11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Lennox
Iwake up alone, which is how I know before I even open my eyes that something’s wrong with the morning, except it isn’t, not really, not in any way I can name yet.
The sheets on Micah’s side are cool, properly cool, like he’s been gone a while.
I lie there a minute, listening for the shower, for the kettle, for any of the ordinary sounds of a person being somewhere in a flat this size, and get nothing back.
Through the window, the sky’s doing that pale, undecided thing it does before it commits to a color.
My body still aches in places it had no business aching at my age, and for one full, stupid minute I just lie there enjoying it, enjoying the soreness and the warmth and the ridiculous, undeserved fact of having woken up here at all.
I make the coffee. I drink it standing at his window, looking out over a London that looks almost gentle from this height, and for ten whole minutes I let myself be a man having an ordinary morning rather than a detective on the worst case of his career.
I’m still standing there in last night’s shirt, smiling at a piece of paper like an idiot, when my phone goes off in my coat pocket.
Farah. Another one. Get here.
The address she sends is a lockup behind a row of garages two boroughs over, not somewhere I’d ever have reason to be on an ordinary day, and the drive there gives me far too much time to think about the fact that I have left a man’s flat in last night’s clothes to go look at a body, which is not a sentence that exists anywhere in the version of myself I used to recognize.
The morning’s gone properly gray by the time I get there, the kind of low, flat London light that makes everything look like it’s already given up.
Farah’s waiting when I arrive, arms crossed, watching SOCO move around a corrugated metal door propped half open on a padlock somebody’s already cut through.
Two uniforms stand at the mouth of the row, keeping a small knot of onlookers back, the usual mix of dog walkers and people who clearly live close enough to have heard something but not close enough to have done anything about it.
I duck under the tape. Through the gap in the door, I can see a shape on the concrete, posed the same way the others were, careful, deliberate, meant to be found exactly like this.
A space heater’s been knocked over near his feet, the kind people keep in lockups that were never meant to be lived in or worked in this many hours a day, and the whole place smells like engine oil and concrete dust and, underneath it, the same copper sourness I’ve come to recognize without wanting to.
“Robert Fenn,” Farah says before I’ve even asked. “Greaves’s lot have had eyes on him for the better part of a year. Ran a boxing club for at risk kids out of a community center near Walworth. Three complaints over the years, nothing ever stuck.”
“Of course they didn’t.”
“Same MO. Posed, carved.” She nods toward the body without looking at it again, the way you stop looking at something once you’ve already seen it enough times to know it’ll be in your head regardless. “Name on his chest this time isn’t a dead body or an official misper.”
“Whose then?”
“Bilal.”
Something in my chest goes very still and very cold at once.
Bilal. The name the old woman half remembered at Effra House, the boy Jordan was thick as thieves with, the one nobody could quite recall properly except that he was always there, trailing after Jordan like a shadow nobody bothered naming.
“That’s Jordan’s friend,” I say. “From the estate.”
“Looks that way.” Farah’s watching my face very closely now, the kind of attention she usually saves for people she’s deciding whether to trust. “Which means whoever’s doing this either knew Jordan and Bilal personally, or spent enough real time around that estate to know things about those boys that were never written down in any file either of us has access to. ”
I don’t have an answer for that, because every answer I can think of isn’t one I’m prepared to say out loud in a car park at seven in the morning.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Farah says, and the shift in her voice tells me this isn’t about Robert Fenn at all. “Walk with me.”
We move away from the lockup, past the tape, out toward where the cars are parked, and she pulls out her phone before she says anything else, scrolling to something she’s clearly already had open more than once this morning.
“I went digging on Micah Vee properly. Not the surface stuff. Properly. Birth records, school admissions databases, the lot.”
My stomach drops somewhere around my shoes. “And.”
“He doesn’t exist before about six years ago.
” She says it flat, professional, but there’s something underneath it that sounds almost like an apology, like she knows exactly what she’s about to do to me and is doing it anyway because that’s the job.
“No school records under that name. No National Insurance activity. Nothing on the electoral roll, nothing on a tenancy agreement before that, nothing anywhere that puts a Micah Vee on this earth before he was roughly seventeen, eighteen years old. Then suddenly there’s a bank account, a National Insurance number issued, a flat.
Like he started existing as a fully formed adult. ”
“People change names. Run from things. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe.” She doesn’t sound convinced, and I don’t blame her, because I’m not convinced either, not really, not underneath the part of me that’s currently working very hard to talk myself out of believing what I’m hearing.
“But we ran into him at the first scene, completely by chance, urban explorer with a camera and no priors of any significance, and now we know he has no documented past.”
“You think he’s involved.”
“I think there’s something off about that boy, and I think you’ve decided not to see it.
” She says it gently, which somehow makes it worse than if she’d said it cruelly.
“I’m not stupid, Lennox. I’ve watched you found him at the first scene.
I know what’s going on, or I know enough of it to make an educated guess, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed. ”
I don’t say anything, because there’s no version of denying it that wouldn’t be an obvious lie, and Farah’s never once let me get away with an obvious lie in eleven years of working together.
“I’m not judging you for it,” she says, quieter now, and there’s something almost kind in it that I don’t deserve.
“I’m telling you because I need you to actually look at this properly, instead of looking away from it, because I think you’re the only person on this team capable of seeing something the rest of us are missing, and right now you’re choosing not to. ”
I want to tell her. The words sit right there at the back of my throat, ready, I was with him last night, ask me anything, I’ll tell you exactly where he was every minute he was with me.
And I can’t, because the only way to clear him is to admit I was in his bed.
For the second time. Sleeping with someone who was on the board.
Someone whose name should never have been taken off the board.
I’ve been compromising every single thing I’ve ever claimed to stand for, and some small, cowardly part of me would rather let her suspect him a little longer than say that out loud.
The pathologist calls Farah over before I can answer at all, and I’m grateful for the interruption in a way that makes me feel even worse than the conversation did.
It’s another forty minutes before the rough window for Fenn’s time of death gets confirmed, somewhere between half six and half eight last night, narrow enough that the pathologist seems almost pleased with himself about it, body temperature and lividity and a neighbor in the next lockup along who remembers locking up and leaving sometime before seven and not noticing anything wrong.
Half six. Half eight.
I do the math without wanting to, the same way I’ve done the math on every case I’ve ever worked, automatic, relentless, impossible to switch off even when switching it off is the only thing that would let me keep breathing properly.
Last night. I was parked outside Micah’s building from somewhere around quarter past seven, sitting there working up the nerve to either drive away or make a fool of myself, and it can’t have been more than ten, fifteen minutes later that he came jogging round the corner in those ridiculous shorts, earbuds in, slightly out of breath.
I’d thought nothing of the breathlessness. Of course he was breathless. He’d been running.
Except a fifteen minute run doesn’t actually prove anything about where someone started from, only about where they ended up, and Walworth to Hackney isn’t an impossible distance if a person had a car, or even just the last stretch covered on foot to arrive exactly the way he wants to be remembered arriving.
Normal. Glowing. Completely innocent to anyone who happened to see him.
Except I happened to see him.
And he seemed pleased to see me.
That’s the part I can’t put down once I’ve picked it up.
Not whether he could have made the journey in time.
Whether a man could carve a name into another man’s chest, leave him posed on cold concrete, and then jog the rest of the way home with his pulse settling, his face arranging itself back into delight, and invite the very detective investigating his murders up for dinner within the hour.
Cook for him. Touch his hand across the counter and ask him to stay the whole night, easy as anything, like none of it cost him a single thing to set aside.
I don’t know which thought frightens me more, that he could do something like that and feel nothing, or that I spent the whole evening with him and felt nothing wrong either.
I stand there in the gray morning light outside a lockup with a dead man inside it, the smell of Micah’s coffee still faintly on my hands, and I have never in my entire career felt so completely, thoroughly, irreversibly sick.