Chapter sixteen
Lennox
She’s already in the interview room when I arrive, a mug of tea going cold in front of her that someone has made and she hasn’t touched.
Late forties. The kind of tired that isn’t about sleep.
She has her hands folded on the table and her eyes on the door, and when I come in she looks at me with the expression I’ve seen on the faces of parents for twenty two years, the one that says please and brace yourself in the same breath.
She found out about the murders from the news.
She’s been following it, the way parents of missing children follow everything, just in case, just on the remote, terrible chance that something surfaces that tells her something she doesn’t already know.
She heard about the carved names. She needs to know.
“Mrs. Osei,” I say. “I’m Detective Inspector Lennox.”
“My son’s name is Oliver,” she says. Not hello. Not thank you for seeing me. Just that, the only thing that matters. “He’s been missing for four years. He was fifteen when he went.”
I sit down.
She opens her phone before I’ve said anything else and holds it across the table to me.
Oliver looks out at me from the screen, school photo, blazer slightly crooked, the kind of grin that’s trying to look cool and just looks young.
Brown eyes. A small scar through one eyebrow.
Fifteen in the photograph and fifteen when he disappeared, and fifteen is such an awkward age, too old to be obviously a child and too young to be taken seriously as anything else.
“He was a good boy,” she says. “I know every mother says that. I’m saying it because it’s true.”
“I believe you,” I say. And I do.
“I always knew,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake.
I think the shaking stopped a long time ago and what’s left is harder and more permanent.
“What happened to him. I always knew it wasn’t runaway, wasn’t gangs, wasn’t any of the things they tried to tell me.
He was being passed around by men who should be in prison.
I knew it from the start and I said it from the start and nobody did a single useful thing about it. ”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because it’s true and because there’s nothing else.
“I don’t want sorry,” she says, without anger, which is almost worse. “I want to know if someone out there knows about my son. If someone carved his name.” She looks at me steadily. “Because if they did, at least that means somebody knew. At least that means he wasn’t forgotten.”
I tell her the truth. Three victims, three carved names, and Oliver isn’t one of them.
I watch the thing that crosses her face when I say it, and I have to look at the table for a second, because it is grief and relief in the same breath, the unbearable mathematics of a parent who is both glad and devastated that her child wasn’t noticed by the person doing the noticing.
“Is it going to?” she asks. Her voice has gone very quiet. “Is his name going to turn up? On the next one?”
I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I don’t know who is on the Vigilante’s list, or how long it runs, or whether Oliver Osei’s name is sitting somewhere in a mind I’ve never managed to get close enough to read.
“I can’t tell you that,” I say.
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Can’t. Genuinely.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she says, “What are you going to do?”
Three words. Flat. Direct. The question sits on the table between us and it doesn’t move.
What am I going to do? I have a name on a board that doesn’t belong there. I have evidence I’ve looked sideways at and instincts I’ve overridden and a case that’s going nowhere while the one person I can’t stop thinking about may or may not be the reason it’s going nowhere. What am I going to do?
“Everything I can,” I say.
She looks at me like she’s heard that before. She has, of course. She’s heard it from every officer who ever sat in this chair across from her and either meant it or didn’t, and made no difference either way.
“You know what’s funny,” she says, and her voice has changed now, something harder coming up under it like bedrock.
“Not funny. Wrong word.” She puts her phone back on the table, face up, Oliver still looking out of it.
“You know what the truth is. In the last few weeks, whoever this Vigilante is, he has done more to protect boys like mine than the entire Metropolitan Police has managed in the last twenty years. He’s done more in a few weeks.
” She says it with a fury so controlled it barely sounds like fury at all. “And you’re trying to catch him.”
I don’t say anything.
There isn’t anything to say.
“My boy is out there, and sometimes I pray he is dead because the alternative is he is still suffering every day. Still hurting. Still wondering why no one has come to help him.”
The pain in her eyes is an awful thing to witness. I can’t imagine what it is like to bear it.
To my shame, I look away.
She leaves twenty minutes later, the tea still untouched. I sit in the interview room after she’s gone and look at the wall, and I don’t move for a while.
Oliver Osei. Fifteen years old. Missing four years. Probably dead, probably in a way that would make Mrs. Osei glad she doesn’t know the details. And nobody has carved his name into anyone’s chest.
Possibly because whoever is doing the carving never knew he existed, which means either the ring got to him and finished with him before anyone could notice him at all, or the ring never got their hands on Oliver Osei.
Or maybe his name is going to be on the next victim. Or the one after that. Perhaps every missing child is going to get their gravestone of revenge.
I think about Graham Pell. About Trevor Sallow.
About Robert Fenn with his boxing club and his space heater knocked over on the concrete floor of a lockup at half-past three in the morning, and I notice, sitting in the blue-gray quiet of a room that smells of old coffee and institutional carpet, that I feel nothing about any of them.
No professional outrage. No grief for the loss of a human life.
Not even the basic, structural impulse that’s supposed to underpin this job, the belief that murder is wrong because it has to be wrong, because without that belief the whole thing falls apart.
I’m rooting for the Vigilante.
That’s the truth of it, flat and ugly and undeniable.
I sit in the interview room where Mrs. Osei sat with her untouched tea, and I look at what I actually feel, and what I feel is something close to satisfaction that Graham Pell and Trevor Sallow and Robert Fenn are dead.
I feel it like a fist unclenching somewhere behind my ribs.
I feel it the way you feel something you’d been holding very tight finally put down.
Then I feel sick.
Because I am a police officer. Because I spent twenty two years believing in something, actually believing in it, not performing the belief but carrying it around like a weight I chose because the alternative was chaos.
Justice is not one person’s to decide. That’s not an abstraction or a platitude, it’s the whole foundation, it’s the reason you have courts and juries and rules of evidence and the right to a defense, because the moment you let one person decide who deserves to die you’ve handed civilization over to whoever happens to be the most certain, and certainty has never once required being right.
Murder is wrong. Full stop. Not complicated. Not conditional. Wrong.
I know that.
I believe that.
And I sit here in this room where a mother just told me her missing son’s name is Oliver, and I believe it the way you believe something you can no longer feel, which is starting to seem like it might not be belief at all.
What am I becoming?
I’ve been asking myself that question since the first alley, since Graham Pell’s name on my lips and the flat empty absence where outrage was supposed to be.
I’ve been watching myself make one decision after another that the man I was two months ago would not recognize, and telling myself it was the case, or the fatigue, or the weight of too many years doing this.
It isn’t. Or it isn’t only that.
I’m becoming someone who feels relief when bad men die.
Someone who looks away from evidence because he’s sleeping with the person it points to.
Someone who stands in front of a board and feels the wrongness of a name like a physical thing, and lets that feeling override everything he was trained to do.
I am, quite possibly, not a good person anymore.
The thought lands with a weight I wasn’t ready for.
I take my phone out.
I don’t decide to. I just do it, the same way I got in the car and drove to Hackney that first night, my hands doing something before my brain has signed off on it, and Micah’s name is already on the screen before I’ve finished processing what I’m doing, and my thumb hits call before I can argue myself out of it.
I hold the phone to my ear.
Three seconds. Four.
I am going to hang up. I shouldn’t be doing this.
This is not appropriate. I am a detective inspector in an interview room in a South London police station having a crisis of professional faith, and the appropriate response to that is not to call the man whose name is on my board because hearing his voice might make it better somehow. I’m going to hang up.
He answers on the fifth ring.
“Hey.” Just that. Quiet and immediate, like he picked up mid-thought. And then, after a fraction of a pause so small I almost miss it, “What’s wrong?”
Not a question. A recognition.
“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know why I called.”
“Yes you do.” He says it gently, no performance in it. “What happened?”
I look at the empty chair across the table. At the cold mug of tea. At the particular absence a person leaves in a room.
“There was a mother,” I say. “Looking for her son.”
He’s quiet. Just present, the particular quality of his attention that I’ve started to recognize, the way his silence isn’t empty.
“Was it…” he starts carefully.
“No. His name isn’t one of them.” I lean back in the chair. “He’s just gone. Nobody’s carved his name anywhere. Nobody’s done anything about him at all.”
“Oh,” Micah says softly. Just that.
“I keep thinking,” I start, and then I stop, because what I’m thinking isn’t something I should say out loud to anyone, least of all him.
“Tell me,” he says.
“It’s not appropriate.”
“Tell me anyway.”
I look at the ceiling. “I sat here after she left and I felt glad. That those men are dead. I felt glad and I couldn’t find the outrage for it. And I’m supposed to be the person who finds the outrage. That’s the whole job. That’s the whole point.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“You’re not glad they’re dead,” he says. “You’re glad someone cared about those boys. That’s not the same thing.”
I don’t answer that. I’m not sure he’s wrong. I’m not sure being right makes it any better.
“Are you still at work?” he asks.
“Interview room.”
“Go home,” he says. “When you can. And eat something that isn’t from a vending machine, because I know that’s what you’re going to do otherwise.”
Something in me loosens without permission.
“You can’t know that.”
“I know you’ve got a certain self-punishing streak.” A pause. “It’s one of the things that makes you, well, you. It’s also the thing that’s going to break you if you let it.”
I sit with that for a second.
“Micah.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know why I called you.”
Another pause, warmer this time. “I do,” he says quietly. “It’s okay.”
I’m not sure it is. I’m not sure anything is, right now, in this room, with a cold cup of tea on the table and the ghost of Oliver Osei’s name sitting somewhere in my chest where it doesn’t have anywhere to go.
But his voice is warm in my ear, and outside the window London is doing what it always does, carrying on without asking whether it should, and for right now that’s enough to keep me vertical.
For right now, that’s everything.