Chapter thirty-one
Lennox
Isit at my desk until half past seven.
Not working. I haven’t been working since I came back inside.
I’ve been looking at the screen and occasionally moving the mouse when the screen saver threatens to start, and I’ve been doing that for six hours, and at half past seven something in me decides that’s long enough and I get my coat and I leave.
The drive home is quiet. I don’t put the radio on.
I don’t think about anything in particular, or I think about everything in a way that’s indistinguishable from thinking about nothing, the specific numb that comes after something has happened and you haven’t caught up with it yet.
The streets do their evening thing around me.
I drive them the way I’ve driven them hundreds of times, and I don’t see any of it.
I stop at a phone shop and buy the cheapest handset they have, because I’m a detective and being unreachable is not something I can afford indefinitely, and the woman behind the counter doesn’t comment on my face or what I’m clearly replacing or the time of the evening, which I appreciate.
I call the station and give them my new number.
I park on my street.
I sit in the car for a moment before I go in.
The light is off in the flat, which could mean he’s asleep, or it could mean something else, and I know before I’ve opened the door which one it is, the same way I knew before I opened the text, before the three seconds, before any of it, the way you know things you’ve been trying not to know.
I put my key in the lock.
The flat is dark and quiet and the particular quality of the quiet is the same quality it had before he came, the quality of a space that only has one person’s things in it, and I know before I turn the light on.
But I turn the light on.
The key is on the counter.
It’s sitting in the middle of the counter, not pushed to the edge or left by the kettle, placed deliberately in the center, where I’ll see it the moment I walk in.
It’s catching the light from the overhead.
Small and silver and cold looking and I know exactly what it cost him to put it there rather than take it with him, the same way I know what it cost him to leave without a note.
I gave him a note when I left. Gone to work. Back later. The coffee beans are in the cupboard above the kettle.
He gave me nothing. Because nothing is kinder than a lie, and there wasn’t a true thing he could put on paper right now that wouldn’t make something worse. I understand the logic of it. I’m standing in my hallway with my coat still on, understanding the logic of it, and it doesn’t help at all.
I don’t touch the key.
I go to the bathroom first. The shelf above the sink has a gap in it now, the specific gap of absent things, the Ouai spray and whatever else he had lined up along there over the last few days.
His toothbrush was on the left side of the glass.
The glass is there. The toothbrush isn’t.
I look at that for a moment, and then I close the bathroom door.
The sofa. The crime thriller isn’t on the arm where he left it last night. I look at the arm of the sofa where it was.
The charger is gone from the counter by the kitchen.
The bag I never saw him unpack is gone from the bedroom floor.
He’s been here for days, and there’s almost no trace of him left, because he was careful about it, or because he travels light, or because he understood that leaving things behind would be its own kind of cruelty.
The lamp is still angled the way he had it.
I look at it for a long time. It’s pointing slightly right of where I had it before, the angle that works for reading from the sofa when you’re sitting in the middle rather than the left, where I sit. I reach for it. My hand is on the stem.
I leave it where it is.
I sit down on the sofa in the wrong place, in the middle, in the place he sat, and I lean my head back and I look at the ceiling.
He used me. He identified me, researched me, went to the club knowing I’d be there and put himself in my path.
It wasn’t a happy accident. I was a mark, a detective to distract and charm and keep pointed in the wrong direction, and everything that happened after was built on top of that first deliberate step.
I know that.
I also know that he stood in a kitchen he’d never been in and learned where the coffee beans were and how my cooker works and made me breakfast this morning and packed me a lunch with a note that told me I looked handsome in my coat.
I know that too, and I don’t know what to do with both of those things being true at the same time.
I put my hand in my coat pocket.
The note is still there.
I take it out and I unfold it, and I read it, and then I read it again, and his handwriting is confident and looping and I can hear his voice in it the same way I can hear his voice in everything now, the specific frequency of him that I have apparently let in so completely that I can’t find the edges of it to push back out.
You look very handsome in that coat. I think you should wear it to bed tonight. With nothing underneath.
I fold it back up.
I should throw it away. That would be the rational thing to do at this juncture, given everything that happened today.
I should put it in the bin the same way I should take the key off the counter and put it somewhere I don’t have to look at it and I should angle the reading lamp back to where it was before someone came and changed things and then left.
I put the note back in my coat pocket.
I sit in the quiet for a long time.
The flat sounds the way it used to sound, which is like nothing very much.
The pipes occasionally, the street outside, the specific urban silence of a ground floor flat in Brixton at seven in the evening.
I used to not notice this silence because it was just the background, the sound of my life, nothing to compare it to.
I notice it now.
I notice it the way you notice the absence of something you’d stopped noticing was there.
I sit there in the middle of my sofa in the angle of the lamp he preferred and I don’t do anything at all for a long time.
The new phone buzzes on the sofa cushion beside me.
Unknown number. And I know before I open it that it’s the same person, because who else would be texting a number they shouldn’t have at half past seven on a Tuesday evening.
I open it.
You don’t believe me. Fine. Here’s proof. Then decide if you still want to play house with him.
There’s a link underneath. Dark web, the specific format of it, and I know what that means before I’ve followed it, what kind of thing lives in those corners of the internet, what kind of person knows how to find their way around them.
I should not click it.
I click it.
It takes a long time to load, which gives me several seconds in which I could choose not to do this, and then it loads.
I look at what’s there for perhaps four seconds.
Then I’m on my feet and moving and I make it to the bathroom before I’m sick, which I am, thoroughly, my hands on the rim of the toilet and my whole body doing the thing bodies do when they’ve encountered something they need to eject, and when it’s over, I sit on the bathroom floor with my back against the cold tile and I breathe.
I feel dirty.
Not angry. Not even betrayed, or not only that.
Dirty, in the specific way of someone who looked at something they shouldn’t have looked at, who saw something that was never meant to be seen by anyone, that existed only because someone had the power to make it exist and no one had the power to stop them.
I feel dirty and I feel disgusted and neither of those feelings is pointed at Micah.
I sit on the bathroom floor for a long time.
He was very young. That’s all I’m going to let myself hold from what I saw.
He was very young, and someone did that, and he survived it, and then he spent years becoming Micah Vee with his loft and his channel and his carefully constructed life that looks like a person and is a person, a real one, the realest one I’ve met, who learned to use the only weapon available to him and used it, and is using it still, because what else do you do with the thing that was done to you except decide what it means.
No wonder.
No wonder the list. No wonder every name on it. No wonder a young man looked at the men who did those things and decided that the law had had its chance and what was needed now was something older and simpler and more honest than the law.
No wonder he looked at a detective and decided to make him useful. A forty-four year old man who clearly liked what he saw. Why wouldn’t Micah use that? Why wouldn’t Micah use what he calls more of a curse than a blessing?
I find I can’t be angry about it. I’ve been sitting here all evening trying to hold onto the anger and it keeps dissolving into something else, something worse, something that has his face in it and the specific quality of light in my kitchen this morning and a note folded in my coat pocket that I’m not going to throw away.
I get up off the bathroom floor. I wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror for a long time.
What we had wasn’t real. I know that now, or I know that’s what I’m supposed to think, and I keep trying to think it and my brain keeps returning the note to me, the breakfast, the lamp at the wrong angle.
I wish it had been real. That’s the honest truth I’m sitting with in the cold bathroom of my own flat at eight o’clock on a Tuesday, that I wish with everything I have that what I felt when he was here was something he felt back, that the man who made me eggs this morning and packed me a lunch and put a heart next to his phone number was doing it because it was true.
Maybe some of it was true. I don’t know anymore what’s allowed to be true.
I go back to the sitting room. I turn the lamp off, the one that’s still at his angle. I stand in the dark for a moment.
Wherever he is tonight, I hope he’s safe.
I hope he finishes what he started and I hope it gives him whatever it is he needs it to give him, and I hope at some point after all of this there’s something soft waiting for him, something he didn’t have to engineer or perform or calculate, just something real that happened to him the way real things are supposed to happen.
He deserves that.
I go to bed.
The key is still on the counter when I pass it, catching nothing now the lights are off, just a small cold shape in the dark.
I leave it where it is.