The windscreen glowed red and there was something sticky in his eyes. He had time to register the fact that his daughter was going to be inheriting the stunning Moray Place property much sooner than he’d anticipated. His wife would become a rich woman, and waste all that hard-earned cash on golf clubs, cocktails and shoes she’d wear only once. Perhaps Bruce Jenson was going to be waiting for him on the other side.

He couldn’t breathe. Gilroy Western saw his mother’s face, smiling, then felt the slap of his father’s belt. He heard his daughter’s first cry as she was handed to him outside the delivery room. He remembered the first time he’d had sex with an American girl at university who’d liked his Scot’s accent and who’d giggled when he’d whispered endless rubbish in her ear. And that brought back something dimmer – a distant memory he’d squashed and changed and added unfair blame to. Another woman, another night.

There had been a party. Too much booze. Had it been Bruce Jenson’s idea or his? He wanted to blame Jenson but knew it wasn’t the truth.

His brain processed the relevance of the odour and he realised his car had crashed into the cheesemongers across the Kerr Street junction.

The woman Jenson had held down for him had screamed and begged them to stop.

Brie, he thought, trying to distract himself. He’d always loved cheese. Camembert, Stilton, Gouda. But the memory overpowered even the most aromatic of the dairy produce.

A larger shard hit his jugular.

He saw Bruce Jenson pinning the woman to the floor and wondered why he couldn’t understand what she was saying. She’d been French, that was it. Beautiful, too, truly breath-taking. He’d wanted her from the second she’d walked into the party.

Everything was black now and there was a droning in his ears. Even the smell of the cheese had faded.

The woman had sobbed as he’d entered her. He’d felt so powerful, king of the world, taking another man’s prize, stealing, violating, knowing she wouldn’t – couldn’t – say anything.

Western tasted blood in his mouth, felt it trickle from his ears.

He saw her face as they’d taken the bag from her head and thrown her back out into the corridor. But she wasn’t crying now. And although she seemed to be speaking French, a language he had no grasp of at all, he could understand perfectly well what she was saying now.

Chapter Seventeen

10 March