Page 72 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I always knew how this was going to end. I just didn’t know, for a little while, that it was going to feel like this on the way.

Chapter thirty-three

Lennox

Ihave been staring at the same report for forty minutes.

Not reading it. Not processing the words into anything useful. Just looking at it, moving the mouse occasionally so the screen doesn’t go dark, the way I’ve been doing for days now, going through the motions of a man at work while the actual man sits somewhere else entirely and stares at a note he should have thrown away and doesn’t.

I’ve been back to Hackney once. I don’t know what I was planning to do when I got there. I sat in the car outside the building for twenty minutes. Then I drove home. He wasn’t there, I didn’t need to try the buzzer to know that.

The note is still in my coat pocket.

I know this because I check. Not deliberately. Just the reflex of a hand that’s learned where the paper is and keeps going back to confirm it’s still there. I haven’t read it again. I don’t need to. I could write it out from memory at this point, and the handwriting would probably be close.

Farah appears in the incident room doorway.

I know from the way she’s moving that something has happened. Farah doesn’t burst, she’s not a bursting kind of person, but she moves at different speeds depending on what she’s carrying, and right now she’s moving at the speed of someone who has been waiting for a particular thing and it’s arrived.

She closes the door behind her.

“I need to tell you something,” she says, “and I need you to not react to it the way I think you might react to it.”

I put the mouse down. “Tell me.”

She sits, which she doesn’t usually do when she has something urgent, but she sits now, and she looks at me with the careful assessment I’ve been watching her try to hide for weeks, and she says, “I’ve been running something on the side. Three possible targets. Men who fit the Vigilante’s profile, men who’ve had investigations opened and closed, men with the right histories. I’ve had people watching all three for the last week.”

A whole week.

I look at her face and I think about seven days and I think about everything that’s happened in a week and the specific, pointed quality of her not telling me any of this.

“You didn’t say anything,” I say.

“No.” She says it simply, without apology. “I didn’t.”

The understanding of why sits between us without needing to be said. She didn’t tell me because she doesn’t trust me on this case anymore, hasn’t for a while, and this is the clearest confirmation she’s ever given me of that, a parallel operation run behind my back by the person who’s supposed to be my partner, and I find I can’t be angry about it because she’s right.

“Which three,” I say.

She tells me the names. I know two of them from Greaves’s files. The third I don’t recognize, which means either Greaves kept him further from the official record or Farah found him through a different route entirely. I look at her across the desk and think about how good she is at her job and feel something that might be pride if it weren’t sitting so close to dread.

“One of them is moving,” she says. “Twenty minutes ago. Left his house on foot, no car, didn’t go to any of his usual locations. He’s been circling a specific area in Bethnal Green, and my watcher thinks he’s been lured. Someone’s been in contact with him through a channel we’re still trying to trace, and he’s been responding.” She pauses. “SWAT are assembling.”

The room does something. Nothing I can point to, no change in the air or the light, just the internal equivalent of a building going quiet before something structural happens.

“This is it,” she says.

I look at her. Her face is doing the thing it does when she believes she’s right, the particular quality of focused certainty that’s been right often enough over eleven years that I trust it the way I trust my own. She is right. I know she’s right with the specific knowledge of a man who put a key in someone’s hand not very long ago and is now sitting in a fluorescent-lit incident room waiting to find out what happens next.

Micah is in Bethnal Green.

My boy, Greaves said, weeks ago, in a corridor, and I told him Micah wasn’t my boy, and I was already lying.

Was he ever mine? That’s the question I keep arriving at from every direction and can’t answer. The man who looked at me across a candlelit table and said, This, with great feeling. The man who slept with his forehead almost touching my shoulder and breathed slowly, and let me feel, for a short while, like something I’d given up on was still possible. The man who made me breakfast and packed me a lunch with a note in it.

Does it matter that it started wrong if it ended real?

Did it end real?