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.