Chapter thirty
Lennox
He’s up before me.
I come out of the bedroom at quarter to seven to find him at the kitchen counter in his sweatpants and t-shirt, assembling something with the focused competence he brings to all cooking, and he looks up when I appear and says, “sit down, I’m making you breakfast” with the specific authority of a man who has decided this is how mornings work now.
I sit down.
He makes eggs. With toast that’s the right color, and he brings them to the table without ceremony and goes back to the kitchen, and when I’m halfway through eating, he reappears with a paper bag that he sets beside my plate.
“What’s this?” I say.
“Lunch.” He drops into the chair across from me with his own coffee. “Prosciutto and mozzarella. There’s a note inside. Don’t read it at your desk.”
I look at the bag. “I don’t take lunch breaks.”
“You do now.” He picks up his mug. “There’s fruit in there too. You’re going to eat it.”
I look at him across the small table in the corner of my small flat, in the morning light that comes through the window at this hour, and he looks back at me with the easy certainty of someone who has decided how things are going to be and is prepared to wait as long as it takes for the universe to agree with him, and I think about arguing and don’t.
“Thank you,” I say.
He smiles over his coffee. “You’re welcome.”
Hendricks’s office smells like the same air freshener it has always smelled like, something that claims to be linen and isn’t, and she is sitting very still behind her desk, which means she’s angry.
“Sit down,” she says.
I sit.
She opens the case file on her desk. It is, and I know this before she opens it, not a thick file.
It is the file of a case that has been running for too long and has produced, in terms of actionable leads, almost nothing.
She looks at it the way people look at things that are disappointing them and turns to page three.
“Four victims,” she says. “Same MO throughout. Names of children, all of them either confirmed dead or missing, carved into the chests of men, some of whom are suspected child abusers.” She looks up.
“The press have named him the Vigilante. He has, and I want you to understand how much this sentence costs me to say, a higher approval rating in public polling than the Metropolitan Police.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you?” She closes the file. “Because what I’m not aware of, Lennox, after four bodies, is a single viable suspect.
You have one name on the board. You are, to my knowledge, not currently pursuing any active leads.
” She pauses, and the pause has a very specific quality. “This is not normal for you.”
“The investigation is ongoing.”
“The investigation is ongoing.” She repeats it without inflection.
“Yes. That’s one way to describe the current situation.
” She leans forward. “You are one of the best detectives on this floor. You have closed cases that no one else could close. I have watched you work impossible problems and find the answer through sheer thoroughness, and I need that person in this office right now, because the superintendent is asking questions I cannot answer and the press are asking questions he cannot answer, and someone on this case needs to give me something.”
I look at the middle distance just past her left ear.
I think about what a scapegoat would look like.
A name that could absorb the investigation’s attention for long enough to give things time to resolve themselves.
Someone adjacent to the case, someone with a record, someone who couldn’t entirely disprove it.
The shape of it assembles in my head with the practised ease of twenty two years of experience, the accumulated knowledge that gives me the specific architecture of how to redirect an investigation.
I dismantle it immediately. I’d rather hand in my badge.
“I’m working on it,” I say.
She holds my gaze for a long moment, long enough to make clear she knows she’s not getting the whole truth and is choosing, for reasons of her own, not to push today.
“Don’t take too long,” she says.
The bench outside the station is three slats of wood on a metal frame and has nothing to recommend it except that it faces the sun at this hour, which is doing something decent with the pavement opposite. I sit on it and I take the paper bag out of my coat pocket.
The note is folded once, the handwriting looping and confident. You look very handsome in that coat. I think you should wear it to bed tonight. With nothing underneath. Also you need to eat more fruit and vegetables. There’s an apple. M x
I read it twice. Then I fold it and put it in my pocket with the same care I’d give something I intend to keep, which is what I intend to do with it, and I take out the sandwich.
It’s good. Really good, the bread doing its job, the prosciutto thin enough, the mozzarella fresh in a way that the place on the corner has never once managed, and I sit in the sun eating a lunch that someone made for me this morning and think about how much ground a person can cover without noticing they’re moving.
I take out my phone.
Me: First lunch break in living memory. The sandwich is the best thing I’ve eaten this week.
The three dots appear before I’ve put the phone down.
Micah: High praise from a man whose fridge contained half a block of butter and one suspicious banana. I’ll take it.
Me: I found the note.
Micah: And?
Me: And nothing. I’m eating the sandwich.
Micah: Sentimental. Is the apple happening?
I look at the apple sitting in the bottom of the bag. I take it out.
Me: The apple is happening.
Micah: I knew you had it in you. The coat thing is happening too. Come home soon.
I put the phone in my pocket. I take a bite of the apple, which is a perfectly good apple, and I look at the pavement and the sun on it and the person across the road trying to reverse park with no success whatsoever, and I think, just for this moment, that things might be alright.
My phone pings.
I’m already smiling when I reach for it. The response already half-composed in my head, something light, something that earns the same lightness back. I pull it out.
The number is withheld. Something is telling me it’s not spam.
The smile stays on my face for a second out of habit and then it doesn’t anymore.
I open it.
He liked the flowers before you interfered.
I stop chewing.
You’re stupid if you think he likes you.
The bench is solid under my hands. I don’t remember pressing them flat against the wood but they’re flat against the wood.
He’s using you.
I read that line twice. The sun is still on the pavement. The person across the road has given up on the parking space and is pulling away. The world is doing its usual thing.
You really think him being at the club that night was an accident?
Something happens in my chest. Not pain. Something structural. The way a building goes quiet before it goes wrong, everything load-bearing becoming suddenly, silently questionable.
Back off. He’s mine.
I sit on the bench. I read the texts again from the beginning, slowly, the way I read things when I need them to say something different the second time.
They say the same thing the second time.
But there is a note I’m going to keep forever in my coat pocket
I am calling before I’ve decided to call. It rings twice, and then his face fills the screen, bright from the windows behind him, hair doing the carefully careless thing, and his expression moves from pleased to alarmed in the space of a second.
“Lennox. What’s wrong?”
“Are you in the flat?”
“Yes. What…”
“Is the door locked?”
“Yes, it’s locked, what’s happened?”
“Someone texted me.” I keep my voice very level. The bench is solid. That’s something. “About the flowers. They have my number somehow. Are you safe? Are you completely certain you’re…”
“I’m safe. I’m standing in your kitchen, the door is locked, I’m fine.” He turns the phone briefly, shows me the locked door, brings it back. His eyes are doing something careful. “What did they say?”
I look at his face on the screen. At the careful quality.
“They said you were using me.” I watch him when I say it. I watch his face receive that sentence. “That you were dangerous. The usual. Stalker territory.” I pause. The pause is exactly as long as it needs to be. “They said the club wasn’t an accident. The night...”
His expression doesn’t change.
I’ve spent my career watching faces. I know what a face does when it hears something false.
It moves. It registers the surprise of encountering something it didn’t expect.
His face does none of that. His face is very, very still, and the stillness has the specific quality of a person making a rapid and private calculation.
It lasts perhaps three seconds.
“What do you mean?” he says.
He says it a beat too late.
“Micah.”
“Lennox, a stalker sent you a text, you can’t take anything they…”
“Were you at that club looking for me?”
He opens his mouth. On the screen, in my kitchen with my coffee on the counter behind him,, he opens his mouth and I watch him search for the sentence that makes this something other than what it is.
He can’t find it.
I know what that looks like. I have sat across tables from people searching for that sentence in interview rooms and I know every version of what it looks like, and this is one of them, and it lasts three seconds and it is the three seconds that does it, the three seconds that collapses something that took months to build.
“I was going to tell you,” he says.
I hang up.
I look at the phone in my hand.
The sun is still on the pavement. A woman walks past with a dog on a lead, and the dog is very interested in a crisp packet near the bench, and she tugs it along. The world is carrying on at its usual pace, absolutely indifferent.
I stand up. I walk to the wall at the end of the bench. I press the screen of my phone against the brick, with all the pressure that’s squeezing my lungs, and the screen goes dark and doesn’t come back, and something scatters across the ground that I don’t look at.
I stand there for a moment.
Then I walk back inside. I sit at my desk. I look at my computer screen. But I can’t see a thing.