The footage of the officer's house collapsing into fire circled the city like a storm cloud. By morning it was no longer a headline, it was a religion. People replayed the moment the roof gave way, slowed it frame by frame, hunted for a trick, an editing splice, anything human to blame. Everyone had a theory. Everyone had a name.
The Gentleman.
If legend had a sound, it was the hush that fell over a room when his name was spoken.
They needed someone to untangle the hush. They brought them Mr. Huraira.
Huraira was a man newspapers called a myth with a badge: sharp-jawed, silver at the temples, eyes that read like X-rays. He arrived at the charred lot wearing a long coat that had seen better seasons and a patience that never ran out. Where the cameras failed, where the protocols frayed, Huraira had a way of finding lace at the bottom of a storm.
He moved like a man who had practiced silence his whole life. The forensic team pointed, the reporters leaned in; Huraira crouched in the soggy grass and traced his gloved finger through the wet prints. They were faint, pressed shallow into the mud, as if the wearer had tried not to leave themselves behind, but they were there: sole pattern clear enough to read.
Forty-two.
A shoe size, a footprint, a number like a pulse.
Huraira did not smile. He photographed the prints, measured the stride, catalogued the soil. The forensics van hummed its quiet machines like distant bees. The crowd muttered; phones recorded Huraira as he worked.
He followed the shoeprint outward, like following a line in a dead man's pocket. He walked it to the nearest sidewalk cameras, pulled footage, and watched The Gentleman's walk replay in jittery frames: a broad-shouldered figure, methodical, a hand lifting a small device, a click, and then the world detonating behind him. The face in the grainy shot blurred; half of it was washed by a passing vehicle's headlight, the other half lost to smoke. Huraira froze the frame and squinted until the image burned in his eyes. He had a hunch about the face. He ran the hunch against old cases, against notes tucked in the margins of his memory. He sketched what he thought he saw: a curve of a cheek, a scar, the tilt of a jaw. He circulated the sketch to all precincts.
No leads.
Huraira then did the thing he hated more than losing: he walked shoe stores. He inspected racks, catalogs, old shipments. He asked clerks to remember loyal customers. He flashed the footprint photo and watched salesmen study the sole pattern as if it were scripture. Every store they checked had stock, styles, rejects — but none matched exactly. The shoeprints belonged to something purchased in the margin between common and custom. A ghost-shoe.
While Huraira hunted shoeprints and faces, another figure moved beside him through the investigation, a young constable in an off-white uniform who kept his cap low, kept his questions quieter than the rest. Huraira found the boy oddly earnest; the boy found Huraira oddly irresistible as a mentor. The officers called him helpful. The press called him dutiful.
They did not know the boy wore the city's most dangerous secret beneath his plain jacket.
Fahad watched Huraira as the detective worked. He watched the way Huraira's eyes slid over a scene and did not miss the small, useless things that give men away: the angle of a boot, the freshness of a cigarette butt. Fahad followed Huraira's motions with the careful adoration of a man reading a surviving relative's diary. He wore a police uniform that made him look harmless and official. In the fabric he was invisible where it mattered.
When Huraira finished cataloguing the prints at the site, he followed a faint sound, a hiss, like a moth trapped in the ruins. It came from the gutted house, from the hollow where a life had been extinguished. Huraira stepped over splintered beams and soot, flashlight cutting slow swathes through smoke still bitter in the air.
When he reached for the familiar weight of his holster to draw his service pistol, his fingers found paper instead of steel. A folded note sat where his gun should have been, tucked into the holster like a mocking bride. Huraira's hand did not tremble as he opened it. The handwriting inside was plain, deliberate, a voice that knew how to write an accusation.
"Gentleman is watching you."
The message landed on Huraira like a hand on his shoulder. He turned slowly, every nerve pricking. The house answered with wind and the soft crackle of dying embers. He darted to the windows, peered into the street. Footsteps? Nothing. Shadows moved, but they were the city's indifferent shadows: trash bags, laundry in a neighbor's balcony. For a moment the detective felt the ridiculous, humbling sensation of being toyed with.
He exited the house the way a man exits a wake: polite, hollowed, angry in a way that smelled of ancient timber. The note was small, but its arrogance was wide. Someone had taken his gun. Someone had played with his fear. Huraira's mouth made a line. He did not shout; he catalogued. He would not be made a spectacle.
Across town, Fahad returned to his apartment the way a conductor returns to a dark stage after an intermission. No one traced him. He closed the door without care and sat on his old sofa where the photograph of him and Farooq still stared like a promise. He pulled the photograph from the wall and, with a steady hand, tacked a new picture beside it: Huraira's face, printed crisp from the morning paper.
He did not write the word "enemy." He did not need to.
Instead, with a black marker, he drew a small symbol beneath the detective's image, a simple crosshair and the numbers "42" in the corner. Beside the photograph he wrote three small words in a handwriting that belonged to no child, no man, something practiced and clinical.
WILL. DEATH. MAN.
Fahad sat back at the table. He opened a leather notebook that smelled faintly of smoke and coffee. He wrote with a hand that made no tremble, ink eating into the page.
I put kerosene already, he wrote. I just need to set on fire. And the story will be end.
He read the line once, as if testing its weight, then closed the notebook and laced his fingers behind his head. A young man whose teeth had never been allowed to relax leaned back and let the exhaustion come for him.
Outside, the city breathed on, full of rumor and cameras and hungry eyes. Inside, the Gentleman turned his face to the ceiling, and sleep took him, not gentle, not healing, but the necessary dark between acts. The plan had been set. The watch had been given a name. The next move would be made in the space where myth and murder touched.
Somewhere, in a house that still smelled of smoke and ash, a photograph of a detective waited under a crosshair for morning.
To Be Continued.