There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Seventy Five

Saturday August 20

Dean McCoy shut the door to his bedroom when he got home that evening and sat still for a long time on the edge of his bed. Chloe knew sometimes his work got to him and if he sat there and closed the door over he was best left alone.

Rose had gone in and hugged him, standing and leaning onto his chest hoping to be lifted up and sat on his lap but she felt it too and she gripped him tight as her cold lips pushed onto his cheek before she turned to be carried up the stairs to bed by Chloe. Chloe kissed the top of his head, placed a beer on the side table next to the bed and swung the door over as she left.

It wasn't just the gravity of what they had realised as they sat in the car with the rain beating down on them that afternoon that ate at him.

It wasn't even that Vincent had somehow fooled him – the spasm of accusation he had felt on that Thursday evening at the station after Avery had died was so far off what he had done, and more so what he had planned; was so far off what was really happening that for the first time in his career McCoy felt inadequate. He didn't want to know that a human was capable of doing what Vincent had done. And he knew he should have kept trusting that bastard instinct that had now got him so much closer. It might not have saved Brodie Renshaw but it had brought her killer to justice.

But more than that even, it was the fact that no matter how hard he tried not to, he felt a definite pang of sorrow for the kid. That patch of stale piss, the pictures on the wall that hung crooked and staring at him as he must have sat there and been ridiculed; hit by his father. Who knows what. But on that count McCoy could join the dots on just what he might have suffered.

But as he sipped his beer and tried to let the cold fizz iron out the wrinkles, he felt in his head and in his heart it was the subtle betrayal that really ate at him as he had yacked with Commander Steve Benson of the Federal Police that afternoon. All the while his partner was putting together the outline to be broadcast to all police personnel around the country. At airports and at border patrols, at dockyards and country stations Harper Lewis would make sure that if Vincent Sampson tried to re-enter the country he would be noticed no matter where.

She worked the only way she knew how – complete, detailed and efficient. She knew that it was only a complete team effort that would make sure he was grabbed and held to justice.

Harper Lewis never could stop herself to try and understand how Vincent must have felt when he was sitting there, watching his mother die and only have the wrath of his father to look forward to. She never would understand how a son could look at his father in the way he had to have done; with a heart full of revenge and lust for what Peter Sampson was owed. Even when she had seen the mangled mass of rotting flesh his face had been hewn to, it would never add up that father and child could feel what they had both felt.

And as McCoy had intimated to her the night she watched the Prossers have a slanging match on the stairs of Georgina's apartment, perhaps what the Sampsons felt for each other was no more right or wrong than Harper's inability to understand it.

Dean McCoy had made it clear to Benson that he was the only one to be contacted in the event Sampson was ID'd. Even as he said it he had to tighten his stomach to offset the pangs of selfishness and deception he knew he was now owed.

And it wasn't dick measuring or self-promotion that he was doing it for.

Dean McCoy just couldn't stand thinking he wasn't able to do this on his own.