Page 73 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer, the one I’ve been not saying for days, the one that’s sitting in my chest next to a piece of paper I should have thrown away. I don’t know if what I felt was matched or if I was the job, the mark, the useful detective who could be kept close and kept quiet, and I don’t know how to not know that, and I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next hour or what I would even want to do if I let myself want something.

If they catch him tonight, he goes to prison for the rest of his life.

Four murders. Plus one attempted if tonight goes the way tonight appears to be going. A man they’ll call the Vigilante in every press release, in every courtroom, and whatever he is to me or was to me won’t be in any of those documents, won’t be part of any of those sentences, will just be the private and entirely irrelevant fact of a detective who let himself get played.

And if they don’t catch him tonight…

I don’t finish that thought.

“Come on then,” I say.

The briefing happens in the car park. The SWAT commander is a man I’ve never worked with before. Broad through the shoulders, the specific quality of contained energy that comes from a job that requires you to be ready to move very fast at very short notice. He has a tablet with a map on it, and he talks through entry points and contingencies with the precise economy of someone who has done this many times and takes none of it lightly.

“The subject is highly dangerous,” he says. “Four confirmed kills, attempting number five tonight. MO shows significant premeditation and physical capability. We treat this as armed until proven otherwise.”

I stand at the back of the small group and I listen to a professional threat assessment of a man who makes very good packed lunches and has never once, in my experience, been physically capable of anything more dangerous than a very good striptease.

A man who was scared in an interview room. Who put a small drawing of a heart next to his phone number. Who angled my reading lamp slightly to the right because he preferred it that way and never noticed he’d done it.

I keep my face exactly where it needs to be. Twenty two years of keeping my face exactly where it needs to be, and it has never cost me more than it does right now, standing in a car park listening to a man I’ve never met describe a threat profile that has nothing wrong with it and nothing right with it at the same time.

“Questions,” the commander says.

Nobody has any questions. We move.

I get my coat. The note is in the pocket and I don’t check for it, just go, because checking for it would be its own kind of answer and I’m not ready to give that answer yet.

Farah’s car is outside. I get in the passenger seat. She pulls out before she’s even properly settled, the specific efficiency of a person who’s been waiting for this and is not about to let it go wrong now, and the SWAT van follows us out of the car park, and we join the London traffic heading east.

The police channel is open on the radio, low but audible, and updates come through in the clipped language of people managing a moving situation. Watcher one has visual. Subject still moving. Heading toward the target location. No contact with anyone yet.

Farah drives with both hands on the wheel, leaning forward very slightly the way she does when she’s concentrating, and she doesn’t say anything and I don’t say anything and between us the radio keeps its running commentary of a person I know walking through streets neither of us can see yet.

Commercial Road goes past. Then the Mile End Road, the particular texture of east London at this hour, the shops, the bus stops, the ordinary evening business of people who have no idea that somewhere ahead of us a SWAT team is taking up position around a building. Bethnal Green now, the streets narrowing.

The radio crackles.

“Watcher two. Subject has entered the building. Ground floor access, looks like an unlocked service door. We have the building ID. Sending coordinates now.”

Farah’s hands tighten on the wheel. She glances at the navigation as the coordinates come through, adjusts her route, and accelerates through an amber light in a way that means she believes we’re nearly out of time.

I look at the building ID on the shared screen.

It’s a disused warehouse. Three floors, multiple entry points, accessed from a side street off a road I don’t immediately recognize. The kind of building that’s been empty long enough that nobody official has eyes on it, the kind of building a person who knows abandoned London very well would know about, would have been to before, might have filmed in the dark with a camera and a soft narrating voice talking about peeling paint and forgotten places.

My chest does something I don’t have time for.

“This is it,” Farah says. Not to me specifically. Just to the air, the radio, the evening, the whole operation that she built while I was sitting at my desk staring at a report I wasn’t reading.

I watch the streets going past and I think about what I’m about to do.

I don’t know what I’m about to do.

That’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever been able to say about myself, and I’ve been able to say some frightening things.

I grip the edge of my seat. It doesn’t help. The future still races towards me, ready to swallow me whole.

Chapter thirty-four