3. Chapter 3
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.”
“Don’t.” He points a thick finger at me, the coffee cup still clutched in his other fist. “Three years. Three years of careful work, Lennox, watching, waiting, building something that was finally about to be worth something, and now I’ve got journalists outside my superintendent’s office asking about a body posed like something off the internet, and every single name in that ring is going to go quiet and scatter the second this hits the news properly. ”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“No.” Greaves’s mouth twists like the word tastes bad. “But you’re the one stomping round with sirens and tape and SOCO vans, aren’t you. Might as well have put up a sign.”
“There’s two dead men with one dead boy and one missing boy’s names carved into them. I’m not sitting on homicides so your op stays tidy.”
“Your homicides aren’t the only thing at stake here, and you bloody know it.
” He steps further into the room, close enough that I catch the smell of stale cigarettes under cheap deodorant, the particular fug of a man who’s been awake since whenever the first call came through and hasn’t stopped moving since.
“We had patience. We had years invested. We were maybe eight months from being able to put names to every single face in that ring, and Pell was the only one of them stupid or desperate enough to talk if we ever got him cornered properly. You wouldn’t know patience if it bit you, would you.
Never did. Straight in, badge first, consequences for everyone else later.
Worked out so well for Foster, didn’t it? ”
The room goes very still.
Farah’s eyes flick to me, and I keep my face exactly as flat as I can manage, because giving Malcolm Greaves the reaction he’s fishing for would be handing him something I’m not willing to part with in front of half the floor.
“That has nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Doesn’t it?” He looks at me a moment longer, and there’s something underneath the anger that almost looks like grief, quickly buried back under bluster before I can be sure of it.
“You’ll get your homicide solved, I’m sure.
You always do, eventually. Just don’t act surprised when there’s nobody left standing in that ring by the time you get there.
And don’t come crying to me when it turns out the only person who actually walks away clean from this is whoever’s doing the carving. ”
He leaves the same way he arrived, taking up the whole doorway on the way out, coffee still untouched, and the room exhales once he’s gone.
“He’s not wrong about the timing,” Farah says carefully, after a moment. “Even if he’s an arsehole about delivering it.”
“No,” I agree. “He’s not.”
I don’t ask her what Foster has to do with any of this. She already knows I’m not going to, and I already know she’s not going to bring it up either, which is its own kind of mercy I don’t examine too closely.
By the time she’s gone to chase the original misper officers for a proper statement, I’ve got the file I actually want to be looking at open instead, the one I’ve been putting off all morning out of something that feels suspiciously like cowardice for a man my age.
Micah Vee exists on the system, just barely.
One entry, four years old, a caution for soliciting, the kind of thing that earns a young man a stern word and a swab kit rather than a night in a cell.
Nothing before it. Nothing after. No pattern, no escalation, nothing that reads like a man building toward anything worse.
The phone number checks out as registered to him, current, no red flags.
Everything else about him on paper is so clean it almost reads suspicious in itself, the way a spotless kitchen sometimes does.
What he does have is a YouTube channel with a respectable subscriber count, mostly footage of him picking his way through derelict buildings in that same gray tank top, talking softly to camera about peeling paint and abandoned beauty like he actually means it.
And an Instagram with several hundred thousand followers, every single photo absurdly tasteful, soft lighting, careful angles, the kind of effortless beauty that clearly takes a great deal of effort.
I scroll further than is professionally defensible.
There’s a photo of him on some rooftop at golden hour, hair doing that artfully careless thing it does, a half smile aimed at the camera like he knows exactly what it’s going to do to whoever’s looking at it.
There’s another of him laughing at something off-frame, genuinely laughing, not performing it, and I find myself wondering what he was laughing at and immediately hating myself a little for wondering.
There’s one of him asleep on a train, which should not be attractive and somehow still is, captioned with a single sleeping emoji and forty thousand comments, most of which I have no business reading and read anyway.
He comments back on a worrying number of them.
Replies to strangers like they matter to him individually, little hearts and exclamation marks scattered through a comment section like confetti.
Either the most generous public figure on the internet or the most skilled at appearing to be, and I genuinely cannot decide which possibility unsettles me more.
And then there’s the OnlyFans link, sitting right there in his bio like it’s nothing, like it isn’t currently doing something to my pulse that no man my age standing in a police station has any business letting it do.
I do not click it.
I think about clicking it for several long, undignified seconds, weighing the various ways my career would not survive that particular bit of browser history showing up on a force laptop, and then I close the laptop entirely, like putting actual distance between my hand and the mouse is going to undo the last ten minutes of my life.
It doesn’t. I still know it’s there. I suspect I’m going to know it’s there for the rest of the day, sitting at the back of my skull like a held breath.
Farah reappears just as I’m closing it, like she’s got some sixth sense for catching me at my most undignified.
“You look like a man with a guilty conscience,” she says, dropping back into the chair across from me.
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Yet.” She nods at the laptop. “You’ve been checking up on our urban explorer.”
“It’s due diligence.” I say coldly, even as my guts twist. I’m not going to ask how she knows. This is Farah. She just knows things. I’ve given up trying to understand it.
“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me, which is fair, because I don’t entirely believe myself either. “Are you going to bring him in?”
“Not yet.”
“Any particular reason?”
I don’t answer that, because there isn’t a version of the truth that doesn’t make me sound exactly as compromised as I currently feel, and Farah, mercifully, lets the silence stand instead of making me find one.
I used to be the most boring man on this floor.
Ask anyone. Lennox doesn’t drink at the Christmas do, Lennox files his overtime properly, Lennox once reported a senior officer for taking backhanders and didn’t even have the decency to feel bad about the fallout. That’s who I am. Who I’ve always been.
And here I am at half-past nine in the morning, in the middle of investigating two murders and a missing fifteen-year-old nobody bothered looking for, thinking about a stranger’s mouth instead of either of them.
I really am rotting from the inside. I just didn’t expect it to feel quite this good on the way down.