37. Chapter 37
Chapter thirty-seven
Lennox
It’s morning now, and he’s still sleeping on the sofa.
He’s out properly, the deep unconscious sleep of a body that’s been running on empty for too long and has finally been given permission to stop.
I crouch beside him, and I rest the back of my hand against his forehead the way I’ve done every hour since two in the morning, checking for heat I don’t want to find.
His color is better than it was. The fever hasn’t broken, but it’s quieter, and under my hand he shifts, just slightly, and makes a small sound that isn’t a word, and settles again.
I pull the blankets up over his shoulder where they’ve slipped.
I stand in the doorway for longer than I should, coat already on, watching him breathe, and then I leave him the spare key on the kitchen counter and a note that says Take the antibiotic at eight, then every four hours, there’s bread and everything for toast, don’t open the door to anyone. And I go.
I don’t want to leave him, but if I don’t show my face at work after yesterday’s events, it’s going to raise too many questions.
The morning is the longest I’ve worked in my entire life.
Not in terms of events. In terms of hours. Every hour is approximately the length of three, and I get through them by doing the smallest possible version of every task, the minimum of presence required to not be visibly absent while being absent in every way that matters.
There’s no way to check on him. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since I sat down at my desk, the reflex of it, my thumb already moving toward my phone before I remember there’s nothing there to move toward.
No number. No thread of old messages to reread.
His phone is gone, mine is a different phone with a different number, and the two of us exist to each other now only in the same room at the same time, nowhere else.
I didn’t understand until today how much of loving someone happens in the gaps between seeing them, in the small check that says I’m thinking of you, and how much it costs to have that taken away in the middle of the one day I need it most.
Hendricks calls me in just after eleven.
Her office smells the same as it always does, something that claims to be linen and isn’t, and she doesn’t ask me to sit before she starts talking, which is never a good sign.
“Lab came back on the blood from the warehouse,” she says.
I keep my face still. I’ve had a lot of practice at this over the years, and none of it has ever mattered as much as it does right now.
“And?”
“Partial profile. Degraded by contaminants at the scene, not enough for a clean match yet, but enough that they’re running it again.” She’s watching me while she says it, the way she watches everyone, cataloguing. “If we get a name off it, we’ll have our man.”
“When will we know?”
“Days. Maybe longer, the sample’s not great.” She leans back. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“Late night.”
“Mm.” She doesn’t push it, not today, and I don’t offer anything further, and I sit there with the specific, private horror of knowing exactly whose blood that is, of having washed it off my own kitchen table with my own hands less than twelve hours ago, and I say nothing, because there is no version of the truth I can give her that doesn’t end with a wanted man on my sofa and my own name on a different kind of report.
Farah catches me in the corridor afterward. “You look pale.”
“Didn’t sleep.”
“Right.” She studies me a beat too long, the way she’s been studying me for a while now, and then she lets it go, because that’s what Farah does, she lets things go until she doesn’t.
At noon, she puts a coffee on my desk without being asked.
I drink it and think about a man on my sofa who has a wound on his ribs and an antibiotic schedule I made him promise to keep, and a blood sample sitting in a lab somewhere with his name already halfway attached to it, and no way on earth to warn him.
By half-past five, I can’t do it anymore. I drive home faster than I need to.
Something is wrong before I open the door. Not anything I can point to, just the specific quality of the flat through the window, the way a space looks when it’s only got one person’s absence in it rather than one person’s presence. I stand at the door for a moment. Then I put my key in the lock.
The flat is empty.
I know before I’ve taken two steps. The sitting room, the silence, the lamp on its timer, and nothing else. He’s gone.
I stand in the middle of the room and I let it land. I’m good at letting things land, I’ve been doing it for a very long time, taking the fact of a thing and putting it somewhere it can be looked at. I look at this.
He left.
He woke up and he left, because whatever the bandaging and the blanket and the turned hand meant, it wasn’t enough, it couldn’t be enough, not without the words, and I never said the words.
I didn’t say I’m not going to arrest you and you’re safe here, I actually mean that, you are safe here.
I didn’t say I saw the link the stalker sent and I understand now, I understand why, and it doesn’t change how I feel, if anything it changes it in the other direction, and you deserved someone to say that to you a long time ago and I’m sorry it took me this long to be that person.
I didn’t say any of it. I said hi, in the rain, at two in the morning, and I turned my hand over, and I put a blanket on him, and I thought tomorrow, I thought tomorrow I would find the sentences.
There is no tomorrow. There’s just this empty flat, and a lamp on a timer, and the note I left on the counter still there because he didn’t need it, he was already going to go.
Suddenly, I stop standing in the middle of the room feeling sorry for myself and I start reading the space the way I’d read any scene. Habit and professionalism ticking over under the grief, alerting me to the things I should have seen straight away.
The blanket isn’t folded, isn’t even bundled the way a person bundles a blanket they’re leaving behind, it’s on the floor in a heap with one corner still hooked over the armrest, dragged rather than dropped.
I touch the mug on the coffee table without lifting it. It’s on its side, and the coffee that came out of it has already dried into the shape of a small, dark continent on the carpet, which tells me it’s been down for a while, not something that happened in the last five minutes.
I look at the door. No forced entry, no marks on the frame, no splintering round the lock, which means whoever came in either had a key or didn’t need one because Micah opened it himself, half-asleep and feverish and trusting in a way he has no business being with anyone but me.
And then I see the shoes.
They’re under the edge of the sofa, the ones he arrived in, still wet through from the rain, exactly where I left them when I slipped them off his feet last night.
Nobody leaves without their shoes.
The picture assembles itself with the horrible clarity that an entire career’s worth of crime scenes gives you whether you want it or not.
Not gone. Taken.
My phone rings.
Unknown number. I answer it.
The voice on the other end is one I’ve never heard, and it is delighted with itself in a way that makes my skin crawl, the specific self-congratulation of someone who has been waiting a very long time for exactly this moment.
“I have him,” the voice says. “Finally. He’s mine now, the way he was always supposed to be.
” A pause, enjoying it. “I saw the flowers worked. He liked them. Then I saw you rushing over there to play the hero. Very touching. Very stupid.” Another pause.
“He’s not yours. He was never yours. And you’re never going to see him again. ”
“Where…” I start.
The call ends.
I stand in my sitting room with my phone in my hand and the blanket on the floor and the water glass on its side, and for a moment I don’t do anything at all, because there’s a version of me that wants to call this in properly, wants to say the words missing person and abduction and stalker into a radio and let the machine of the job take over the way it’s supposed to, and there’s another version of me that already knows the machine is too slow for this, that every hour it takes to spin up a response is an hour I don’t have.
And even if the machine does find Micah, it’s still going to punish him when that blood sample cleans up.
I stand there with both of those men arguing inside my skull, and neither one wins, because my phone buzzes before either of them can.
A text from the same number. One word. Enjoy. And a link.
I open it.
A video feed. Grainy, lit by a single light, and there is Micah.
My breath catches at the sight of him. He’s alive, he’s conscious, his hands are behind him and his back against something structural, and he’s doing the thing he does when something costs him and he’s not going to let it show, the specific, contained stillness of a person who has survived difficult things by going quiet inside them.
He looks pale under the flush of fever on his cheeks.
The wound will still be hurting. He’s not looking at the camera.
His eyes are glassy. He’s looking somewhere far away, retreated to a place where he has a better chance of surviving what happens next.
I hate that it’s a well-worn look. As if the muscles in his face are so used to this configuration, they settle into it easily.
The person holding the phone is moving around Micah. The camera swinging to show his prize, proud of it, this specific triumph. And then, as the camera swings away as it’s turned off, it passes a window.
I stop breathing.
It’s a sash window. Well, it was one once. The frame is dark with age, and something has snapped rather than decayed, both sash cords broken in the specific way they break when someone tried to open a window very quietly and the ancient rope gave way and the whole thing came down.
I know that window.
I know it the way I know my own handwriting, the way I know the specific sound of a case going wrong.
I stood in a corridor near that window on a dark night and heard the crack of it falling, and I turned a corner and walked into someone in the dark and my torch caught a face I never forgot, and I turned my torch off in an alley months later for that same face.
The derelict hospital.
He’s at the derelict hospital.
The stalker sent me that video to gloat. He doesn’t know what he’s given me. He has no idea that I’ve been in that building, that I know that window, that this particular piece of cruelty has just handed me the one thing I needed.
I’m already running.