6. Chapter 6
Chapter six
Lennox
Iwake up not knowing where I am, and for one fuzzy, half-conscious second every instinct I have left fires at once, the low grade alarm twenty-two years on the job has wired into me permanently. Unfamiliar ceiling. Unfamiliar light. Unfamiliar smell.
Then I roll over, and the alarm dissolves so fast and so completely it’s almost embarrassing.
Sunlight is doing something soft and unfair to Micah’s face, picking out the curve of his cheekbone and turning it gold, and for a long moment I just lie there and let myself look.
Asleep, he looks even younger. All that knowing confidence from last night has drained out of him somewhere in the dark, leaving behind someone who sleeps with one hand curled loosely against his own chest like a kid clutching a toy he won’t admit he still needs.
His mouth is slightly open. There’s a faint crease on his cheek from the pillow.
It is, against every reasonable expectation I had walking in here last night, the single most adorable thing I have seen in years, and I am a middle-aged man, lying in a stranger’s bed, smiling at a sleeping man like an absolute fool.
Every muscle I own aches in a way I’d forgotten muscles could ache, the good kind of sore that reminds you a body is for more than standing over corpses.
The room is exactly as expensive in daylight as it was last night, all that glass letting in a flat gray London morning that somehow still manages to look better than it has any right to, just because of who’s lying in the middle of it.
I lie there a minute longer than I should, cataloguing it, before I make myself move at all.
I lean over him at one point, on my way to finding my trousers, close enough that I could press my mouth to his temple without either of us having to acknowledge it happened.
I don’t. I catch myself halfway there and freeze, genuinely alarmed at my own lips, hovering an inch from his hair like they belong to someone else entirely.
I make myself move before I do something even more stupid.
Finding my clothes turns into its own quiet comedy.
My shirt is on the floor by the window, for reasons that come back to me in a hot, vivid rush I am not going to examine at this time of morning.
One sock has vanished entirely, and after a full minute of increasingly undignified searching, I give up and accept I’m going home with one bare ankle inside my shoe, which feels like a fitting enough punishment for a man my age behaving like this.
I creep around the loft on the balls of my feet like a burglar, wincing every time a floorboard so much as thinks about creaking, throwing constant glances back at the bed to make sure he hasn’t stirred.
He hasn’t. He sleeps the way he does everything else, apparently, completely and without apology.
I get dressed in the hallway rather than risk waking him doing it next to the bed.
In daylight the loft looks exactly as bare as it did last night.
No photographs, no clutter, nothing that says a person actually lives here rather than just stores himself here between better things.
I noticed it the moment I walked in, and let it go because the thought scattered.
I notice it again now, properly awake this time, and let it go again anyway, because everybody’s entitled to a minimalist streak, and because I am apparently incapable of suspecting a man I just watched drool slightly onto his own pillow.
Then I stand there for an embarrassingly long time, just looking at him from the doorway, before I make myself leave.
The concierge downstairs gives me a look that says he’s seen plenty of men leave this particular lift looking exactly like I currently do, and has developed a professional immunity to commenting on it.
I nod at him like a man with dignity intact.
He nods back like a man who knows better.
Outside, the street is doing that grudging early morning thing where the sun’s clearly up but hasn’t yet convinced the cold to leave, and I stand on the pavement for a second, deciding whether I feel like myself or like somebody wearing my coat.
I don’t do Ubers, not on a detective inspector’s salary, so I take the Overground, changing onto the Victoria line at Highbury and Islington for the run south.
The carriage is half full with the kind of people who got up properly for work instead of doing the walk of shame across half of London in last night’s shirt.
A woman in a sharp blazer clocks me, clocks the state of my collar, and very deliberately looks back at her phone.
Nobody else looks at me twice. I look like exactly what I am, a tired man in his forties who clearly didn’t sleep at his own address, and London is far too busy minding its own business to care.
I catch myself grinning at my own reflection in the dark window opposite and have to look away.
This is ridiculous. I am sitting on the Victoria line grinning like a teenager because a man half my age let me sleep in his bed and didn’t ask me to leave the second we were finished.
I think about the noises he made. I think about the way he’d looked up at me afterward, lazy and wrecked and pleased with himself, and said something filthy enough that I’m fairly sure my ears went red in front of him for the first time since university.
Mostly, though, I think about the moment when I first met him, and his face when I told him it was a murder scene.
The way his eyes had gone enormous, the fear so total and so unguarded that every careful instinct I have left had screamed at me to step closer instead of further away.
I think about that more than I think about anything that happened after last night, which probably says something uncomfortable about me that I am choosing not to look at directly.
Somebody capable of looking that frightened, that young, that completely without armor, cannot also be capable of what was done to Graham Pell and Trevor Sallow.
The two things don’t fit in the same body.
I have spent my entire career learning to read people who are lying, and he wasn’t.
He couldn’t have been. I’d stake my whole career on it, which is, I realize as we pull into Highbury and Islington, possibly exactly what I am doing.
I run through it again, methodically, the way I’d run through any other suspect, except every conclusion keeps arriving exactly where I want it to, which should worry me more than it does.
He’d been delighted by my badge, not frightened of it, and guilty men don’t usually light up like that at the sight of a warrant card, they go careful and quiet and start measuring their words.
He’d given his name, his number, his whole easy cooperative manner without me having to ask twice for any of it, and people hiding something tend to hold a little of themselves back, even the good liars, especially the good liars.
And whoever carved those names did it with hands steady enough to take their time over it, patient and precise in a way that doesn’t sit anywhere near a man who flinched and apologized and wrapped his own arms around himself at the mere idea of a body twelve feet away.
He’s clean on paper too. Whatever Greaves thinks of my methods, whatever Farah isn’t quite saying out loud, I ran every check I’m allowed to run and several I’m not, and there’s nothing there.
No record, no flags, no history of violence, nothing but a YouTube channel, Instagram, OnlyFans, and a stupid amount of charm.
People who carve names into men with that kind of precision do not also blush when a badge gets pulled on them.
It isn’t logical. It isn’t how guilty people behave.
He’d talked too, last night, after, in that loose unguarded way people only manage right when their guard is fully down.
About nothing important. A building two boroughs over he’s been wanting to explore, an argument with whoever edits his channel about which take to post first, an utterly indefensible opinion about pineapple on pizza that he defended with the same delight he brings to everything else.
None of it sounded rehearsed. None of it sounded like material gathered to play a role.
It sounded like a man talking simply because he wanted to keep talking to me, which is its own kind of evidence, even if it’s not the kind that would survive cross-examination.
It hits me somewhere around Vauxhall, one stop from home, that I don’t actually have a way to reach him at all.
We didn’t swap numbers last night, too busy with much more interesting things, and I left this morning while he was still asleep.
The number he gave me at the hospital is still sitting in my notes, technically, but using it would mean explaining to myself why I’m using police data for personal reasons.
A breach of data protection, as well as a breach of Micah’s consent.
He gave Detective Inspector Lennox his phone number, not the man he hooked up with last night.
I could call him in instead. Formally. On the record. A witness statement about the hospital, nothing that would alarm anyone if Greaves ever asked why. It would be entirely defensible. It would also mean seeing him again. An opportunity to ask if he wants to see me again, unprofessionally.
Unbidden, a memory uncoils from last night. Micah spread out on his sheets, body rising up to meet me, a soft, carnal cry on his lips, eyes wide and astonished as if he didn’t know it could be so good.
My spine tingles.
I think he will want to see me again.
For physical reasons, if not romantic ones. But if I get to spend time with him, I can work on the latter. And I remember being in my twenties, I remember how much of a driving force of my actions the former was.
He’s going to want to see me again. I’m quite confident of that.
I grin to myself. Everything is looking rather hopeful. Rosy even.
I’m already composing the request in my head.
Routine follow up. Nothing that would look like what it actually is, which is a grown man inventing paperwork so he can look at someone’s face again.
I imagine the interview room, the recorder running, Micah leaning back in the chair across from me with that same unbothered smirk, and have to physically stop myself grinning like I’ve lost my sanity on a packed train in rush hour.
I am, I reflect, an absolute disgrace to twenty-two years of professional conduct, and I cannot bring myself to mind even slightly.
I surface at the station into warm daylight, blinking, my phone shuddering back to life in my pocket with the small, violent flood of everything London’s tunnels don’t let through.
An email about overtime forms. A reminder about a dental appointment I’d forgotten existed.
Three missed calls from a withheld number that’s probably just the surgery confirming the same appointment.
The ordinary debris of a morning I slept straight through.
One from Farah, sent forty minutes ago.
Got the swabs back from scene one. Micah Vee’s DNA is all over it.
Everything I spent an entire train journey building, carefully, piece by reasonable piece, comes apart in the time it takes to read one sentence.
I stand completely still in the middle of the pavement, people moving around me on both sides like I’m a rock in a river, and read it three more times in case it says something different the fourth time.
It doesn’t.