24. Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Lennox
Iam standing in the ready meal aisle of Tesco at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon, which is what my life looks like when nobody is watching it.
I have a basket containing four identical chicken tikka masalas, a multipack of soup I will eat cold from the can, and a bag of apples I bought because I was briefly optimistic about being the kind of person who eats apples.
The lighting in this aisle is doing nothing for anyone.
A woman at the far end is reading the back of a lasagne with the focused attention I usually reserve for case files, and I respect that enormously.
I am trying to decide between another tikka masala and a pasta bake that claims to serve two, which is a claim so optimistic I’m almost offended by it, when my phone goes and it’s Micah’s name on the screen, which means I pick up before the second ring in a way I would find embarrassing if there was anyone around to notice.
“The flowers are beautiful,” he says. “Thank you.” There is a breathless quality to his voice. Happy. Pleased. Almost giddy with it.
I open my mouth.
Close it.
“What flowers?” I say.
A beat of silence on his end. Then, quietly, “You didn’t send flowers?”
“No.”
“There are flowers on my kitchen counter. White roses. I came home from a shoot and they were just there. I thought.” Another pause. “The concierge didn’t call up. Nobody called up.”
Something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the weather.
“Micah. Is anyone in the flat with you right now?
“No. I checked.”
“Are you sure?”
“I checked every room.” His voice is steady, which tells me he’s frightened.
Micah’s voice only goes that steady when he’s frightened and is choosing not to be about it.
“I thought they were from you. The concierge always calls up when I have a visitor, he always. I thought maybe he’d seen you enough times… how did someone get in?”
“I don’t know yet.” I’m already standing, already reaching for my coat. “Don’t touch the flowers. Don’t let anyone in. I’m coming.”
“Lennox, you don’t have to.”
“I’m coming,” I say, and hang up.
I look down at my basket. I put it on the nearest shelf, next to a stack of reduced baked beans, and walk out of Tesco without buying anything, which is the most decisive I’ve felt about anything all week.
In the car, I run through what I know, which is not enough.
The building has a concierge desk staffed at all hours, a key fob entry system, a lift that opens directly into the loft.
Three layers of security that someone got through without the concierge making a single call.
Which means either the concierge is compromised, or someone got past him, or there’s a way into that building that isn’t through the front door.
And whoever it is knows where Micah lives, knows what he likes, and wanted him to know they’d been inside.
The flowers aren’t a threat. They’re a statement.
I’ve seen this before, the specific language of someone who wants to be noticed, who wants the person they’re watching to understand they could have done more and chose not to. Yet.
I think, briefly and unproductively, that I should have bought him flowers. He deserves flowers. He deserves someone who thinks to do those things without needing a crisis to prompt it, and instead he has me, arriving in an unmarked car on a Tuesday afternoon because somebody else got there first.
I drive faster than I need to and tell myself it’s to beat the traffic.
I park badly outside the warehouse and I’m already moving before the engine has finished ticking.
The concierge looks up when I come through the door. His expression does something complicated, the particular look of a man who has been expecting someone and is not entirely glad that someone has arrived.
“Detective Inspector,” he says.
“Who came in today? “ Between ten this morning and half-past two.”
“I.” He stops. “My shift started at noon. There was nobody after noon, I would have called up.”
“Who was on before you?”
He gives me a name. I write it down. I tell him to call nobody, say nothing to nobody, and take the lift.
The lift takes long enough that I become unreasonably aware of it taking long enough.
Micah is on the other side of the door when it opens.
He’s still holding his phone, the one he called me from, and his hair is doing that thing it does when he’s been running his hands through it, which he only does when he’s unsettled, and he is so clearly and quietly relieved to see me that something in my chest does something I don’t have time for right now.
The flowers are on the kitchen counter. White roses, a dozen of them, arranged in a vase he clearly got out himself because it wouldn’t have come with them. They are, objectively, beautiful. They are also the most frightening thing in the room.
“Don’t touch them again,” I tell him. “I’ll have forensics here tomorrow.” Even though I’ll have to conjure up a whole heap of reasons why, while simultaneously covering up exactly how much time I’ve spent in this loft. With this suspect.
“You think there’ll be prints?”
“I think there won’t be, but we’ll check.” I look at him properly. The steadiness is still there in his face but it’s costing him something. “Pack a bag.”
He blinks. “What.”
“You’re not staying here tonight. Pack a bag, whatever you need for a few days, and you’re coming with me.”
He looks at me for a moment, and something in his expression does that thing it occasionally does, the charm and the composure and everything he uses to manage people dropping away all at once, leaving something younger and less certain in its place.
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t tell me he can handle this, or that he doesn’t need looking after, or any of the things I half expected, the performance of self-sufficiency he’s been putting on for the whole time I’ve known him.
He just says, “Okay,” quietly, and goes to pack.
I stand in his kitchen and look at the flowers and think about who got into this building and why, and I don’t come up with any answers that make me feel better.
I think about the fan letter, and how I told him it was probably nothing.
I think about the way the word probably is doing a great deal of work in retrospect.
I should have taken it more seriously. I didn’t take it more seriously because it was an excuse to go to him and part of me knew that, and now there are white roses on his counter from someone who walked through three layers of security to leave them there, and I am going to have to sit with that.
He comes back with a bag, like someone who knew immediately what they needed, no fuss, no forgetting things and going back.
He’s changed into a soft gray jumper, and he’s carrying his laptop and a charger coiled neatly around it and the whole picture of him, practical and quiet and ready to go, tightens something in my chest that has no useful outlet right now.
He doesn’t look at the flowers when we leave.
The drive to Brixton takes forty minutes in the traffic, and he spends most of it looking out the passenger window at London going by, which is fine.
Once I feel him glance at me and decide against saying whatever he’d been about to say, which is also fine.
We don’t need to fill the car. We’ve stopped needing to fill things a while ago.
At one point he reaches across and turns the radio on, very low, something with a piano in it, and then settles back and doesn’t say anything about having done it, and I don’t say anything either, and we drive through South London with the piano doing something quiet in the background and the city doing its afternoon thing on either side of us.
“This is your street?” he says, when I park.
“Yes.”
He looks at the terrace. Beige stone and white lintels, Victorian, the kind of street that’s been here long enough to have opinions about the newer buildings.
My building is in the middle, groundfloor flat, nothing distinguishing about it from the outside except a window box that I keep meaning to do something with and never have.
“It’s nice,” he says.
“It’s small,” I say.
“Small is cozy.”
I let us in.
The flat is exactly what it is, which is a place I sleep and keep my things and haven’t thought very hard about beyond that.
The sitting room has a sofa that’s been with me long enough to have formed a personality of its own, a bookshelf that takes up most of one wall, a television I rarely turn on, and a reading lamp that’s the only lighting I ever actually use.
The kitchen is galley-sized, functional, the kind of kitchen that suits a man who eats to fuel rather than for pleasure, which I have been for most of my adult life.
The whole place smells like coffee and books and whatever the previous tenant left in the walls, which is just how it is.
I’m aware, for the first time in a long time, of what this place looks like to someone seeing it for the first time.
It looks like what it is, which is the home of a man who has spent twenty two years putting everything into his job and nothing into turnings walls into a home, and if that tells someone something about him that they could have probably worked out from other evidence, then here it is, all confirmed in one small ground floor flat in Brixton.
Micah walks in and looks around slowly, and I watch him do it, braced for something I couldn’t name if you asked me.
He goes straight to the bookshelf.
He runs his finger along the spines the same way I ran mine along his, and pulls out a history of the London docks that I bought fifteen years ago and have read three times, and turns it over and reads the back.
Then he puts it back and pulls out another one, something about postwar housing, and does the same thing.
“Can I borrow this?” he says, holding a crime thriller book I failed to resist in a second hand shop.
“Yes,” I say.
He tucks it under his arm like he’s been doing this for years and turns around and looks at the sofa, and then he goes and sits right next to the spot where I always sit, and looks up at me with an expression that does something catastrophic to my ability to function as an adult.
“It’s a good sofa,” he says.
“It’s old.”
“Old sofas are comfy.” He pats the cushion beside him. “Sit down, Lennox. You’ve been standing in doorways since you arrived.”
I sit down.
He leans into me immediately, without preamble, the same way he does at the loft, the same way he seems to do everything now, like the distance between us is a problem that’s already been solved and he’s just waiting for me to catch up.
He still has the book under his arm. He opens it on his lap and starts reading, or pretends to.
I look at the wall opposite and think about the flowers on his kitchen counter and the lock on his front door, and the concierge who didn’t make a call.
I think about the morning shift worker whose name I wrote down in the lobby and what I’m going to say to him tomorrow.
I think about the three layers of security that weren’t enough.
And underneath all of that, quieter and more insistent, I think about the fact that he is here, in my flat, on my sofa, reading my book.
He turned the radio on in the car without asking and found the perfect music.
He fit into this space so immediately and so completely that it feels less like an intrusion and more like something that was always going to happen, and I was just the last to know.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, after a while.
He doesn’t specify what for. He doesn’t have to.
“Don’t mention it,” I say.
Outside, London carries on. Inside, it is very small and very quiet, and the reading lamp is doing something warm to the room, and something warm is happening to my heart. And I like it.