There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Seventy Seven

Sunday August 21

McCoy pushed open the heavy door to the Sampson house as he had done the week prior and held his hand out to beckon Lewis to go through. The familiar smell of pretence in the form of mahogany and leather crept through the door as Lewis entered.

She nodded to him. 'Thanks, Detective.' McCoy thought he saw the barest hint of a smile.

'I'm going to look in his bedroom, see if there is anything more there than what we've got with us now – you know, now we know how the Mason Stepper thing fits, there might be other stuff that helps.'

McCoy nodded at Lewis as she headed down the hallway to their left. He waited until she had entered the bedroom before he headed down the same way. He walked carefully; not enough to hide but not to draw attention, hoping she would be engrossed in her own search enough to leave him to his. He found the room he had thought so much about over the last week or so and closed the door over. He pulled the curtains across so as to make the room as dark as he could and sat on the floor, resting his back against the bedside table. He found his left hand going to the area of deep scratches on the bed railing, tracing the arc automatically as he sat and thought.

Dean McCoy closed his eyes and practised again his capacity to shunt away feelings that tried to surface for those he needed to surface. He held that tiny vial in his hand, squeezing gently as if some truth or idea might nuzzle its way out of the tube. That vial that had rattled around in the drawer behind his head for years, its tiny chemical secret now held by only he, Harper and Vincent. He could smell the deep musty pang of stale urine that had puddled beneath him who knows how many times.

Dean McCoy was looking for a clue in something other than what those papers he'd shuffled through endlessly would tell him.

He sat there for minutes, trying to feel something like what Vincent would have felt. Trying to find a place in his own mind where Vincent would have taken himself.

And, as metres away between walls that wouldn't want to talk if they could, Harper shuffled through what was left in Vincent's old desk and school books, Dean McCoy opened his eyes and smiled. In the very act of putting himself in someone else's place he'd figured what he should have known all along.

His eyes settled on the wall on the far side of the room, full of the pictures that hung there, loose and crooked. It was almost exactly as he had first seen it – not neat, not formal; but loved. Adored. It was like the pictures were worn out from being looked at so much.

It was, indeed, a shrine.

And McCoy suddenly realised why he felt that annoying nasty pang of sorrow for Vincent despite all he had done.

It was all about his mother. Every bit of it. And he felt more annoyed but more subdued as he thought through Vincent's path.

McCoy had given up his law career for his mother when she had been sick. As a result, he'd carried the burning hole of memory and sacrifice as his own quiet badge of pride.

So had Vincent.

McCoy had done the only thing he knew how, to make things right; to make the best of what he had been handed.

So had Vincent. Only Vincent had been handed Mason to help.

And now he sat here and looked at those pictures with a set of eyes he'd always had but never used.

Hr felt exhilarated but nauseous, the gap between he and Vincent now narrowed again, both professionally and personally.

He saw pictures of verdant green vineyards, of opera theatre stages, of the giant, sweet smile of Chiara. There were no family shots, no kinder pictures, no laughs on the beach.