weight of it has become the shape of her. The untouched mug of tea. The phone held out across the table, her son’s school photograph, blazer slightly crooked, the particular smile of a boy trying to look older than he is. Sometimes I pray he is dead, she said, because the alternative is he is still suffering every day.

Here is the answer to that prayer.

Oliver Osei, whose mother sat in my interview room and asked me what I was going to do and watched me have no answer worth giving her, whose name is now carved into the chest of the man who apparently knew exactly what happened to him when the police did not, when I did not, when no official resource brought to bear on this case ever managed to, because David Carrow was careful and connected and utterly invisible on paper.

Nobody got there except the one person who had the knowledge to know and the rage to act on it.

I think about her face. The controlled grief of someone who has used up all her fury on people who weren’t listening. I think about what it means that Oliver Osei’s name is on that chest, that Micah knew, specifically, concretely knew what Carrow had done when nobody in any official capacity ever did.

Something settles in me that I wasn’t expecting to settle. It doesn’t make what happened in this room last night right. I’m not sure right is the word that applies to any part of this anymore. But it makes it real, the specific human weight of it, the reason underneath the act, and the angst that’s been building since I walked into this room shifts somewhere quieter.

Someone knew about Oliver Osei when nobody else did. Someone cared enough about Oliver Osei to carry his name and carve it into the chest of the man who stole his life.

I know where that someone is right now.

He’s in my flat, in my bed, drinking coffee from my beans in the cupboard above the kettle, and he is sleeping the sleep of someone who did something that needed doing, and I am standing in this hotel room holding the entire weight of that, and I am a detective who has solved this case and I am a man who is choosing not to act on it. Because I’m finally accepting that justice and the law are not always the same thing.

I look at the body. I think about the hard drive that made a man who looks at evil as his profession throw up. I remember the look in Oliver’s mum’s eyes.

I take a deep breath. It’s time to do my job.

Protect those who deserve it and see that justice is served.

Chapter twenty-nine

Micah

I’ve made coffee I don’t particularly want and now I’m sitting at the small table and waiting.

He left a note. Gone to work. Back later. The coffee beans are in the cupboard above the kettle. Which I already knew, because I put them there, but the fact that he wrote it down means he was thinking about me while he was leaving, and I’ve been holding onto that for the last few hours like it’s the only solid thing in the room.

I’ve tried editing. There’s a new building I’ve been putting off starting, an abandoned textile factory in Bermondsey that I shot last week, and I’ve opened the files twice and stared at them and closed them again because I can’t make myself care about it right now. I’ve made two coffees and drunk neither of them. I’ve stood at his bookshelf and read the spines of things I’ve already read the spines of, running my finger along the history section the way I did that first night, except this time I’m not curious, I’m just doing something with my hands while my brain refuses to settle.

I know what he went to see this morning. I don’t know what it’s going to do to him. I don’t know, when that door opens, which version of Lennox is going to walk through it, and that not knowing is the specific quality of dread I’ve been living with since his phone buzzed at six and he got up quietly, trying not to wake me.

I pick up my phone. I put it down. I pick it up again and look at his name in my contacts for a while and then put it in my pocket because calling him is not something I’m going to do right now. Whatever is happening in his head needs to happen without me managing it, and I know that, and I’m sitting on his sofa in his reading lamp’s light respecting that, and it is the hardest thing I’ve done in recent memory.

Which is saying something.

I look at the lamp. He has it angled slightly to the right, because that’s the angle that works for reading from the sofa, and I know this because I’ve watched him shift it without thinking every time he sits down. A handful of days of watching him do things without thinking and I know his habits as if I’ve known him for years, which is either a sign of how much attention I pay to him or how little attention most people pay to anyone.

I hear the key in the outer door at half past seven.

I don’t move. I sit very still and I listen to his footsteps on the path, and then the sound of his key, and the door opening, and then he’s in the hallway, and I’m across the room before I’ve consciously decided to move.

He’s there. Still in his work coat, and he looks tired in the specific way he looked tired in those early weeks when I was watching him from the wrong side of things, the bone-deep tired of a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time. But there’s something else. Something in his face I haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen like this, not mixed in with all the conflict and the fighting and the years of being a particular kind of man.

Settled.

He looks settled.

We stand in the doorway and look at each other and I try to read everything his face is saying, and his face is saying more than I know what to do with, and neither of us says anything for a long moment, and then he reaches into his coat pocket.

He holds something out. Small. Metal. Catching the light from inside.

“I should have given you this already,” he says. “Sorry.”