Helen Fields - Perfect Death

‘You couldn’t tell him?’

‘Losing his job would have been the best-case scenario, Luc. Your father adored me. He’d have killed them, both of them, for hurting me that way. The thought of losing our house didn’t matter to me, we could have lived on the streets and been happy, moved to France to find work, lived with my parents. But do you think your father would have walked away? Never. He would have ended up in a prison cell and all for the sake of me needing to share my pain. I loved him too much to tell him. Worse things happen to women, Luc. That’s what I told myself. It was easier to stay quiet. Easier to bear my shame quietly, alone. Better than risking it all.’

‘So no one ever knew?’ Callanach asked. ‘You’ve carried that alone all this time?’

‘I told my mother, after your father died when we moved back to France. Your father’s death devastated me but it released me from the need to stay in this country, near those animals. I was free to take you away and start again, and I was able to stop lying to the man I loved. I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear all this.’

‘There are counsellors, Maman. Even now it might do you good to get some help,’ Callanach said.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Véronique said, smiling gently at him. ‘I don’t want it to be part of my present. It’s the past. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the strength to tell you before. Instead, I ran. Not from you, though. From the memories.’

‘I understand the trauma,’ Callanach said. ‘But you know me. You know I could never be capable of causing the harm those men did you.’

‘I do know that. Really, I do. But there’s something more,’ Véronique said. ‘If I don’t tell you now, I never will. Eight weeks after that Christmas party I discovered that I was pregnant. Your father and I had continued having a normal relationship. I knew that if I stopped being with him, he would know immediately that something was wrong.’

‘Stop,’ Callanach said. ‘Please stop. Are you telling me …’

Véronique walked over, knelt before him and took his hands in hers.

‘Luc, nothing has changed. You were the only thing that mattered. The man you have always thought of as your father, was the only father who ever had any influence in your life. He loved you so much. When you were born it was as if I lost half of him to you and I never minded, not for one second. His smile was brightest when he looked at you. He would spend hours just holding you, watching you sleep.’

Callanach stood up. ‘You should have told him,’ he said.

‘To what end?’ Véronique asked. ‘If he had known the truth, he would have been blinded by my pain. But I know that he would have loved you no less, no differently, and I have always believed that you are his son.’

‘No. Not when Astrid came to you with her lies. For a while, then, you believed something else. Is that the guilty burden you came to shift? That you thought, for however fleeting a moment, like father like son. You thought that my biological father was the man who had raped you, and that I had turned out the same. That’s why you left me,’ Callanach said, picking up his coat and shrugging it on.

‘Luc, it wasn’t that black and white. I was devastated by the past all over again. Nothing made sense to me. I ran because I couldn’t hide the pain I was feeling and you had more than enough to deal with. This conversation we’re having now, that I always knew we would have to have one day, would have been too much for you back then.’

‘It’s too much for me now!’ Callanach shouted, reaching for the door.

Véronique threw herself in the way. ‘Please, please don’t go. I know how you’re feeling, I want to help you.’

‘I’ve just been told that my life may be the result of a rape, and that the man I’ve believed all my life was my father may not be. You have no idea how I’m feeling!’

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Véronique sobbed, collapsing into the chair, head on her knees. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought it would help you forgive me.’

Callanach pushed the door gently shut and sat on the edge of the bed facing his mother. ‘There’s nothing left to forgive,’ he said. ‘Go back to France. You have to give me some time now.’

He stood up, left quietly and made his way back down to the street. It looked the same as he had left it, yet he felt it should have been different. That it should have changed with him. Everything he thought he knew about himself might be a lie. The solid ground beneath his feet was gone. His mother was even more a victim than him, yet he hadn’t had the strength to be the man she needed, to comfort and reassure her. Callanach turned up his collar against the icy walk home, telling himself as he went that the tears streaming down his face could be blamed on the wind in his eyes.

The main gates to Louis Jones’ car yard were locked and bolted. Leaving DC Tripp in the car, Ava walked the perimeter of the premises looking for a way in. It turned out not to require much effort. A back gate, through which lay a short alley, had been on the receiving end of some well-applied bolt cutters, its lock on the ground in two pieces. Ava pushed the gate fully open with her elbow, pulling on gloves as she entered and switching on a torch. The lot was full of vehicles. All had seen better days, most with dents that no amount of beating would repair. The whole place was surrounded by an eight-foot-high metal fence, the inside of which had been privatised using planks of wood. Jones wouldn’t have wanted anyone noting the licence plates on his vehicles, of course. Ava wondered if any of the cars there had been driven by the man who’d abducted her. She pushed the thought aside. That wasn’t what she was there for, and dwelling on it was a shortcut to misery. What she needed to figure out now, was who had been driving the crashed car.

Along one edge of the lot was a brick building. There was only one door that she could see and it was sturdy, probably reinforced. The windows, however, were another matter. There were only two and both were smashed, the displaced shards reflecting streaks of torchlight. Louis Jones, by the look of it, was having a very bad day indeed. Ava put her head to the first window, darted the torch around, announced the police presence even though the premises seemed vacant, and jumped in. Someone before her had been kind enough to dash any remaining glass spikes from the lower edge of the window. To the left-hand side of the room was a desk, each drawer ripped open, the contents scattered across the floor. A landline phone lay on the floor beneath an upturned chair, and sad-looking posters of supercars that had once adorned the walls hung in tatters.

The place had been ransacked. The question was whether the intruders had caused such carnage to send a message, or whether they were searching for something specific. A rack of keys along the right-hand wall was untouched. It wasn’t a vehicle they were after, then. Ava glanced around for evidence of a computer, but outfits like Jones’ rarely kept their records on anything as substantial as digital files. An internal door stood ajar, nothing but blackness showing in the crack. Ava walked to it slowly, kicked it open and drew a can of pepper spray from her jacket pocket. A screech came from the back of the area and Ava ducked, sending out a jet of pepper gas, slashing the torchlight left and right across the room.

‘Police, stay where you are,’ she shouted. There was no reply. ‘There’s another officer at the front door,’ Ava lied. ‘If you attempt to leave the premises, you will be stopped with force.’ She stood up, focusing the light and her eyes on the rear of the room. Panicked fluttering and squawking filled the air.