2. Chapter 2
Chapter two
Lennox
My phone buzzes against the nightstand at half-past two, and before I even pick it up, I already know my night is over.
We’ve got another one. Very similar MO.
I lie there a moment longer than I should, staring at Farah’s text like staring at it is going to change what it says.
Then I get up, because lying there isn’t going to change anything either, and Callum Doyle’s name has been sitting behind my eyes since the alley anyway.
I haven’t slept properly in three days. What’s one more?
She sends the address a minute later. I read it twice because I’m sure I’ve got it wrong the first time.
I haven’t got it wrong. It’s the old hospital.
The derelict one boarded up behind chain link two streets from my own front door, the one I walk past most mornings without giving it a second thought because a building can be a wreck for so long it stops registering as anything at all.
I’ve lived a five-minute walk from it for six years.
I don’t bother with the car. I just put my coat on and go.
The night is doing that thin, drizzling thing London nights do when they can’t commit to actual rain.
I walk fast, hands in my pockets, and try not to think too hard about the fact that somebody chose to do this two streets from where I sleep.
I fail. Of course I fail. My brain has never once let me have a thought without immediately following it with three worse ones.
Uniform have only just got there themselves when I arrive, torches sweeping through broken windows, one of them still wrestling with the rusted padlock on the side gate like it’s personally offended him.
Farah’s car pulls up behind me a moment later, headlights cutting briefly across peeling paint and a faded sign that still says CASUALTY in letters someone painted thirty years ago.
“You walked,” she says, taking me in.
“It was quicker than driving.”
She doesn’t ask how much quicker. She doesn’t have to. I watch the thought cross her face and land somewhere she decides not to say out loud.
We duck through a gap in the fence somebody’s already widened for us and pick our way across a courtyard gone feral with buddleia and broken glass.
The building swallows the torchlight whole.
Every hospital I’ve ever been inside, the working kind, hums with something, machines and footsteps and the particular brightness of fluorescent light that never lets you forget you’re somewhere people get fixed or finished.
This one just breathes cold air back at us and waits.
We find him in what used to be an examination room.
The table is still there, miraculously, cracked vinyl and rusted stirrups, the kind of furniture nobody bothers stealing because nobody wants it.
He’s strapped to it. Legs hauled up and spread into the position that table was built for, the lithotomy position.
Medical, invasive, and someone has used it to leave a grown man on display in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully scrub out of my head.
There’s a toy between his legs, obscene in scale, the kind of thing that exists purely to be a joke until somebody decides it isn’t one anymore. I’ve seen a lot in twenty-two years. I have never seen anything arranged with quite this much specific, deliberate cruelty.
Carved into his chest, the same neat, unhurried letters as before.
A name I don’t recognize.
I crouch and read it twice anyway, just in case six years of carrying Callum Doyle around has made me stupid enough to miss something obvious.
It isn’t him. It isn’t anyone I know. Whoever this dead man wronged, it wasn’t on my desk, and for one ugly half-second I feel almost cheated by that, which is its own kind of horrifying thing to feel standing over a body.
“Similar MO,” Farah says quietly, crouched beside me. “Different victim profile, until forensics tells us otherwise. Different name.”
“Different name,” I agree. “Same message.”
Something slams above us, hard enough that we both flinch and go still. A window. Old wood hitting an old frame, the sound of it rolling away down empty corridors before the building swallows that too.
Farah’s hand goes to her radio. “Uniform are supposed to have cleared this place.”
“They’re supposed to have done a lot of things.” I’m already moving toward the sound, every nerve in my body lit up and humming. “Call it in. I want bodies on every exit before anyone else gets the bright idea to leave.”
She’s already talking into the radio as I head for the stairs.
The window that slammed is in the room next door, an old sash, the kind nobody’s made in decades, paint flaking off it in long curls.
The sash cords have snapped clean through, both of them, and they don’t look like they’ve been hanging on by a thread for thirty years and finally gave up tonight.
They look fresh. Like someone was easing this window open slowly and carefully, trying not to make a sound, right up until centuries-old rope decided it had had enough and let the whole thing come crashing down anyway.
Somebody was here. Somebody was trying very hard not to be noticed, and the building betrayed them anyway.
I lean out, scan the drop, the fire escape bolted to the wall below it, rusted but intact. Plenty of ways down. Plenty of ways gone, if whoever it was had the sense to run the second that window gave them away.
I turn back toward the corridor, torch beam swinging ahead of me, expecting empty space and broken tile and nothing else.
I get about three steps before I walk straight into someone solid and warm and very much alive.
The impact knocks my torch sideways, throws light skittering up the peeling wall, and for one disorienting second all I’ve got is an armful of someone smaller than me, gripping my forearms to keep us both upright, a warm puff of breath against my jaw.
He smells faintly of clean sweat and something sweeter underneath it, the particular smell of being young and barely worried about anything in the world.
My hand finds his waist on instinct, steadying him, steadying myself, and it takes a full beat longer than it should to remember I’m meant to let go.
We untangle. Sort of. He doesn’t step back as far as he should.
My first thought, before training, before suspicion, before anything resembling sense, is that he’s gorgeous.
He’s slight, all lean lines under a thin gray tank top that’s seen better days, dark hair falling messy across his forehead like he’s just rolled out of someone’s bed, or wants me to think he has.
Sharp cheekbones. A soft mouth. The kind of pale skin that looks like it would bruise if anyone so much as breathed on it too hard.
A shadow of stubble along his jaw that reads deliberate rather than lazy.
He can’t be more than twenty-two, twenty-three at the absolute most. I am forty-four years old, standing in the middle of a murder scene, having an entirely inappropriate physical reaction to a stranger who has no business being here at all, and some small, horrified part of my brain is already trying to catalogue the exact color of his eyes, in the dim light, like it thinks there’s going to be a later worth remembering them for.
“Oh,” he says, not moving away from where we’re still half tangled together. “I’m so sorry for walking into you.” His eyes drag over me, slow and unbothered, like he’s got all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it. “Or am I?”
The smile that follows is pure cheek, no apology in it whatsoever.
“What are you doing here?” It comes out rougher than I mean it to, more growl than question, and I hate that I know exactly why.
I am flustered. I am a forty-four year old detective standing in a derelict hospital next to a body left in the worst possible position a man can be found in, and I am flustered by a stranger’s smile.
“Urban exploring.” He says it like it explains everything, like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world to be doing in a derelict building at three in the morning. “For my YouTube channel. You’d be amazed how many subscribers a decent abandoned hospital gets you.”
“Through which door?”
He blinks. Just once. Just a fraction too long. “Side gate. Same as you, probably.”
“I came in the front.”
“Then I suppose I’m more adventurous than you.” The smile doesn’t waver. If anything, it widens, like he’s enjoying this, like getting caught somewhere he shouldn’t be, by a detective twice his age, is the most fun he’s had all week.
I should be asking for ID. I should be walking him straight to a uniform and having him processed properly, name, address, the full sweep, the way I would for anyone else who turned up loose at a fresh scene. Instead what comes out of my mouth is, “Name.”
“Micah.” A beat, just long enough that I notice it.
“Surname?”
He smirks. “Nope.”
“Everyone’s got a surname.”
“They do.” He tilts his head, considering me, like he’s the one deciding whether I’ve earned anything further. “Doesn’t mean I’m handing mine to a stranger in a dead hospital at three in the morning.”
I find myself reaching for my badge, less because I need it and more because some buried, deeply unprofessional part of me wants to watch what he does with it.
“Detective Inspector Lennox.” I hold it up between us. “I need your name.”
Something shifts across his face, fast and total, the cheek dropping away like it was never there. His eyes go wide in an entirely different way than before, no fear in it at all, just open, unguarded delight.
“Oh.” He leans in slightly to actually read it, like he wants to be sure. “You’re a cop.”
“That’s generally what the badge means.”
“That’s so hot.” He says it like he’s commenting on the weather, easy and unbothered, and the worst part is how thoroughly I enjoy hearing it.
I haven’t been looked at like that in years.
Possibly ever. I clear my throat and try very hard to remember which one of us is supposed to be in control of this conversation.
“Name,” I say again, firmer this time, mostly for my own benefit.
“Micah Vee.” No hesitation now, no coy beat, nothing held back. He gives it freely, like the badge unlocked something in him that the flirting hadn’t touched. “Do you need my address too? I can give you my address. I can give you anything you want.”
The way he says it, low and a little too pleased with himself, makes it an invitation rather than cooperation, and I am annoyed at myself for enjoying the difference.
“This is a murder scene.”
His eyes go wide again, properly this time, all that delight collapsing into something that looks exactly like fear.
“Oh no.” His voice has gone small. Young. Genuinely frightened, or close enough to it that I can’t find the seam anywhere. “I didn’t, I had no idea, I would never have come in if I’d known. Is that why the door was already open? Was there someone else in here with me the whole time?”
He wraps his own arms around himself, and the gesture is so unguarded, so entirely without performance, that every careful instinct I’ve spent twenty-two years building tells me to step closer instead of further away.
To put a hand on his shoulder and tell him he’s safe now.
I don’t let myself do it. But I want to, and that wanting is its own kind of warning I’m already choosing not to listen to.
“I’ll need a number as well,” I tell him. “In case we need a statement.”
He rattles it off before I’ve even finished asking, eager in a way that should probably reassure me, but doesn’t.
“You’re free to go home,” I tell him. “Try not to film any more murder scenes.”
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.