Kincaid considered going back for his car, which he’d left in the Greys Road car park near the police station. But he suspected that if he did, the incident room would suck him in like a magnet, and he still felt that invisibility was the better part of valor until he knew what they had on Craig.
He would walk to Remenham. He’d driven the distance, after all, and it hadn’t seemed that far.
He soon discovered that although the lane looked idyllic, the hamlet was considerably farther than he’d remembered. By the time he reached Becca Meredith’s cottage, he was warm, even in the lightweight leather jacket he’d worn that day, and he’d have given a king’s ransom for his trainers.
The cottage looked less tidy by daylight, the lack of routine maintenance more evident. The hedges needed trimming, the lawn needed cutting, and the paint round the front porch was beginning to peel.
The front gate was off the latch, and as Kincaid stepped through it, he realized the cottage’s front door was standing ajar. A dozen scenarios ran through his head in an instant, none of them pleasant.
He stopped, his heart pounding, examining what he could see of the house and the garden. After lecturing Gemma about being careful, he didn’t need to be the one who carelessly walked into a dangerous situation.
There was no sound, no movement. Then he saw the footprints. There had been heavy dew that morning, and the overlong grass in the front garden, which had been shaded by the hedge, was still damp. A distinct single line of footprints led from the front porch into the grass, and around the side of the cottage.
Kincaid followed cautiously. When he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Freddie Atterton standing at the far end of the garden, looking out over the river. He wore jeans and a faded Oxford-blue T-shirt, and his feet were bare.
“Freddie,” Kincaid said quietly, and Atterton turned.
“Oh. It’s you.” The smile Freddie gave Kincaid was tentative, and he seemed a little disoriented.
“Are you all right?” Kincaid asked, going closer. He saw that the Oxford-blue T-shirt really was Oxford blue—it bore the Oxford University Boat Club emblem on the front. “You’ve had us all a bit worried. Especially DC Bell.”
“Imogen. Nice name. Pretty girl.” The smile was a little stronger this time, then Freddie’s brow creased in a frown. “She was looking for me?”
“You haven’t checked your messages.”
“No. Turned the bloody phone off. Press.”
“You’ve been here since last night?”
Freddie nodded.
“What are you doing out here in the garden?” Kincaid asked, as gently as he would have asked one of his children.
“I wanted—I just wanted to see—” Freddie stopped, his teeth chattering. Kincaid saw that the legs of his jeans were soaked halfway to the knees from the damp grass, as were his own trousers. “You can’t quite make it out from here,” Freddie went on. “Temple Island. But she was so close.”
“Yes,” Kincaid agreed. “She was.” Just as matter-of-factly, he added, “You seem to have lost your shoes.”
“Oh.” Freddie looked down, and seemed surprised to see that he was barefoot. He touched the front of his shirt. “I found these. My things from uni. In the wardrobe. She’d saved them.” There were tears in his eyes.
“I think,” Kincaid said reasonably, “that we should go inside, have a cup of tea, and get warm. Then we can talk about it. All right?”
It was obvious from the rumpled duvet on the sofa that Freddie had slept there, and not upstairs in the bedroom. Kincaid couldn’t blame him. Sleeping in one’s dead ex-wife’s bed would be bad enough. Sleeping in the bed you now knew your dead ex-wife had shared with another man would be even worse.
“You should change,” he suggested as he followed Freddie into the room.
“I’ll dry. I’m a rower, remember? Or I was, anyway. Wet is a fact of life for rowers.”
The sitting room was cold in spite of the bright day, as it had been the first time Kincaid had come to the cottage. “Why don’t you light the fire, then? I’m not quite as hardy as you. I’ll make us something hot.”
He found tea bags in the kitchen—Tetley’s. Apparently Becca’s taste had run to down-to-earth. A plastic jug in the fridge was half full of milk that was just skating its use-by date. When he had the kettle on, Kincaid glanced back into the sitting room and asked, “Milk and sugar?”
Freddie nodded. “Lots of both. Another old rower’s habit. Never let a good calorie pass you by.” Having lit the gas fire, he pushed the duvet aside and sat on the sofa, then began to shuffle what looked like old photos that were spread out on the small coffee table.
When Kincaid had filled two mugs, skipping the sugar in his, and deciding at the last minute to pass on the milk as well, he carried them into the sitting room and took the chair nearest Freddie. “What are you looking at?” he asked, handing over Freddie’s mug.
“She saved these, too. I’d no idea. I was looking for a pen and I found them stuffed in the drawer of the writing desk.” He began to turn the photos so that they faced Kincaid.
In every one, Kincaid saw a much younger Freddie, in Oxford rowing kit. In several, he was at stroke in an eight, his face contorted with a grimace of effort. Several seemed to be at parties or after races. In one, a much younger Becca was pouring a bottle of champagne over his head, and they were both laughing.
Freddie picked that one up and ran a finger over its surface. “It was the second year I was in the Blue Boat,” he said. “We’d just got engaged. No surprise it was Ross who put Becca up to the champagne.”
“Ross?”
“My mate who took me to—” He faltered, drank a sip of his tea. “To the mortuary,” he went on. “We were all at uni together, Becca and me, and Ross and his wife, Chris.”
Freddie nodded at a framed photo of the same Boat Race crew on Becca’s bookshelf. “See, there he is. That one was taken right before the race. Ross was a last-minute substitution from Isis, the second boat.”
Kincaid saw a stocky young man, smiling, as were all the crew, with what looked like a mixture of pride and nerves. “I thought maybe the champagne was a Boat Race celebration.”
“Not for the losing crew. We were nearly swamped that year. Could have bloody drowned. I think Becca—I don’t know. Things were never quite the same after that. Maybe that marked me as a failure in her eyes.”
“It was just a race,” Kincaid said.
Freddie stared at him as if he’d gone utterly daft. “It was the Boat Race. Nothing afterwards ever quite lives up to that, whether you win or lose. But Becca, she wanted me to win, even more than I did.”
“Was she jealous of you, of your opportunity?” Kincaid asked, thinking of everything he’d learned about Becca Meredith. “That was the one thing she could never do, row in the Boat Race.”
Freddie’s eyes widened in surprise. “Maybe. It never occurred to me. Maybe that was why it mattered so much.”
“Your loss was her loss.”
“She took it hard. Not just angry. Not just disappointed. She was . . . bitter.” He shrugged. “We went on, got married, as if things were the same. But they weren’t. Then—well, you know what happened then.”
“The Olympic trials. Her injury. Her failure.”
Freddie nodded. “I didn’t think we would get through that. But then she went into the job, and for a while, things got better. She put all that ferocious energy into work. But there was always a distance between us, a wall, and I could never break through it.”
“And, eventually, you sought solace.” Kincaid said it without censure.
Freddie’s smile twisted. “I suppose you could call it that. But it never helped. Now I keep wondering if there was anything I could have done that would have made a difference. And I’ll never know.”
It was true. There was nothing Kincaid could say that would change it. And now he knew that the things he would have to say at some point would only increase the burden of Fredd
ie’s guilt, at least in Freddie’s eyes.
If Freddie and Becca had stayed married, Angus Craig might never have had the opportunity to rape Becca. And Becca might not be dead.
Kincaid looked round the cottage, realizing that when he’d been here the first time, on Tuesday evening, he’d had no knowledge of what had happened here.
Now, in his mind’s eye, he saw again the crime-scene photos from Jenny Hart’s flat, and imagined this room, and Becca, violated. He felt sick.
“What is it?” asked Freddie. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
Kincaid met his eyes, and in that instant he made a decision. Freddie would have to know what had happened to Becca.
But not yet. Because with knowledge would come rage, and if Freddie sought out Angus Craig, Kincaid had no way to protect him from the consequences.
Chapter Twenty
We are all proudly wearing the OUBC Race Day kit. Today we earn the highest sporting honour of our university, the Oxford Blue. Only a select number of sports are eligible and a Blue can be awarded only in competition against Cambridge . . . To be awarded the rowing Blue you must pass the Fulham Wall, about two minutes down the course. The cruelty of sinking would be doubled if it happened before that point. [David Livingston]
—David and James Livingston
Blood Over Water
The Churchill Arms was just as cluttered as Melody had described it. It was also packed, suffocatingly warm, and reeked of boiled veg and roasted meat.
Gemma was early, so she’d slipped inside to absorb a bit of the atmosphere while she waited for Melody. Patrons were carrying drinks onto the pavement, so it was easy enough for her to stand to one side of the crush milling about the door. Having dressed casually, in a skirt and boots, she attempted a studied nonchalance, and thought it was a good thing she’d never had to work undercover.
It was a beautiful, crisp day, and having asked Betty Howard to watch Charlotte and Toby for a few hours, Gemma had walked the short distance from Notting Hill to the Churchill Arms. She’d glanced down Campden Street, where Jenny Hart had lived, and like Melody, she’d felt chilled at the thought of the murderer striking so close to home. The initial call would have gone to Kensington Station; otherwise it would have come across Gemma’s desk. Not that she’d have got any further than the major crimes team that had eventually been assigned to the case. They’d done a good job with what they had.
She kept thinking of Melody—young, attractive, single—a perfect target for Angus Craig. Maybe it was a good thing for Melody’s sake that Craig seemed to have upped his game, going after more senior female officers.
Now, of course, Melody was forewarned, but there were too many other potential victims who were not. They needed to put the bastard out of action altogether, and soon.
Gemma watched the waitstaff, moving busily between bar and kitchen and tables in the pub’s crowded rooms, and wondered which of the girls might be their witness.
“Boss,” said Melody in her ear, and Gemma started. “You still look like a copper,” Melody added, giving her a quick and nervous smile.
“Same to you. And you nearly gave me heart failure. Have you got the photos?”
“Of course.” Melody touched her handbag, which was capacious enough to carry off a good bit of the pub’s Churchill memorabilia. “That’s the manager,” she added, nodding at a tall young woman behind the bar. “Theresa.”
“And the other girl?” Gemma asked.
“Let’s find out. And I’m just going to introduce you as my colleague, okay? No names. Just in case—well, let’s not go there.”
Gemma stopped her friend with a touch on the arm. “Melody, are you sure about this? It could mean—you could seriously damage your career by doing this. Or worse.”
“If she doesn’t ID him, we’ve nothing to lose. It was just a dead-end Sapphire lead. If she does give us a positive, I’ll do whatever it takes. Same as you.” Melody’s conviction was absolute.
“Right,” said Gemma, and followed her to the bar. She stood back as Melody talked to the manager. The noise level in the pub was so high that she caught only a few words, but when she saw the manager nod towards the girl who was pulling pints at the bar’s far end, her heart sank.
The barmaid was plump and freckled, with bleached blond hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head, and a splatter of colorful tattoos down her bare arms. When she came over, at the manager’s signal, Gemma saw that the girl was older than she’d first thought, perhaps in her mid-twenties.
“Ros,” said the manager. “These are the ladies from the police.”
Gemma moved in close enough to hear Melody ask, “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“There’s an empty table back by the kitchen,” the barmaid answered. “Quieter there.” Turning, she led them through a maze of rooms into, much to Gemma’s surprise, a little indoor garden. It was quieter and cooler, and the three of them squeezed themselves round a small table in the corner.
“The ferny grotto, I call it,” said Ros. Her accent, Gemma realized, was educated and middle class.
“Theresa said you wanted to talk to me about Jenny Hart,” the girl continued, looking at them earnestly. Gemma added forthright and confident as bonuses to the accent, and her hopes rose.
She felt no embarrassment for her bias—she’d been on the job long enough to know that a middle-class witness was automatically given more credence. And, she thought, studying Ros more closely, if you put a long-sleeved blouse on the girl, she might clean up very well.
“So you remember Jenny Hart?” asked Melody.
“Of course I do,” Ros said with some asperity. “She came in two or three nights a week, at least, and I served her if I could.” She shook her head, looking stricken. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard what had happened to her.”
“How did you come to know her name?” asked Gemma, forgetting for a moment that she was playing the subordinate role.
Melody gave her a quelling glance and added, “It’s a busy place, and you must serve hundreds of customers in a day.”
“Not that many women come in regularly on their own. And she was friendly, always had a nice word for all the staff.”
“Did you know she was a police officer?” Melody asked.
“Not until one night a few months before she was—before she died. There was a bit of aggro—couple of blokes old enough to know better started a row over a football match. Jenny stood up—straight as a die after two martinis, mind you—pulled out her warrant card and gave them their marching orders.” Ros smiled at the recollection. “They marched, too. She was not going to be messed about and they could tell.
“After that, we talked more. I was thinking of going into criminal justice, and she was nice enough to give me advice.”
“And did you?” asked Melody. “Go into criminal justice?”
“No. I’m reading law.”
Gemma didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or horrified. The fact that this young woman was clever was certainly in their favor—the fact that she would understand what she was getting into might not be.
Melody opened her bag, and Gemma’s heart sped up. Even though they’d moved away from the rooms with open fires, she suddenly felt much too warm.
“Ros,” said Melody. “You told the police that Jenny was here the night she was killed. And that you thought you saw her talking to a man. Can you tell me about that?”
Ros nodded. “It was a Saturday—well, you know that. Place was packed to the gills. I served Jenny a couple of martinis at the bar. Vodka with just a whisper of vermouth, and a twist—just the way she liked them. I remember she looked tired.” Ros shifted in her chair and crossed her tattooed forearms across her chest.
“People were shoving to get served, so after the second drink, she moved back a bit. Then I saw her talking to a bloke.” Ros frowned. “I got the impression that she knew him—I’m not sure why. When you work in a bar and you watch people all the time, you
just get a feel for the body language. This was different from a stranger pickup.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I think this guy bought her a drink, but I’m not sure. I didn’t serve him. Then I lost sight of them. That’s all,” Ros added, sounding as if she was terribly disappointed in herself. “When the police came to talk to us after they’d found her body, I couldn’t believe it. If I’d only paid more attention—”
“Stop,” said Melody. “Right now. You mustn’t even begin to think that way. Nothing that happened was your fault. But you can help us now.” She leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “You weren’t able to give the police much of a description, even with the help of the sketch artist.”
Ros shook her head in obvious frustration. “He was just . . . ordinary. And I wasn’t trying to remember.” She thought for a moment. “I know he was older—he reminded me of my uncle John. Fair-skinned, hair receding a bit. Slightly stocky build. Not tall. But when the police artist put together features, nothing gelled.”
“Had you seen him before?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again? It’s been six months.”
Ros looked at Melody, then Gemma, her expression anxious now. “I don’t know. But I think so. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.”
“Okay,” said Melody. “Not to worry. I’m going to show you a photo of a group of men. You tell us if any of them look familiar. It’s that easy.”
From her bag, she took the photo of Angus Craig in a group of other senior officers, all in evening dress. There was nothing about him, Gemma thought, that stood out. Unless you knew.
She realized she was holding her breath.
Taking the photo carefully, Ros studied it, her eyes flicking from one side of the picture to the other. Then she stared straight at it and gave a little gasp.
No Mark upon Her Page 28
