12. Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Lennox
Bilal doesn’t exist. Not in the way that matters.
I spend the better part of the afternoon trying to find him properly, surname, last known address, a school record, anything that turns a half-remembered name into a person, and the system gives me almost nothing back.
No misper file. No safeguarding flag. Not so much as a mention in Jordan’s own paperwork, which should have been the first place anyone thought to look three years ago and apparently wasn’t.
Eventually I find him buried in a school admissions database under Bilal Hussein, attendance dropping off two terms before Jordan’s did, no exclusion notice, no transfer record, no explanation at all for where a fourteen-year-old boy went when he stopped turning up.
Jordan at least got a file. A thin one, a badly worked one, but a file.
Bilal got nothing. Nobody ever even noticed he was gone long enough to write it down, which means whoever’s doing this knows things about that estate and those boys that no official record could have told them.
I run his full name through every database I’ve got access to.
No address past the school roll. No National Insurance number ever issued.
No death certificate either, which should be a relief and somehow isn’t, because it just means there’s a fourteen-year-old boy somewhere in this city’s history with no paper trail at all, the same shape of nothing Farah found when she went looking for Micah.
I notice the parallel and don’t let myself sit with it.
I sit with that for longer than I should, the incident room emptying out around me as the shift changes and everyone else goes home to whatever ordinary lives they’ve still got waiting for them. Farah stops by my desk on her way out, coat already on.
“Anything on Bilal?” she asks.
“Nothing official. He fell through every crack the system has.”
“Sounds about right.” She studies me a second longer than the answer needs. “You look terrible, by the way. Go home, Lennox. Sleep in your own bed for once.”
“I will.”
“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me, and she’s right not to, and she leaves anyway, because that’s the kind of partner she is, and I’m grateful for it in the same complicated way I’ve been grateful for most things lately.
By the time I leave myself, it’s properly dark, and I drive home on autopilot, and I don’t go inside.
I sit in my car outside my flat. Lurking outside a property for the second time this week, which is becoming enough of a pattern that I should probably be concerned about it independently of everything else currently wrong with my life.
I take the note out of my coat pocket, the one with the heart drawn next to eleven digits I haven’t used yet, and I look at it for a long time without dialing.
He still doesn’t exist before six years ago.
That fact keeps circling back no matter how many times I try to set it down, and there’s almost nothing else to weigh it against, no childhood photos, no old friends, no family anyone’s ever mentioned.
The only record of who he actually is sits behind a paywall I’ve spent two weeks pointedly not crossing.
I tell myself it’s research. I tell myself it might be the only available window into who this man was before he became Micah Vee, and that a detective who refuses to look at available evidence because it makes him uncomfortable isn’t doing his job properly.
I do not examine the other reasons too closely, the curiosity, the low, ugly thread of jealousy at the thought of strangers paying to look at someone I want to keep for myself, because examining them would mean admitting they’re there.
I pay for the month. I tell myself it’s for the case.
It’s tasteful. That’s the first thing that strikes me, scrolling through months of it in the dark of my car like a teenager.
No filthy captions, no overt performance, nothing that reads as desperate or transactional the way I’d half braced myself for.
Photographs mostly, soft focus, careful light, the same expensive minimalism as the rest of his life.
And he’s alone in every single one. Not a single photo with another person in it, not a hint of anyone else ever having been in that loft with a camera, just Micah, on his own, looking at the lens like it’s a person he trusts.
He looks sweet in most of them. Bashful, almost, caught mid-laugh in a few, biting his lip in others with an expression that’s coy rather than confident, shy rather than sultry, exactly the way he looked at me across his own kitchen counter two nights ago.
It’s the same Micah. That’s what eases something tight in my chest that I hadn’t fully noticed was there until it loosened.
If I’d found a different man entirely behind that paywall, someone hard-eyed and knowing, fluent in a performance I’d never once seen from him in person, I think it would have frightened me more than anything Farah’s records search turned up.
A person capable of playing an entirely different role for money is a person capable of playing one for me too.
But there isn’t a different Micah. There’s just this one, soft and a little shy and clearly more comfortable being looked at than being known, which is its own kind of sad if I let myself think about it for too long.
I close the app, feeling something that isn’t quite relief and isn’t quite shame, but sitting somewhere uncomfortably between the two, and finally let myself dial.
He picks up on the second ring, and his face fills the screen looking soft and lamplit, hair damp like he’s just out of the shower, and something in my chest loosens before he’s even said a word.
“Detective.” He’s smiling already. “You used the number.”
“I used the number.”
“I was starting to think you’d lost it on purpose. Very on brand for a man who won’t even use police systems to text someone.”
“I had a long day.”
“You look like it.” His expression shifts, something genuinely soft moving in behind the teasing. “Bad one?”
“There’s been another.”
I watch his face carefully when I say it, the way I’ve trained myself to watch faces, and what crosses it is exactly what should cross a normal person’s face.
Concern. A flicker of something darker underneath it.
He doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t ask where.
He just asks if I’m alright, properly alright, in a tone that makes me want to tell him the truth more than I’ve wanted to tell anyone the truth in a long time.
“I’m fine,” I say, which is a lie, and we both let it stand as one.
“You carry these like they’re yours to fix single handedly.
” He pulls a blanket up around his shoulders, settling deeper into the sofa he’s curled up on, and for a moment he just looks young and tired and entirely too pretty for a weekday night.
“You know that’s not sustainable. Even for someone as stubborn as you. ”
“Comes with the badge.”
“Doesn’t mean it should.” It’s almost exactly what he said to me over dinner, the same words, and I don’t know if it’s because he genuinely means them that much or because he’s said them to enough people that they’ve worn a groove.
I hate that I can’t tell anymore. I hate more that I’m not sure I want to be able to.
“Was it near here?” he asks, light, almost idle, already reaching for something off-screen. “London’s so big I never have a sense of where anything actually is relative to anything else.”
“South. Walworth.”
“Walworth.” He says it like he’s placing it on a map in his head. “Isn’t that near the park with the bingo hall on the corner? I filmed there once, ages ago, before any of this. Funny how a whole part of the city can just be background until it isn’t.”
It’s nothing. It’s the kind of throwaway local knowledge anyone who’s lived in London long enough picks up without trying.
Except I never told him where in Walworth, and he placed it within two streets of a lockup nobody’s named publicly yet, and I sit there with my own face reflected faintly in the corner of the screen, watching myself not react, twenty two years of training holding my expression exactly where I need it to stay.
“You know London well,” I say, careful, light.
“I know London’s empty buildings well. That’s a smaller, weirder map than most people’s.
” He laughs at himself, easy, unbothered, already moving on to something else, asking if I’ve eaten, telling me about a video he’s editing, the conversation sliding back into something soft and ordinary so smoothly I almost let myself follow it.
Almost.
“I miss you,” he says later, quieter, no performance left in it at all. “I know that’s stupid. It hasn’t even been that long.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“You don’t believe that. You think everything about this is moving too fast for a sensible man your age.” There’s no malice in it, just an accuracy that catches me somewhere under the ribs. “I don’t care. I like how it feels. I haven’t liked how anything feels in a long time.”
I want, more than I have wanted almost anything in my adult life, for that sentence to be entirely true and entirely simple. I want it so badly that for one long, traitorous moment I manage to believe it is.
“Come round again soon,” he says. “If you want to.”
“I want to.”
It’s the truest thing I say in the whole conversation, which feels like it should worry me more than the rest of it does.
He’s quiet for a moment, picking at a loose thread on the blanket, and when he looks back up at the camera something has shifted in his face, younger and less certain than anything I’ve seen from him before.
“Can I tell you something stupid?” he says.
“Always.”
“I keep thinking you’re going to get tired of me. Or work out I’m not actually worth the trouble I’m clearly causing you.” He laughs, short and unconvincing. “Forget it. That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
“It’s not ridiculous.”
“You don’t have to be nice about it.”
“I’m not being nice. I’m not very good at nice.” I mean it as a joke and it doesn’t quite land as one. “I’m still here. That should tell you something.”
Something settles in his face, relief or something close enough to it that I can’t tell the two apart anymore, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all, just looking at each other through two screens and several miles of London between us.
We talk for another twenty minutes about nothing, his channel, my appalling taste in takeaway food, a film he wants me to watch with him that I have absolutely no intention of sitting through, and by the time we hang up my face aches from smiling and my stomach is in a knot I can’t untie.
I sit in the dark outside my own front door for a long time afterward, the phone gone black in my hand, replaying two streets in Walworth over and over until the words stop sounding like anything at all.
I run through every other explanation I can think of, the channel, the wandering, the simple fact that a person who spends his whole life exploring this city’s forgotten corners would naturally know more of its geography than most. Every one of them is plausible.
Every one of them is exactly the kind of plausible a guilty man would need ready.
I want him to be innocent so badly it has started to feel like a physical need rather than a professional judgment, the kind of want that bends every fact toward itself if you let it.
But I’ve spent years learning not to let it, learning that wanting something to be true has never once made it true, and somewhere underneath the warmth still sitting in my chest from his voice, the detective in me is quietly, patiently building a case I don’t want to read.