Chapter thirteen
Lennox
It is not a good morning.
I know this before I even get to my desk. The incident room has a particular energy when things are going badly, a tightness in the air, everyone looking at their screens a little too hard. Farah gives me a look the second I walk in, and it is not a good look.
“Hendricks wants you,” she says.
Detective Chief Inspector Hendricks. My boss. A woman who has the patience of a saint until she doesn’t, and then God help you.
“Now?”
The look Farah gives me answers that question.
I haven’t even taken my coat off.
Hendricks is behind her desk when I knock, which is never a good sign. She’s the kind of woman who paces when she’s thinking and sits very still when she’s angry. Right now she is very still.
“Close the door,” she says.
I close the door.
“The Guardian ran a piece this morning.” She turns her monitor to face me. The headline is large enough to read from across the room. VIGILANTE JUSTICE. And underneath, in slightly smaller letters, Are London’s predators being hunted?
My stomach does something unpleasant.
“They’re calling him the Vigilante,” she says, sounding far calmer than I suspect she is.
“Three victims,” she continues. “All with prior complaints of child sexual abuse. All cases that went nowhere. The press have got hold of the victims’ histories and now the whole internet knows it.
Graham Pell’s convictions. Trevor Sallow’s football club.
Robert Fenn’s boxing gym. There are forums. Fan accounts.
Someone has made a tee shirt.” She says it without inflection, which is somehow worse than if she’d shouted.
“The Guardian piece this morning has over forty thousand shares. The comments are not what you’d call supportive of our position. ”
“I can imagine.”
“Can you?” Her eyes don’t leave my face.
“Because from where I’m sitting, what I have is three murders, no suspect, no forensic leads that go anywhere, a colleague from CAIT who has filed a formal complaint about the handling of this investigation, and a press who are making the Metropolitan Police look like they’ve been actively protecting pedophiles for years.
Which, in at least two of these cases, it could be argued we were. ”
I don’t say anything. There isn’t a lot I can say to that.
I made the mistake of reading those comments on the drive in.
The support for the Vigilante is extraordinary.
The public isn’t asking who did this. The public is asking why we’d want to catch him.
Three men who touched children and walked free, and now three men with names carved into them like receipts for a debt everyone agreed was owed. The comments aren’t subtle about it.
I don’t blame them. That’s the horrible truth sitting in my chest that I have the sense not to say out loud.
“Farah tells me there’s a person of interest.”
There it is.
“There was,” I say. “He was looked at and cleared.”
“Cleared based on what?”
“Footage placing him at the second scene before the murder occurred.”
Hendricks is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means she is choosing her next words very carefully.
“Farah also tells me this person of interest has no documented existence prior to six years ago.”
“People change their names.”
“People change their names,” she repeats, pleasantly. “Yes. That’s one explanation. Another explanation is that a young man with no documented past, was found at scene two by one of my detectives, and was cleared on the basis of footage he himself provided from his own phone.”
When she puts it like that it sounds bad. I am aware of how it sounds. I’ve been trying very hard not to think about how it sounds.
“Put him back on the board,” she says.
“There’s nothing connecting him to the murders.”
“There’s nothing connecting anyone to the murders.
That’s the problem.” She folds her hands on the desk.
“Put him back on the board, Lennox. I need to give the press something that isn’t three unsolved homicides and a public who are openly asking why we should be trying very hard to catch whoever’s doing this. ”
She isn’t wrong about the public.
Greaves is waiting for me in the corridor when I come out.
Of course he is.
“She putting your boy back on the board?” he asks.
“He’s not my boy.”
Greaves makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh.
“Fenn was ours for eighteen months. Did Hendricks tell you that? Eighteen months of very careful, very quiet work. He ran that boxing club as a recruiting ground. Four boys we know of, probably more we don’t.
Used Sallow as the referral. Passed them on to Pell when he was done with them.
” He stops. His jaw is tight. “The youngest was nine.”
Nine.
I look at the wall for a moment and breathe.
“We had a witness. Fourteen years old when it happened to him, twenty-one when we finally found him. Took two years to get him to the point where he’d consider testifying.
Two years of meetings, of building trust, of convincing him the system might actually do something useful for once in his life.
” Greaves’s voice hasn’t changed pitch but something in it has flattened out entirely.
“He pulled out the week we were going to charge. Said he couldn’t go through with it.
I don’t blame him. I never blamed him. The defense would have destroyed him on that stand.
” He looks at me. “Fenn walked. Sallow walked. Pell walked. And now all three of them are dead and the ring they were part of has gone to ground, and I’m going to be doing this for another ten years trying to find the men we can’t see, and I am very, very tired, Lennox. ”
There’s nothing I can say to that either. It’s been a good morning for things I can’t say anything to.
“The ring is gone for now,” he continues, pulling himself back into something more professional.
“Three days after Fenn’s body was found, every name we had flagged went quiet.
Burner phones. Cleared accounts. One of them is on a flight to Paraguay as we speak, and there’s nothing on him officially, there’s never been anything on him officially.
” His voice has gone flat in a way I recognize from men who’ve been grinding away at something for years and just watched it dissolve.
“Whoever your Vigilante is, he’s smart enough to know that killing the men we could see was going to scatter the men we couldn’t. ”
“Unless that wasn’t the point,” I say.
Greaves looks at me.
“Unless justice for the boys was the only point. Not dismantling the ring.”
He stares at me for a long time. There’s something in his face I haven’t seen before. Not quite agreement. Not quite grief. Something between the two that he doesn’t want me to see and isn’t quite fast enough to hide.
“Put your boy back on the board,” he says quietly, and walks away.
I stand in the corridor for a minute. The fluorescent light above me is doing that thing where it flickers imperceptibly unless you stare directly at it. I’m staring directly at it.
I don’t want to put him on the board.
That’s the simple truth I’ve been dressing up in professional language for days now.
Not I don’t have enough evidence, not there’s insufficient basis for suspicion.
I don’t want to. Because he’s sitting at home in that ridiculous loft with his YouTube channel and his OnlyFans and his cooking and his looping, confident handwriting, and he looked at me across a kitchen counter and listened like what I was saying actually mattered to him, and I am so completely and utterly done for that it should probably be investigated as a crime all of its own.
My boy.
The number is in my phone. I still have the paper he gave it to me on. The one with the little heart drawn next to it. I am standing in a police station corridor thinking about a drawing of a heart on a piece of notepaper and I am in serious, serious trouble.
I go back to the incident room. I pick up the marker. I stand in front of the board for a long time, long enough that Farah glances over once and then looks carefully back at her screen.
Then I write his name.
Micah Vee.
I stare at it.
It looks wrong there. That’s what I notice first, before I can stop myself noticing it.
It looks wrong in a way Graham Pell’s name wouldn’t look wrong, in a way Trevor Sallow and Robert Fenn could never look wrong.
This name doesn’t belong next to theirs.
This name belongs on a different board entirely, the one in my chest where I’m keeping all the things I’ve decided not to examine.
Which is, I’m aware, exactly what a compromised detective would think. A man whose judgment has been steering him by the heart and who has no business deciding whose name belongs where.
The incident room carries on around me. Phones ringing. Someone’s printer jams again. The particular smell of this floor at this hour, stale coffee and someone’s lunch and the background hum of a building full of people trying to solve things that mostly don’t get solved.
Somewhere in London, Micah is probably making something beautiful out of a derelict building, narrating softly to a camera about peeling paint and forgotten places, laughing at something off frame. Looking exactly like a man with nothing to hide.
Or he isn’t.
I don’t know which thought is worse. I don’t know anything anymore, and I’ve spent my long career being a man who knows things, and the ground underneath that has been shifting for weeks and I haven’t let myself look down until right now.
I’m looking down now.
It’s a long way to fall.