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 took a few deep breaths and looked around the room. It was cheap and shabby. This wasn’t luxury nursing. The bed had a rail to keep the patient 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