what the climb up the inverted suicide fence had done to his rescuer’s hands. Blood dripped in gashes from his palms and skin was flapping in the breeze as he reached out to take hold of Stephen’s belt.
‘I didn’t mean for you to get hurt,’ Stephen said. ‘Thank you.’
He managed to get his knee into a gap between the metal struts and pushed his body up high enough for Maclure to get to him.
‘Thank me later,’ Maclure said. ‘Let’s just get you a cup of coffee and away from the spectators for now.’
There were shouts as police threw ropes over the barrier for them to tie around their waists, rolling the tyres of a police car over the ends to keep them safe.
‘Why did you risk yourself?’ Stephen asked as he finally got his face level with Maclure’s and looked him straight in the eyes.
‘We all have our demons,’ Maclure said. ‘Every one of us. Anyone who says differently just learned to lie better than you and me. My way of dealing with my own is to do my best to help other people. It’s selfishness if you think about it.’
Stephen put an arm around Maclure’s neck and pulled him into a quick, hard hug.
‘I owe you my life,’ he said.
And he meant it, but all he could think about were the demons Maclure had mentioned and the man still watching from the crowd. He wasn’t laughing any more. Not so much as a glimmer of a smile.
Detective Inspector Luc Callanach stood and stared at the man in the tatty armchair, wondering about the people who professed to forgive those who’d hurt them most. Terrorists who’d bombed indiscriminately and yet parents had forgiven them for taking their children so cruelly. Drunk drivers who’d caused crashes and still those who mourned the dead would not speak ill of the perpetrator. Never in his life would Luc be able to find so much space in his heart for such a gesture.
The man looked up at him, opened his mouth as if to speak, then blew a bubble instead, slapping at it before dropping his hand back into his lap. Bruce Jenson was suffering from Alzheimer’s. It was too good for him, Luc thought, staring out of the window and across the rolling lawn of the care home as the day lost the last of the light. Any disease that let such an animal forget what he’d done was an injustice on a grand scale.
Luc took a step forwards to kneel down and stare into the watery blue eyes that saw but didn’t see.
‘Was it you who raped my mother?’ he asked. ‘Or did you just watch as your business partner violated her? Did you threaten to sack my father, if my mother told him what you did? Was it you or Gilroy Western who first came up with the idea?’
Jenson issued a strangulated groan, his shoulders juddering with the effort of making the noise.
Luc took a photo of his mother and long-dead father from his pocket and held it in front of Jenson’s face. His head drooped. Luc took him by the chin and held the photo in front of him once more. He knew what he was doing was wrong. Bruce Jenson wasn’t going to respond to anything he did. Sixty seconds after he left the room, his father’s boss of thirty-five years ago wouldn’t even remember that another human being had been in there with him.
Still, he couldn’t stop. The rape his mother had suffered had echoed through the years, the trauma so bad that she’d deserted Luc when he’d been falsely accused of the same offence. Jenson and Western had never had to pay for what they’d done.
Luc had done his best not to pursue them, telling himself the past was best left, knowing he would lose his temper – perhaps fatally – if he ever did come into contact with either man. But he’d just spent a week in Paris with his mother, and being back in France had brought back all the horrors of his own arrest and the loss of his career with Interpol.
He’d had to walk away from everything he held dear when an obsessed colleague had told the worst lie you could tell about a man, and yet his mother’s rapist was at liberty. Hard as he’d tried not to hunt down the two men who’d once run one of Edinburgh’s most successful furniture companies, he’d realised the battle was already lost. So here he was – using his police credentials to get inside a nursing home, where Bruce Jenson would die sooner or later – still wanting answers. Still craving vengeance.
‘Do you recognise them? Is there any part of you still in there? You wrecked her life, and then you wrecked mine. And the worst of it …’ Luc spat the words out, a sob coming from deep inside his throat as he tried to keep going. ‘The worst of it is that one of you bastards might just be my fucking father.’
Bruce Jenson’s mouth lifted at the corners. It was a coincidence, Luc told himself. Nothing more than an involuntary twitch. But hadn’t his eyes lifted a little higher at the same time, doing their best to meet Luc’s even if they hadn’t quite made it?
‘My father worked for you for years. He looked up to you, trusted you. You sent him out to pick up a broken-down truck during the Christmas party and together you raped my mother. Her name was Véronique Callanach, and if you smile this time, I swear I’ll choke the fucking life out of you.’
A string of saliva tipped over the edge of Jenson’s bottom lip and made slow progress of lowering itself down his chin. Callanach’s stomach clenched. He could see his mother, sack over her head, pushed to the floor of Jenson’s office, wearing the party dress she’d been so proud of but thought too expensive for someone as lowly as herself. He could hear her cries, sense her anguish and revulsion. And then the shame, followed by the horror of finding herself pregnant with her first and only child, knowing she could never tell Luc’s father what had happened.
Losing his job would have been the least of their problems. He’d have killed both Jenson and Western for what they’d done to her and she’d have spent the next twenty years visiting a good man, who’d never hurt a soul, in prison. The globule of drool ran into the wrinkled grooves of Jenson’s neck. As if he’d been there, Luc imagined him drooling on his mother’s flesh as Jenson or his partner had violated her, hands wherever they liked, bruising her, hurting her.
The cushion was in Luc’s hands before he realised what he was doing. Propping one knee on the arm of the chair, he raised the cushion in his shaking, white-knuckled fist, teeth bared, every muscle in his body straining to let loose. Yelling, he aimed the cushion at the wall and lobbed it hard, knocking a vase to the floor as it fell, leaving a mess of smashed pottery and slimy green water.
He shoved himself backwards, away from Jenson, and staggered against the patio door that led into the garden. Forehead against the glass, hands in raised fists either side of his shoulders, he kicked the base of the door. The crack in the glass appeared remarkably slowly, with a creak rather than a crack, leaving a lightning-fork shape in the lower pane.
Callanach sighed. He was pathetic, taking out his anger on a man who had no fight left in him. Natural justice was in play. Jenson would never see his grandchildren grow up, or retire to a condo in Spain, which was where his former business partner was apparently now residing. He was seventy years old and to all intents and purposes, already dead. There was nothing more Callanach could do to him that he wasn’t already suffering.
He
