No Mark Upon Her (4 page)
“Did not,” said Toby. At his grand age, he
considered himself superior in all ways.
Duncan came into the kitchen. Tall, tousled, and as
red-cheeked from the cold as the children, he looked quite as damp as Toby, if a
bit cleaner. Glancing out the window, Gemma saw that the rain was coming down
harder than ever.
“You, sport,” Duncan said severely to Toby, “are
incorrigible.” Pointing at the muddy boot prints on the floor, he pulled some
towels from the kitchen roll and handed them over. “Apologize to Auntie Winnie
and mop up. And then”—looking almost as impish as Toby, he grinned at Gemma and
abandoned his policeman voice—“Dad’s ordered us all outside, rain or not. He’s
stage-managing at his most annoyingly coy, and he’s roped in Jack and Kit.
Knowing Dad, I shudder to think.” He rolled his eyes for emphasis, and Gemma
couldn’t help but smile. She had adored Duncan’s dad from the moment she’d met
him, but Hugh Kincaid was not always the most practical of souls.
“He says he has a surprise for us,” Duncan went on.
“And that we are absolutely, positively, going to love it. I think we’d better
go see what he’s done.”
T
he
rain came in waves that spattered against the windows of the converted boatshed
like buckshot.
Kieran Connolly clenched his jaw, trying to ignore
the sound, but the rumble of thunder over Henley made him shudder. It was just
rain, he told himself, and he would be fine. Just fine, and the shed had
withstood worse.
It was one of several such structures scrunched
between the summer cottages on the small islands that dotted the Thames between
Henley and Marsh Lock. Built of wood siding on a concrete pad, it had not been
meant for human habitation, but it suited Kieran well enough. The single space
provided him with a workshop, a camp bed, a woodstove, a primus, and a primitive
toilet and shower. There was nothing more he needed—although he suspected that
if Finn had been given his choice, he’d have preferred someplace that allowed
him a run in the park without having to motor from island to shore in the little
skiff Kieran kept tied up at his small floating dock.
Not that Finn couldn’t have swum the distance. A
Labrador retriever, he was bred to it, but Kieran had taught him not to go in
the water without permission. Otherwise, Kieran wouldn’t have been able to leave
him when he rowed, as he did every morning, or he’d be sculling up and down the
Thames with a big black dog paddling in his wake.
Almost every morning, Kieran amended, when the
thunder rumbled again. He didn’t go out in storms. The boatshed shook in another
gust and the windows rattled in concert. He jerked involuntarily, pain searing
his hand. Glancing down, he saw a spot of blood on the fine sandpaper he’d been
using to smooth a fiberglass patch on the old Aylings double he had upside down
on trestles. He’d sanded his own damned knuckles. Shit. His hands were shaking
again.
Finn whined and pushed his blunt snout against
Kieran’s knee. The thunder cracked again and the shed vibrated like a
kettledrum. Or an artillery barrage.
“It’s just rain, boy.” Kieran heard the tremor in
his voice and grimaced in disgust. Some reassurance he was, sweating and quaking
like a leaf. Pathetic. Making an effort to steady his hand, he folded the
sandpaper and set it on his worktable.
But even if he could make his hand obey, he had no
command over his knees. When they threatened to buckle, he staggered two steps
to the wall and slid down with his back against it. He felt as if the very air
were a massive weight, pressing him down, squeezing his lungs. Finn nuzzled him
and climbed half into his lap, and as he wrapped his arms round the dog, he
couldn’t tell which of them whimpered. “Sorry, boy, sorry,” he whispered. “It’ll
be okay. We’ll be okay. It’s just a little rain.”
He repeated to himself the rational explanation for
his physical distress.
Damage to middle ear, due to
shelling. Swift changes in barometric pressure may affect
equilibrium.
It was a familiar mantra.
The army doctors had told him that, as if he hadn’t
known it himself. They’d also told him that he’d been heavily concussed, and
that he’d suffered some loss of hearing. “Not enough,” he said aloud, and
cackled a little wildly at his own humor. Finn licked his chin and Kieran hugged
him harder. “It will pass,” he whispered, meaning to reassure them both.
The room reeled, bringing a wave of nausea so
intense he had to swallow against it. That, too, was related to his middle ear,
or so they’d told him. An inconvenience, they’d said. He slid a little farther
down the wall, and Finn shifted the rest of his eighty-pound weight into his
lap.
So inconvenient, along with the shakes and the
sweats and the screaming in his sleep, that they’d discharged him.
Bye-bye, Kieran Connolly, Combat Medical Technician, Class 1,
and here’s your bit of decoration and your nice pension.
He’d used
the pension to buy the boatshed.
He’d rowed at Henley in his teens, crewing for a
London club. To a kid from Tottenham who’d stumbled across the Lea Rowing Club
quite by accident, Henley had seemed like paradise.
It was just him and his dad, then. His mum had
scarpered when he was a baby, but it was not something his dad ever talked
about. They’d lived in a terraced street that had hung on to respectability by a
thread, his dad repairing and building furniture in the shop below the flat.
Kieran, white and Irish in a part of north London where that made him a
minority, had been well on his way to life as a petty thug.
Kieran stroked Finn’s warm muzzle and closed his
eyes, trying to use the memory to quell the panic, the way the army therapist
had taught him.
It had been hot, that long ago Saturday in June,
just after his fourteenth birthday. He’d stolen a bike on a dare, ridden it in a
wild, heart-hammering escape through the streets of Tottenham to the path that
ran down along the River Lea. And then, with the trail clear behind him, his
legs burning and the sun beating down on his head, he’d seen the single shells
on the water.
The sound of the storm faded from his consciousness
as the memory drew him in.
He’d stopped, gazing at the water, all thought of
pursuit and punishment gone in an instant. The boats were stillness in motion,
graceful as dragonflies, skimming the surface of the mercury-gleaming river, and
the sight had gripped and squeezed something inside him that he hadn’t known
existed.
All that afternoon, he’d watched, and in the
dimness of the evening, he’d pedaled slowly back to Tottenham and returned the
bike, ignoring the taunts of his mates. The next Saturday he’d gone back to the
river, drawn by something he couldn’t articulate, a longing that until then had
only teased the feathery edges of his imagination.
Another Saturday, and another. He learned that the
boat place was called the Lea Rowing Club. He began to name the boats; singles,
doubles, pairs, quads, fours, and the eights—if the singles had made him think
of dragonflies, the eights were giant insects, moving in a rhythm that seemed
both alien and familiar and that made him think of the pictures of Roman galleys
he’d seen in school history books.
And they talked to him, the oarsmen, when they
noticed him hanging about. He was tall, even then. Awkward, scrawny,
black-haired, pale-skinned even at summer’s height—all in all, not a very
prepossessing specimen. But although he hadn’t realized it then, his inches had
made him rowing material, and they’d been assessing his potential.
After a bit, they’d let him help load the boats
onto the trailers or lift them back onto the trestles that waited in the
boatyard like cradles. One day a man tossed him a cloth and nodded at a dripping
single. “Wipe it down, if you want,” he’d said. Other days, it was a wrench to
adjust the rigging, oil for the seat runners, filler for the dents in the
fiberglass.
By that August, he’d become the club dogsbody, his
mates forgotten, his dull terraced street subsumed by the river. He learned that
the burly-shouldered man who gave him chores was a coach. And when one day the
coach had looked him levelly in the eyes and handed him a pair of oars, the
world had opened like an oyster, and Kieran Connolly had seen that he might be
something other than a poor Irish kid with no future.
The Lea—and rowing—had given him that. His coach
had encouraged him to join the army. He could row, Coach said, and get an
education, too. And so he had done, training as a medic, rowing in eights and
fours, and then in the single scull that had been his true love since that very
first day on the Lea.
What neither he nor his coach had foreseen in those
halcyon days before 9/11 was that the world would change, and that Kieran would
see four tours of duty in Iraq. On the last, his unit had been taken out by an
improvised explosive device, and he had been the only survivor.
There’d been nothing left for him in Tottenham when
he came home. His dad had been taken by cancer, the house sold to pay his debts,
although Kieran had managed to salvage his father’s woodworking tools. After
that, he couldn’t bear to go back to the Lea, to meet anyone he had known, or
who—worse still—might offer him sympathy.
So he’d bought an old Land Rover and drifted round
the south of England, sleeping in a tent, always drawn by the rivers, but unable
to imagine what he might do or where he might fit.
Then, early one May morning, two months after his
discharge, he’d stood on Henley Bridge, watching the scullers, feeling as
insubstantial as a ghost.
Later he’d walked through town, intending to buy
some supplies, and he’d seen the advert for the boatshed in an estate agent’s
window. It had seemed like a spar held out to a drowning man.
A few weeks later, now the proud owner of the
one-room shed, he’d moved in his few possessions, bought a used single shell,
and begun to row for the first time in years. It was, he thought, like riding a
bike—once learned, never forgotten. His body, still healing, had protested, but
he’d kept on, and slowly he’d grown stronger.
There was a small fixed dock that allowed him to
tie up the little motor skiff he’d bought, and the boatshed’s small floating
raft gave him a private place from which to launch the shell. He’d had no
interest in rowing from a club, or competing again. He rowed for sanity now, not
sport.
But it was impossible to row on the Thames at
Henley every day without encountering other rowers, and a few had recognized him
from his competition days. A few others remembered that he had a knack for
fixing boats, and as the months passed, he’d found himself taking on a repair
here and there.
The jobs helped fill his days between morning row
and evening run, and when he wasn’t working on someone else’s boat, he’d begun
very tentatively to work on a design for a wooden racing single. He was, after
all, a furniture maker’s son. To him, wooden boats had a life and grace not
found in fiberglass, and the project was in a way a tribute to his father.
But he’d had no one to talk to but himself, and
that small voice was little buffer against the memories that thronged inside his
head and kept him awake in the night.
And then one day he’d gone to pick up a boat that
needed patching, and he’d seen the pen full of puppies in the owner’s
garden.
He’d come away with the boat, and Finn.
That fat, black, wriggly puppy had, in the two
years since, given Kieran a reason to get up in the morning. Finn was more than
a companion, he was Kieran’s partner, and that union had given Kieran something
he’d thought gone from his life—a useful job.
Not that Tavie didn’t deserve credit, too, but if
it weren’t for Finn, he’d never have met Tavie.
Finn, as if aware that he was the subject of
Kieran’s ruminations, spread his back toes in a luxurious doggy stretch and
settled his heavy head a bit more comfortably on Kieran’s knee.
Shifting position, Kieran grimaced at the prickle
of pins and needles. His legs had gone to sleep. And, he realized, the storm was
passing. The rain was pattering now, not ricocheting, the shed was no longer
shaking in the wind, and his nausea had passed.
“Get off, you great beast,” he said, groaning, but
he stroked Finn’s ears while he gingerly flexed his legs to get the circulation
back.
He felt another tingle, but this time it was his
phone, vibrating in his back pocket as it binged the arrival of a text.
“Shift it, mate,” he said, gently moving the dog
before scrabbling for his phone as he stood.
The text was from Tavie—she was the call-out
coordinator that morning.
MISPER. ADULT FEMALE ROWER. PLS AND LKP LEANDER.
REPORT AVAILABILITY FOR SEARCH.
Kieran’s translation was now as automatic as
breathing.
Missing person . . . Both the Place
Last Seen and Last Known Position, Leander Club
. He felt a jolt of
adrenaline, and Finn, up now, whined and danced in anticipation. He recognized
the sound of a text, and he loved working almost as much as he loved Kieran.
“Right, boy,” said Kieran. “We’ve got a job.” And
thank God the worst of the storm was over, and he was steady enough on his feet
to report in. But he didn’t like the sound of this, not one bit.
In the year and a half he’d been working with
Thames Valley Search and Rescue, they’d conducted more searches involving the
river than he could count. That came with their territory. But they’d never had
a call out for a missing rower.
Humans constantly shed small cornflake-shaped dead skin cells known as
rafts
, which are discarded at the rate of about 40,000 a minute. Each raft carries bacteria and vapor representing the unique, individual scent of the person. This is the scent sought by the trained dog.
—American Rescue Dog Association
Search and Rescue Dogs: Training the K-9 Hero
T
avie had designated the Leander Club as the team call-out point. As well as being the last place the victim had been seen, it provided a centralized location for the search operations, including access to power and other necessary facilities for the team.
When Kieran turned into Leander’s drive, he saw that the other team members had begun to assemble where the lane dead-ended at the meadow. Tavie’s shiny black Toyota 4×4, with the distinctive
THAMES VALLEY SEARCH AND RESCUE
logo emblazoned on its side, was pulled up close to the arched club entrance, flanked by two Thames Valley police cars.
Tavie stood beside the truck, her cap of blond hair blazing like a beacon above her black uniform, waving a handheld radio for emphasis as she talked to the uniformed constables. Sharp, high yips came from the rear of the truck. Tosh, Tavie’s German shepherd bitch, was expressing her impatience.
Kieran saw other team members’ sturdy vehicles parked near Tavie’s Toyota, and when he glanced in his rearview mirror, more were pulling in behind him. All held dog crates.
He found a spot up against the car park fence, and as soon as he switched off his engine, Finn began to bark, answering the chorus from the other vehicles. “Steady on, boy,” Kieran told him. Time was of the essence in a missing persons search, but so was preparation. He had taken time to have a quick wash before changing into his uniform, and had fed Finn some dry food and himself a protein bar. It could be a long day and they would need all their energy.
As he checked his gear one last time and climbed out of the truck, he saw a tall, slender man in a sports jacket come through the archway that led to the club entrance and approach Tavie, his gestures agitated.
At first Kieran thought he might be the club’s manager, but as he drew nearer, he could see the distress in the man’s fine-boned face. This was obviously personal.
When he reached the group, Tavie turned to him. “Kieran, this is Mr. Atterton. He’s reported his ex-wife missing. She took a boat out from the club yesterday evening and hasn’t returned.” Tavie’s voice was matter-of-fact, the tone she used to reassure relatives.
Kieran studied Atterton, trying to pin down a nagging sense of familiarity. The man was probably in his mid-thirties, fit, with powerful shoulders that had been disguised from a distance by the elegant cut of his jacket. Where had he seen him? His uneasiness grew.
Atterton turned to him. “Miss Larssen says you’re a rower.” His accent immediately pegged him as upper class, university educated. “So you’ll understand. I know it sounds mad, taking a shell out at dusk. But Becca wouldn’t have been careless. She’s too experienced.”
Kieran’s heart squeezed tight in his chest, as if all the vague dread had crystallized instantly in one spot. “Becca?”
“Rebecca. Rebecca Meredith. My wife—my ex-wife—kept her maiden name. That’s how she was known as a rower. And now she’s training again. For the Olympics.”
“Becca,” Kieran said again, through lips suddenly gone numb. A hole had opened in the fabric of the universe, and he felt himself falling through it.
“K
ieran, are you all right?” Tavie had waited until they were on their own, and in position, before she asked.
She’d deployed two teams on either side of the river, each team consisting of two handlers and two dogs, to cover the area between Henley and Hambleden Lock.
Once she’d convinced Mr. Atterton that he would be more useful staying behind at the club in case his ex-wife rang or returned, she and Kieran had driven separately down Remenham Lane, then over the farm track that gave the closest access to the river path and their segment.
They’d stopped at the last fence that lay between them and the Thames meadow. Beyond the meadow she could see the river, bisected by Temple Island, which looked absurdly manicured against the shaggy Buckinghamshire bank on the river’s far side. They would take the dogs through the gate into the meadow, boggy from the morning’s downpour, and start downriver on foot from there.
Fortunately, the morning’s bad weather seemed to have discouraged the usual contingent of dog walkers, joggers, and pram pushers that used the Thames Path, and once the search had been instituted, the police had cordoned off the path between Henley and Hambleden on both sides of the river. This would reduce the number of confusing scents for the dogs.
Opening Tosh’s crate, Tavie snapped on her lead. Tosh jumped down lightly and sat, half on Tavie’s foot, looking up at her in quivering anticipation. She was eager to go to work.
Tavie glanced back at Kieran, who still hadn’t responded. He was pulling his gear out of the back of his old green Land Rover—pack, radio, water bottle, Finn’s lead, the squeaky ball that was Finn’s reward for a find—all automatic motions—and he didn’t look at her.
“Kieran, are you sure you’re up to this? I can do this on my own if the storm—”
“I’m fine,” he said, still not meeting her eyes, but something in his voice made Finn stop whining to get out of his crate. The dog gazed at his master, his lip wrinkled in a puzzled expression Tavie would have found comical if she hadn’t been worried.
She knew that Kieran had bad days, and that he was uncomfortable with storms. He’d never said much about his past, and as for the present, she knew only that he fixed boats in the little shed on the island above Henley Bridge, and that he rowed.
But in spite of his reticence, they’d become friends. A chance meeting in the park had led her to offer him help in training Finn, then to her suggesting that Kieran join the SAR team. At first he’d resisted the idea, but as Finn grew, Kieran began to admit that the dog needed a job. Tavie never said she thought that it was Kieran who really needed a reason to get up in the morning, but as he began to ask her to recount the details of searches and finds, she saw a spark come back into his eyes.
Before his first training session with the group, however, she’d stopped, moved by some impulse to protect him. “Kieran, you know a good many of our finds are deceased. Will that be a problem for you?”
He’d given her a crooked smile. “Not as long as they’re strangers.”
His answer came back to her now. She touched his arm. “Kieran, I have to ask. You turned white as a ghost when you heard this woman’s name. She’s a rower, you’re a rower, and I think it’s a pretty small world here in Henley. Do you know her?”
M
elody Talbot gazed at the bow-fronted, terraced house, furrowing her brow. “It’s, um—it’s very—suburban.” Then, seeing her companion’s crestfallen expression, she amended. “It’s nice, Doug, really it is. It’s just not exactly single-guy territory, Putney, is it?” She gave him a calculating glance. “Unless you have plans you’re not sharing, mate?”
Doug Cullen flushed to the roots of his fair hair. “No. It’s just—I wanted something as different as possible from the Euston flat. It’s an easy commute to the Yard. I wanted to be near the river and the rowing clubs. And it was a good deal.” He surveyed the house with obvious pride. “Just needs a bit of fixing up, is all.”
Gazing at the peeling paint on the window frames and the door, and the damp stains in the plaster, Melody suspected that might be an understatement. “You’ve actually bought it, then?”
“Signed the last papers an hour ago.” Doug fished a set of keys from his pocket and held them up like a trophy.
Melody had been surprised when he’d rung her at Notting Hill Station that morning, asking her if she could meet him in Putney for lunch. She knew he’d been flat hunting. And Gemma had told her that Duncan intended to take a few days’ holiday before starting his official family leave, so she’d supposed that Doug, as Duncan’s sergeant, might be at a bit of a loose end. She hadn’t expected to be told that he’d taken the plunge into homeownership.
“You’re full of surprises today. I never thought of you as the DIY type.” She’d never thought of Doug as the athletic type either, although he’d told her one of the reasons he’d settled on Putney was because he wanted to take up the rowing he hadn’t done since school. When she’d driven across Putney Bridge, she’d seen a lone sculler working his way upriver, and hadn’t been able to picture Doug huffing and puffing in sweaty rowing gear. She’d never seen him exert more effort than it took to attack a keyboard.
“I can paint as well as the next bloke,” he said, sounding a little insulted. “And as for the rest, there are loads of books, and the Internet . . .”
Melody had no doubt that Doug could find out how to fix things—his research skills rivaled her own—but she’d no idea if he had the manual aptitude. Reading about pipe wrenches and actually using one were entirely different propositions, at least in her limited experience. She wasn’t exactly the DIY type either.
“I want to see you in your workman’s overall.” She grinned and hooked her arm through his, earning a startled glance. “Come on, then. Show me the goods.” A snake of wind eddied down the quiet residential road, swirling the brown leaves in the gutters and lifting the hair on Melody’s neck. Although the terraced houses blocked any view of the river to the north, they were near enough that she imagined she could smell its dank, earthy scent.
Releasing Doug’s arm so that she could turn up her coat collar, she could have sworn she saw a fleeting look of relief cross his face.
She chided herself for teasing him. She suspected he wasn’t comfortable with physical contact, and she was not usually demonstrative herself. But there was something that seemed to goad her into pushing his boundaries.
They’d developed an odd sort of friendship in these last few months, and friendship in general was something that it seemed neither of them was very good at. She wondered, in fact, if he hadn’t been able to think of anyone else with whom he could share his new acquisition.
Melody had always been guarded in her relationships. When she was younger, she’d never been sure if people liked her for herself or were just sucking up to her because of her father. Then, after she’d joined the police, she hadn’t wanted to let anyone get close because she’d been afraid of being
rejected
because of her dad.
But Gemma had learned the truth, as had Doug Cullen, and then Melody had gone to Duncan. Although she didn’t work directly with Duncan, their friendship had made her feel that he was the senior officer to whom she most owed the truth.
When Duncan had heard her story, he’d given her an assessing look before nodding once. “Your family is no one else’s business,” he’d said, “as long as you don’t make it so.” That had been that. The revelation had given Melody, for what seemed like the first time, the opportunity to be herself. And it had changed her relationship with Doug Cullen in some indefinable way.
“It’s two up and three down, basically,” said Doug, leading the way up the steps to the front door. “But there’s a garden.”
The door, in spite of its dilapidated frame, had some nice Victorian stained glass in pale greens and golds. When they stepped inside and Doug closed the door behind them, the watery sun came through the panes, making Melody think of the light in a spring wood. The original black-and-white-tiled floor was intact, and a staircase led up to what Melody assumed were the bedrooms.
Doug motioned her forward with a little theatrical bow, the light from the stained glass glinting off his glasses and giving his blond hair a greenish tint. “My humble abode.”
To the left behind the stairs, Melody saw a cupboard, and tucked next to that, a small toilet. Beyond that a door led into a tiny galley kitchen.
But on the right-hand side of the hall, two adjacent doors opened into the two rooms that ran the length of that side of the house. When she walked into the front room, she saw that the wall between the two rooms had been partially removed, letting light flood straight through the house, and in the rear, French doors opened onto the garden.
“Oh,” she said, on a breath of involuntary surprise. “It’s lovely. Small, but lovely.”
Doug nodded, flushing again with obvious pleasure at her response. “There’s a full bath upstairs, and I’ll use one room for the bedroom and another for an office. The kitchen needs new cupboards and worktops. And in here”—he waved a proprietary hand at the living areas—“a new carpet, and a bit of paint, of course.”
“Not going to stick with magnolia, then?” Melody asked, teasing. The walls were the color of curdled cream, with lighter patches where pictures had hung. Both sitting and dining room had fireplace surrounds that looked original, but the interiors had been boarded over.
Doug shuddered. “No. And definitely not gray. I’ve had enough gray to last a lifetime.”
“You could use the colors in the stained glass,” Melody said, considering. “With this light, it would be lovely. And you’ll have to put in some gas fires.” Melody walked to the back door and looked out. Steps led down to an oval of broken paving stones. Beyond that was a weedy patch of lawn surrounded on three sides by neglected beds.
Melody, who could live anywhere she chose if she accepted more of her father’s help, felt a stir of envy. Not that there was anything wrong with her mansion flat in Notting Hill, except that it felt nothing like a home. It was also on the top floor of her building, its only access to the outdoors a tiny balcony. And lately she had developed an unexpected urge to get her hands in the dirt, to smell growing things.
“I could help with the garden, if you like,” she offered, a bit hesitantly, turning back to him. “In the spring.”
“Have you ever in your life worked in a garden?” There was a hint of mockery in Doug’s voice.
“I suspect I know more about gardening than you do about painting and plumbing,” she said, equably enough. “I used to follow my grandparents’ gardener in Bucks around like a shadow. How hard can it be, compost and bulbs and things?” She studied him. “What about you? You grew up in St. Alban’s, didn’t you? Suburban mecca. Surely you must have had a garden.”
