from falling out, but the blankets looked thin. The paintings were the sorts of cheap prints you could buy in a pound shop. Other than a couple of ageing, dusty family photos, no personal touches adorned the surfaces. Jenson had effectively been ditched. It was as good a sentence as any court could have passed, if rather late in the day. Wandering over to the mess on the floor, Luc collected up the shards of vase and dumped them in the waste basket. He took a few paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and mopped up the water as best he could before some unsuspecting nurse walked in and slipped, then brushed off the cushion with his hand and tucked it into Jenson’s side.
Satisfied that the room was back in order, he took a pair of gloves from his pocket and a sterile bag. Standing over Bruce Jenson, he plucked one of the few remaining hairs from the man’s scalp, sealing it carefully into the bag to avoid contamination of DNA before stripping off the gloves and depositing them in the bin.
He accepted that it was beyond his power to punish this one of his mother’s attackers, but he needed to know if the man had fathered him. He’d spent a long time weighing up that particular decision, but even now he wasn’t prepared for how to face the outcome. If Jenson was his father, it would destroy everything he’d ever considered to be his identity. His mother was French and he’d grown up with her in France, never suspecting his time there would come to an end. His father, though, was a proud Scot. Born in Edinburgh, Luc could barely remember the first few years of his life. He recalled his dad as a warm, laughing man, who hugged often and hard, with huge hands and a quick smile. With his father gone too soon, his mother had struggled raising a young child alone and retreated to her family.
Luc checked the room once more to ensure he’d left it as tidy as possible, took a final look at the face of the man he would hate forever, and left. Passing by the nurses’ station, he paused and leaned over the desk.
‘I accidentally knocked a flower vase with my elbow,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m so sorry. Can I pay to replace it?’ He let his French accent rumble along the words, making eye contact with the nurse.
‘Oh no, don’t worry at all. These things happen. We have loads of vases in the storeroom. I’ll pop down and clean it up.’ She smiled sweetly, running a self-conscious hand over her hair as it escaped from her ponytail.
‘Don’t worry, I made sure the floor was dry,’ Callanach said. ‘You have much more important things to do. Mr Jenson wasn’t disturbed at all. As you said, he really wasn’t aware that I’d visited. It’s a tragedy.’
‘I know. His son Andrew finds it difficult to visit him, too. Will you need to come back, do you think?’ she asked.
Luc swallowed his guilt. He was flirting for his own purposes, well aware of the effect he had on women when he switched on the charm. His looks had got him modelling contracts and a stream of rich, good-looking girlfriends until he’d grown up and decided to do something with his life. Now living in Scotland, he supposed he was almost exotic with his deep-toned skin and still getting to grips with a second language. He might have been bilingual since childhood, but that didn’t account for fighting with the Scottish accent and colloquialisms.
‘I’m not sure. I may be back in a few days,’ he said, showing perfect white teeth. ‘Hopefully you’ll be on duty again?’
‘I might just be,’ she giggled.
He’d pretended to be on official police business, thereby avoiding signing the visitor’s book. No one had thought to take a note of his details. It was shocking how easily people let the rules slide when you flashed a badge. Giving the nurse a final wave, he took the corridor towards the car park.
If Jenson proved to be his father, it was more complex than just knowing he had the genetics of a monster. There was the issue of hereditary Alzheimer’s to contemplate. Worse than that, he would either have to reveal to his mother that her rapist had indeed impregnated her, or spend the rest of his life lying to her about it. Neither prospect was a happy one. Then there was the complication of potentially having a half-sibling. Would he want to know more about Andrew Jenson, or was that a step too far?
If Jenson wasn’t his biological father, that would mean tracking Gilroy Western down in Spain. Obtaining a reliable DNA sample from a man who would quite possibly remember Callanach’s French mother, would prove much more difficult.
Callanach pushed through the double doors into the car park, sighing. He didn’t want any of this. He longed for a simpler time, when he thought he’d known who his father was, even if losing him so young had pained him his whole life. If it was the living, breathing, golf-playing Gilroy Western, how was he going to make sure justice was done?
His mother had been adamant that she didn’t want to make a historic rape report to the police. There was no corroborating evidence. Western might even plead that the sex had been consensual, and dealing with that would leave his mother doubly traumatised. That left either walking away, knowing his mother’s rapist had gone unpunished, or ruining his own life and career by taking matters into his own hands.
There were few positive outcomes of continuing to investigate, yet he was headed for home, to put Jenson’s hair into an envelope to send it off for forensic testing, alongside a hair from his own head. He despaired of himself. He was hoping the holiday in Paris would resolve matters between his mother and him. After a long period of separation, they’d made their peace with one another. The holiday had been as emotionally draining as it was pleasurable. Luc had felt unable to discuss the rape, and his mother had obviously picked up on his pity for her. The pain of a sexual assault didn’t diminish over time.
He started his car, turning on the headlights in the fading light, and felt his mobile vibrating in his pocket, answering it as he pulled on his seatbelt.
‘Luc, it’s Ava,’ a woman said before he could greet her. ‘Listen, sorry, I know you’re not due back from leave until tomorrow, only I’m at the city mortuary. A man was found dead, having fallen from a tower at Tantallon Castle. How quickly can you get here?’
His holiday, if you could call it that, was most definitely over.
Detective Chief Inspector Ava Turner stood, arms folded, overlooking the corpse. She was only slightly saved from the trauma of the scene because the injuries were so horrific that it almost didn’t look real. Dr Ailsa Lambert, Edinburgh’s chief pathologist, a tiny, hawkish woman who might have blown away in a strong breeze, was moving around the postmortem suite with her customary speed and professionalism.
‘Your first high-fall body?’ the pathologist asked Ava.
‘Yup,’ Ava replied, lifting an arm with her gloved hand and looking underneath. ‘Are all these injuries postmortem or are there signs of an assault before he fell? These gashes look like knife wounds.’
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? I’m afraid with a high fall, in physics terms, the force applied to the body is ballistic. These huge splits to the fleshy parts occurred when the force radiated out and reached a critical point where this man’s body could no longer contain the amount of energy within them.’
She lifted the sheet to reveal a split around the man’s side that almost reached his navel and another down the back of his left leg. It was as if someone had taken a meat cleaver to his flesh. Ava took the
