8. Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Lennox
If the serial killer isn’t Micah, and I have decided, against every shred of professional training I own, that it isn’t, then it has to be someone who knew Jordan.
Nobody carves a fifteen-year-old’s name into a dead man’s chest as an abstract statement about justice.
You do it because the boy mattered to you specifically, because his name is the only word in the world precise enough for what you’re trying to say.
Find whoever loved Jordan Marsh enough to still be carrying him three years on, and I find my killer.
I park badly, half on the curb, the way everyone parks here because nobody designed this place with enough room for this many cars to begin with.
The lift in block C has a laminated OUT OF ORDER sign that’s been there long enough to have gone yellow at the edges.
I know this estate. A stabbing three years back, a domestic the year before that ended with a woman going through a window four floors up.
I’m not knocking on Jordan’s mother’s door.
Not yet. Three younger siblings still at home according to the file, all of them too young to have had anything to do with what’s been done to two grown men, and a mother who’s already been failed by enough people with badges that turning up on her doorstep again with nothing concrete to offer her feels like one more thing this family’s had taken from it by someone in my position.
The original misper officers tried her twice when Jordan first vanished and got nowhere, not because she had nothing worth saying but because by then she’d already learned that talking to anyone official never changed a single thing, only ever cost her time off work she couldn’t afford to lose.
I want to know what the file never bothered asking before I go anywhere near her.
I knock on the first door at the end of the third floor walkway, paint flaking under my knuckles.
It takes a long minute before a chain rattles, and half a face appears in the gap, suspicious and deeply lined.
Her eyes go straight to my shoes, then my coat, then settle on my face, and whatever she sees there answers the question before I’ve said a word.
“Police,” she says. Not a question.
“Detective Inspector Lennox.” I hold up the badge anyway, force of habit, even though it’s told her nothing she hadn’t already worked out for herself in about two seconds.
“I’m trying to find out about a boy who used to live here.
Jordan Marsh. Who was he close to? Who did he used to run around with? ”
Something shifts in her face. The door opens another few inches.
“Jordan.” She says the name like it weighs something.
“Skinny lad. Used to knock about with a couple of others off the estate, though I couldn’t give you names, not after all this time.
” Her eyes flick past me down the empty walkway, checking who’s listening.
“There was one boy he was thick as anything with, mind. Couldn’t go anywhere without the other one trailing after him. ”
“Do you remember his name? The friend.”
She shakes her head, slow. “Nobody round here keeps names that long.” She says it like she’s commenting on the weather, and the door starts to close before I can ask anything else.
Two doors down, a man built like a fridge has the door half open before I’ve even knocked twice, and whatever he sees in my face tells him everything.
“I’m not telling you fuck all,” he says.
“I’m asking about a missing boy.” I don’t even get Jordan’s name out before the door’s already swinging shut. “Get off my landing.”
It slams hard enough to rattle the number screwed to it.
A girl barely out of her teens answers the next one with a baby balanced on her hip, eyeing me the way everyone here eyes anyone holding a badge.
“Jordan Marsh,” I say. “Did you know him?”
She frowns, working through it. “Maybe. There were two Jordans in my year. Tall one and a skinny one.” She shrugs, already losing interest.
“The one who went missing. The skinny one,” I prompt.
She sighs wearily. “Does it matter now though. He’s probably dead, isn’t he?”
She isn’t wrong. I don’t tell her that.
“Who was he close to? Did he have a best mate, anyone he ran with?”
She frowns again, brow furrowing. “Maybe a lad called, I don’t know, started with a B? They were always together.” She shakes her head, the baby starts to fuss. “Don’t remember more than that. It was years ago.”
My phone buzzes halfway back across the courtyard.
Farah, checking in, asking if I’ve turned anything up on the carving angle she still thinks I’m chasing.
I tell her it’s slow going. I don’t tell her where I actually am, or why, or that the only theory I’m currently testing exists mainly to keep one specific name off a list I’ve already quietly decided not to put it back on.
She replies with a single thumbs up, trusting, the way she’s trusted me on most things for longer than I currently deserve, and I put the phone away feeling worse than I did before it buzzed.
I get back to knocking on doors.
Nobody gives me a name. Nobody gives me anything, not really, just the same flat, exhausted shrug I’ve been getting all afternoon, the shrug of people who’ve watched enough police roll through here over the years to know that nothing useful to them ever follows.
The estate I grew up on looked enough like this one that for one disorienting second on the third landing I expect to see my own mother’s kitchen window instead of a stranger’s.
Different postcode, same concrete, same stairwells that always smelled of piss, same understanding, absorbed so early I couldn’t tell you when I learned it, that nobody outside these walls was ever coming to help.
I remember a boy from two floors down who stopped coming to school the same way Jordan apparently did, slowly, then all at once, and how nobody official ever seemed to notice until a teacher finally asked where he’d got to and got told, with a shrug very much like the ones I’ve been collecting all afternoon, that he’d moved away.
He hadn’t moved away. I found that out years later, long after it could have done him any good.
I think about him more than I’d like to admit, usually at moments exactly like this one.
It’s a fluke I got out. Grammar school place, a scholarship nobody in my family understood the value of until it was too late to be grateful for it properly, and twenty-two years building a career inside the exact institution that taught me, age nine, not to bother calling them.
I think about that a great deal more than I let myself say to anyone.
Now nobody here sees a man who used to belong somewhere like this anymore. They just see the badge, every single time.
On the ground floor, past a row of buzzers that have given up working, somebody’s converted the old laundry room into a drop-in center, a faded poster for a holiday hunger scheme taped crooked in the window.
A woman in a fleece zipped to the chin is wiping down a folding table when I knock on the open door.
“We’re closed for another hour,” she says, not looking up.
“I’m not here for the drop-in.” I hold up the badge. “Detective Inspector Lennox. Looking into a misper case. Jordan Marsh.”
That gets her attention. She straightens properly, studies me a second like she’s deciding whether I’m worth the energy.
“Denise,” she says eventually. “Been running this place twelve years. Course I remember Jordan.”
“What was he like?”
“Hungry, mostly.” She says it flat, no drama in it. “Came for the food, not much else. Wouldn’t talk about home. Wouldn’t talk about much, if I’m honest, except football. Boy loved football like it was the only thing that ever loved him back.”
“Did he have a best friend? Someone he was close to?”
“There was a boy he used to come in with sometimes, when they were younger anyway.” She frowns, chasing the name. “Bilal, I think. Or maybe I’m confusing him with someone else, it’s been a long time and a lot of boys have come through that door since.”
“Did you ever report concerns about him?”
“Twice.” She holds up two fingers like she’s counting them off for herself as much as for me. “Nothing ever came of either one. Just like no one really looked when he went missing.”
She says it without any heat in it at all, which somehow lands harder than if she’d shouted.
I don’t have an answer for that. There isn’t one that doesn’t make my entire profession sound exactly as useless as she’s implying.
By six the light’s going gray and thin, and I’ve got nothing for it except sore knuckles and the particular ache behind my eyes that comes from being looked at like the enemy by people who aren’t wrong to look at me that way.
I sit in the car outside the estate for a minute before I can make myself drive anywhere, the kind of stillness where you’re not really resting, just refusing to move yet.
I check my phone. I tell myself it’s for messages from Farah. It isn’t.
Micah’s posted something new.
It’s him on the windowsill of that ridiculous loft, knees drawn up, arms crossed loosely over them, looking out at a sky doing something genuinely spectacular in orange and gold behind him, the kind of light that turns ordinary glass into something holy.
It’s turned the edges of his hair into an actual halo, which is either an extraordinary coincidence or an extremely well timed camera, and at this point I don’t trust myself to guess which.
Looking for the one who got away.
My first reaction has nothing to do with detective work at all.
It’s just want, plain and uncomplicated, the kind of want that doesn’t care about timing or sense.
He’s beautiful. He’s always beautiful, every photo confirms it, but there’s something about this one, so artfully posed, that knocks the breath clean out of me.
I spent a night with him. I had my hands in that hair.
Some disbelieving, star struck part of me still can’t quite reconcile the two facts sitting next to each other, that a man who looks like sunset itself once looked at me like I was worth looking at back.
Then I get to the caption. Underneath the stunning photo, longer than his captions usually run.
Some of you have been asking why I’ve gone quiet this week.
Truth is I met someone. One night, and it was the kind of thing you don’t get to plan or choose, it just happens to you.
He’s older. He’s the serious, professional type, the kind of man who’s spent his whole life doing things properly, and I think he’s already decided someone like me is a spectacularly bad idea.
Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. But if you’re reading this. L. Please call me.
He’s talking about me. Whatever else is true or isn’t, that part isn’t in question.
And underneath the want, right on its heels, comes the colder thought I can’t quite outrun, that he’s done this in public, and that a man with nothing to hide rarely needs his declarations to come with quite this much audience built in.
I hate that thought. I hate that it sounds exactly like the detective I’m supposed to still be underneath all of this, the one I spent the whole day trying to prove I hadn’t lost.
But underneath even that, quieter and far more dangerous than either the want or the suspicion, there’s just longing.
Plain, foolish, aching longing for it to be exactly what it looks like.
An innocent boy on a windowsill, genuinely undone by one night, brave enough to say so in front of strangers because the alternative was saying nothing at all.
I want that version of events so badly it physically hurts somewhere behind my ribs.
I want to be the kind of man this happens to.
I want, just once before I’m too old for wanting anything at all, for something this bright and this simple to actually be true.
I sit there in a pool car outside the one place in London where I genuinely believed, six hours ago, that I might find the actual thread of this entire case, and I stare at a photograph of a man on a windowsill until the screen dims and locks itself against my palm.
I have never in my life felt this many things at once and had absolutely no idea what to do with a single one of them.