No Mark Upon Her (9 page)

And he was not going to get home anytime soon.

Chapter Six

You make your own success in the single scull. You win or lose by your own toughness. You alone are responsible for the outcome of the race. The sheer, unadulterated pleasure of winning a single sculling race, regardless of the level, from novice to elite, is enough to keep you training for another three years
.

—Brad Alan Lewis

Assault on Lake Casitas

“W
ait,” Kincaid said. “Back up a bit. You’re telling me that Rebecca Meredith was training for the Olympics? But she wasn’t a member of the Leander crew.”

“Didn’t have to be,” Milo answered. “Becca was a member of the club. She could represent Leander in a race. But even that wasn’t necessary. Anyone can compete in an Olympic trial.”

Cullen frowned for a moment, then his face cleared. “Brad Lewis.”

Milo Jachym was already nodding in agreement. Kincaid felt as if he were playing table tennis without the ball. “What are you talking about?”

“Brad Alan Lewis,” Cullen explained. “He won gold in double sculls at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. And he did it from completely outside the system, and with next to no financial backing.”

“And Becca is—was”—Milo’s lips tightened in a spasm of distress—“not dissimilar in character. Stubborn. Obsessive. Determined to do things her way. And like Lewis, she knew it was her last opportunity.”

“But you said her ex-husband was furious when he found out she was training. Why, if she really did have a chance at something that big?”

“I— He was concerned about her safety, I assumed, because she was going out so late. But it was the only way she could row every day.”

“Unless,” Kincaid said thoughtfully, “she quit the job. And that—”

The phone in his pocket vibrated once, then again—an incoming call. Irritating as the interruption was, he couldn’t afford to let it go.

He didn’t recognize the number on the display, but he knew DI Singla’s voice immediately. “Superintendent, there’s a man at Rebecca Meredith’s cottage,” said Singla. “He’s threatening the constable I put on watch there. Do you want me to have him picked up? He says he’s her husband.”

“Y
ou are an absolute dear.” Gemma stretched her legs out under the kitchen table and raised her glass to Melody in salute. Melody had not only arrived with a very nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, but had picked up pizza, dripping with olive oil and garlic, from Sugo’s, Gemma’s favorite Italian bistro at Notting Hill Gate.

“Good thing I left the car at the flat,” Melody said, pouring herself another generous measure. “And if I come across any vampires on the walk home, they’ll take one whiff of me and run the other way.” She blew out a breath, as if testing her theory.

Melody lived in a mansion block on Kensington Park Road, and declared that the half-mile walk between her flat and Duncan and Gemma’s house in St. John’s Gardens provided just the right amount of exercise after an overindulgence in food and drink.

“Do you suppose garlic has a calming effect on children, too?” Gemma asked. “I think they’re probably related to vampires.”

By the time they’d reached home, Toby had been overexcited, and Charlotte even more clingy and fretful. While Toby had refused to sit still, dancing around the table with his slice of pizza, teasing the dogs, the cat, and Charlotte, Charlotte had agreed to eat her supper only if held in Gemma’s lap. Kit, unusually unsociable, had grabbed half a pizza and disappeared upstairs, plate in one hand and phone in the other.

“I can do the washing-up,” offered Melody. “Dab hand in the kitchen.”

Gemma considered. “You know, I’ve never actually seen you cook. But you get top votes for deliveryperson.”

“I can cook,” Melody protested, grinning. “Um, cheese, biscuits, wine . . .” She furrowed her brow, then shrugged. “Well, maybe not so much. But I really can wield a mean Fairy Liquid.” She started to stand, but Gemma waved her back into her chair.

“It’s only pizza boxes. Easily done when the kids are in bed.” Knowing bedtime would be an ordeal and wanting to enjoy her visit with Melody, Gemma had bribed the little ones with the promise of a video in the sitting room. Once she’d convinced Toby that he really did not need to watch
Peter Pan
for the hundredth time, she’d settled them down with
The Lion King
and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Now she could hear Toby singing along tunelessly.

“The West End in his future, for certain,” said Melody, and they both giggled.

“Only if he can swashbuckle,” Gemma said, meditating on Toby’s possibly brilliant career. “But maybe, if I’m lucky, he’ll put Charlotte to sleep, and not just future audiences.”

She thought her friend looked unusually relaxed. Melody had changed into jeans, but still wore the bright pink cardigan she’d had on earlier, and her cheeks were flushed from taking the dogs for a quick outing while Gemma was settling the kids.

“And that would be a blessing? Putting Charlotte to sleep?”

“Some nights. Most nights,” Gemma admitted. “And even when she does go to sleep, she wakes up with bad dreams.”

“Does she dream about her parents, then?” Melody asked.

Gemma swirled the wine in her glass. “Sometimes. Sometimes she calls out for them.” She didn’t want to confess, as she had to Winnie, how helpless and inadequate she felt when Charlotte woke up sobbing, “Mummy! Daddy!” Only recently had she begun calling out for Gemma as well, but Gemma wasn’t sure that was an improvement.

Melody glanced towards the sitting room and lowered her voice. “I’d think that was pretty normal, under the circumstances. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a child to lose her parents, her home, everything familiar . . .”

“The odd thing,” Gemma answered slowly, “is that except for the separation anxiety, during the day it seems as if she’s adjusting quite well. She does talk about her mum and dad in the present tense, as if they were just away somewhere, but she doesn’t ask to go home.”

“Have you taken her back there?”

Gemma shook her head. “No. We didn’t think that was a good idea. But Louise is getting ready to put the house up for sale, and we wanted her to have some familiar things.”

Louise Phillips had been Charlotte’s father’s law partner and was now the executor of the estate.

Although art dealers—including Pippa Nightingale, who had represented Sandra Gilles, Charlotte’s mother—were begging for the textile collages that remained in Sandra’s studio, Lou Phillips had decided she would store all Sandra’s works and her notebooks until Charlotte was of age and could sell or keep them as she saw fit. Her mother’s art would be a legacy for Charlotte’s future, and the money from the sale of the Fournier Street house, which should be considerable, would go into a fund to pay for her education.

“So I took her to the park one day when the boys were at school,” Gemma went on, “and asked her to play a game. She had to close her eyes and name her favorite thing from every room in her old house.”

“I can’t think of a thing I’d save from my flat even in a fire,” Melody said, sounding wistful. “It’s not like this house.”

Gemma looked round at her cheerful blue and yellow kitchen, with her treasured Clarice Cliff tea set on the shelf above the cooker, then glanced into the dining room, where her piano held pride of place.

She’d loved this house from the moment Duncan had shown it to her, when she’d thought their lives held a very different future. And it seemed to her, oddly, that in making Charlotte feel at home, she had grown deeper into the house as well, learning every nook and cranny, every creak and sigh, as if they were etched in her bones.

But the house belonged not to them, but to Denis Childs’s sister and her family, and Gemma’s love for it was always tinged with the ache of impending loss. One day they would have to give it up.

“What did Charlotte choose?” asked Melody.

Gemma smiled at the recollection. “From the kitchen, an old egg cup with a chicken-foot base. I imagine her mum picked it up at a street stall. It’s hideous, and Charlotte adores it. From the sitting room, she chose the chaise longue.”

Charlotte had called it the “crazy chase,” and it had taken Gemma a moment to work out that she meant the chintz crazy-quilt chaise longue, but she, too, loved the whimsical piece that had seemed such an expression of Sandra Gilles’s personality.

When they’d begun officially fostering Charlotte, they’d had to meet the requirements imposed by social services, which included moving Toby back in with Kit so that Charlotte could have a room of her own—the room that had been meant as a nursery for the baby they had lost.

They’d brought Charlotte’s bedroom furniture from the house in Fournier Street, and there had been enough space in her new room for the crazy chase as well. When Gemma had told her they could paint her room any color she liked, Charlotte had chosen not a little girl’s pink, or blue, or even lilac, but a deep saffron yellow that picked out the dominant color in the quilted chaise and glowed like distilled sunlight on the walls. The child had without doubt inherited her artist mother’s eye.

“From her parents’ bedroom she wanted her mother’s petticoats,” Gemma continued, “although I brought the colored-glass bud vases that Sandra kept on the chair rail as well.

“And from Sandra’s studio, Charlotte wanted the duck pencils. When I pointed out that she already had them, she asked for the painting of the red horse that hung over her mother’s desk.”

“That’s not one of Sandra’s?”

“No. In fact, it’s signed
LR,
and Duncan said he saw a painting that was almost identical hanging over Lucas Ritchie’s desk in the club in Artillery Lane.”

“Ah, so you think it was done by the delectable Mr. Ritchie?”

“Maybe. It would be a nice connection for Charlotte to have with her mother’s old friend. Someday we’ll have to ask him.”

“I’ll go with you,” Melody offered, and Gemma laughed.

“I didn’t realize you fancied him,” she said. Lucas Ritchie managed a private club in Whitechapel, but had gone to art college with Charlotte’s mum. He was also tall, blond, wickedly good-looking, and apparently quite well off.

“I’m female. I’m not attached. And I’m not blind.” Melody took a big swallow of wine to punctuate her assertions, coughed, and wiped at her watering eyes.

“I can see that,” Gemma said, still grinning. “What I don’t know is what you were doing with Doug Cullen today.”

“Ah.” Melody was beginning to look slightly owlish. “He invited me to see his new house. In Putney. It needs some DIY. And I’ve offered to help him with the garden.”

Raising her eyebrows in surprise, Gemma asked, “Have you ever done any gardening?” Melody, as far as she knew, had grown up in a town house in Kensington, in a household that lacked for nothing. If it had had a garden, it would have come with gardener attached.

“No. But it should be an adventure.”

Gemma looked at her friend, bemused. She could imagine few things more unlikely than Doug Cullen doing home improvements while Melody mucked about in the garden. “You must be desperate for excitement.”

“I keep telling you, work hasn’t been the same with you gone, boss,” Melody retorted. “And speaking of the job”—she straightened up rather carefully and set her now-empty glass on the table—“there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve put in for my sergeant’s course.”

“Oh.” Gemma felt an unexpected prick of loss. Not that she hadn’t nagged Melody to go for promotion. Not that she’d expected Melody to stay at Notting Hill forever. But promotion would undoubtedly mean Melody would transfer to another station, if not another division, and Gemma realized how much she’d looked forward to working with Melody at Notting Hill again.

Seeing the disappointment on Melody’s face, she pulled herself together and summoned a smile. “Oh, congratulations, Melody. I’m so glad for you. You should have done it ages ago. And you know you’ll do just fine on the exam.”

“I’ve liked working with Sapphire,” Melody said, sounding relieved at Gemma’s approval. “I suppose before you went on leave, I’d been riding on your coattails, and the new job gave me a bit of confidence.”

It was always hard for Gemma to imagine that the daughter of one of the biggest newspaper barons in the country could lack confidence. But Melody had gone against her father’s wishes in even joining the force, and Gemma knew that this decision would have been difficult for her.

“This business today, in Henley,” Melody said, “will it interfere with your starting back next week?”

“Oh, I’m sure we can work out something, if it’s not sorted by then,” Gemma told her, but in fact she’d been worrying all evening about alternative child care if Duncan were to get hung up on this case. They couldn’t count on their friend Wesley Howard, who sometimes nannied for them, for full-time child-minding, and if anything, the events of the day had made her more certain than ever that Charlotte wasn’t ready for nursery school.

“What about the girl who used to be her nanny?” Melody suggested. “Have you kept up with her?”

“Alia?” Gemma frowned, considering a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her. “She’s been to visit a couple of times, and Charlotte is always pleased to see her. Maybe I should give her a ring, just in case . . .”

“Maybe they’ll find the death in Henley was accidental, and Duncan will be off the hook.”

Remembering Rashid’s expression when he was examining the body, Gemma thought she wouldn’t hold her breath. Rashid Kaleem was a good pathologist, and she trusted his instincts. And she was still wondering why Denis Childs had been so insistent that Duncan look into the death. There were other detective superintendents—not on holiday—who could certainly have represented the Met. “Maybe,” she said, trying to muster some conviction.

“The officer whose body they found—did you know her?” Melody asked.

Gemma shook her head. “No. At least the name didn’t ring a bell, and I didn’t actually see her face. But Duncan said she worked out of West London.”

“West London?” Looking suddenly sober, Melody straightened in her chair and pushed her wineglass away. “That’s a bit close to home, isn’t it?”