There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Thirty Eight

Thursday Aug 11

Dean McCoy arrived home that night with an equal sense of frustration and hope. After they had left the Sampson house Lewis had given him food for thought.

Bits that might have been arbitrary were starting to look less so. And the feeling McCoy had trusted was one she started to have also – he could see it in her eyes. But McCoy had had to temper his feeling – something about Frances Delorme's description, but more so the way she looked when she had talked about Peter Sampson, had a pang of doubt about the level of his own convictions regarding Vincent.

His first beer came and went as little Rose was bathed and fed. He heard her usual barrage of questions to Chloe as she ate tea and whilst he smiled to himself with some of them, he wasn't missing the queries directed at him tonight.

He'd spread all of the pictures he'd printed from Avery and Vincent's social media pages across his desk. He had dates on them and written in black the names of others tagged in each picture. He also had the photos of the house Avery had been found in taken by the forensic team.

That afternoon he'd received the information for all of the services connected to that house and, to his surprise, they had not been used for the previous few weeks. Not a drop of water, not a poof of gas. It was as if Vincent had walked out of that interview room and literally vanished.

He wrote a time line on his notepad to try and make sense of what had happened in all of their lives in the last six months. He started with Avery's death and worked back to include the closure of Peter's business, the argument between Avery and Peter and the start of what Doug Prosser had described as Avery's change.

Lewis had had trouble with the two staff members of Peter's vet clinic – one had not returned her calls ands the other had been evasive and short with her answers. He had Lewis chasing both of them up again.

He had originally planned to head down to Barwon Heads the following day – a Friday he'd taken on annual leave so as not to poke a stick at Frank Young. If Peter Sampson wasn't at work, if he didn't have work to go to, or in his Malvern house, he might be down there. But the warrant for the Malvern home had come through quickly so he and Lewis had planned to go there first thing.

He'd also requested the last six months of usage for services at that house, as well as the bank records of all of the Sampson and Prossers. He reckoned he wouldn't get them until early the following week but pressed his admin departments anyway to see what they could do.

He looked closely at the faces in Avery's pictures as he had earlier that day on his screen. She looked just as pretty and just as happy. He pulled a picture of Vincent holding her on his shoulders close to his face and looked at them both with their white teeth glowing and their smooth skin gleaming even in the fire light that party was bathed in. And if it wasn't for his distaste for Vincent he would have thought they could have been snaps from a Hollywood movie. He swiped the picture of him holding the skateboard away across the table, disgusted that there were things there he wasn't finding.

And halfway through his second beer Rose came in smelling of powder and kids shampoo and her thick, warm dressing gown pressed close to him as she sat herself up on his lap. McCoy turned his screen off and placed a large book over the photos. She spotted the one he'd swooshed out of the way on the far side of the desk and stood on his thighs to get it. She held it in her precious little hands and pointed.

'Look Daddy, it's a big green hand on the skateboard. It looks funny.'

McCoy swooned every time she called him Daddy. He was the only one she'd ever known and they'd tell her one day but even then he figured she'd go on calling him the same. He held her close and gently breathed in her freshness – always a caveat to the long, lonely days he spent around things anything but fresh.

'Yes, sweetheart, that is Santa Cruz. Look at the little red wheels on it too!' McCoy held his hand over the face of Vincent Sampson just on principle. He didn't want any kid of his, biological or not, to ever have to see the faces of the scumbags he had to deal with.

But he'd take great delight in taking apart a family like the Sampsons.

Whether it ended up being one or both of them, he now had that feeling that they were all in the gun.