There was a small, cozy bar on the right, and on the left a more formal restaurant, with starched white tablecloths and linen. Ahead, tasteful antique furniture and wood floors gleamed in the lamplit reception area. Near the desk stood an imposingly hooded cane chair, and Kincaid immediately thought it would make a perfect hiding nook for a child.
“I used to beg my parents to come and stay here whenever I had a race in Henley when I was at school,” Cullen continued, “but they never did.”
Kincaid looked at his partner in surprise. “They never came to watch you row?”
“Not that I can remember,” answered Doug, but his tone was a bit too casual, and Kincaid suspected he’d trodden on sensitive territory. “My dad was busy, and I was never likely to win,” Doug added, shrugging. “And what I really wanted was to be allowed to have a drink in the bar, and pigs were more likely to fly.”
“Well, the drink in the bar can be remedied, at least,” Kincaid said, dropping his voice as the young woman at the desk looked up and smiled at them in welcome. “I’m not sure we can do anything about the flying pigs.”
When they had settled into their respective rooms—Kincaid’s with a four-poster that he would certainly have preferred to share with Gemma—they eschewed the formal dining room and met in the aptly named Snug Bar for drinks and dinner. This, tucked behind the small bar they had seen by the entrance, had dark wood-paneled walls and dark leather furniture, relieved by softly lit bookcases and oil portraits of bewigged men. A fire burned cheerily in the grate.
“An Englishman’s dream,” Kincaid murmured as they chose a low table near the fire. He realized that the dining room at Leander, with its cane-backed furniture, had given him the same teasing impression as this place. There was a hint of the colonial, the cane furniture a reminder of the last vestiges of empire. And there was a very definite sense that generations of entitlement had stamped their imprint on this rich market town on the Thames. The atmosphere would raise his liberal father’s hackles.
But Kincaid was not about to turn up his nose at the steak and mushroom pie, an Englishman’s dream of a dinner, nor at the bottle of Benvulin single malt that he’d spied behind the bar.
When they’d ordered and brought back their drinks, he raised his glass to Doug. “Cheers, mate. To long- delayed pleasures. And to the trials and tribulations of homeownership.”
Looking pleased, Cullen raised his glass, sipped, and promptly turned pink. “Nice whisky,” he said, wiping at his watering eyes. “Bit stout.”
“Sip,” Kincaid suggested. “But first add the tiniest bit of water. Remember your whisky-tasting lessons.”
He took another sip himself, closing his eyes and savoring the heathery-honey-buttery layers of the scotch. Was the trip to Scotland that had introduced him to Benvulin really the last time he and Gemma had been away together without the children? And on that trip they’d been involved in a very distressing case, not on holiday.
This definitely needed to be remedied. Having married Gemma three times, he thought that he should at least be able to give her a honeymoon. Maybe he’d bring her back to the Red Lion, once she was settled into her job again and they could make arrangements for the children.
Their food arrived, and both he and Doug tucked in with the silent single-mindedness of the truly ravenous. When the last bites had been scraped off the plates, Kincaid finished the coffee he’d ordered to chase the whiskies and signed the bill to his room.
“You go enjoy your four-poster,” he told Doug. “Dream of Charles I, but before you do that, see what you can find out about Freddie Atterton for me.” He knew Cullen had come straight to Henley without his laptop, but he had confidence in his partner’s resourcefulness.
He, on the other hand, was regretting a bit too much food as well as the second scotch he’d had during dinner. Now he felt that what he needed was a walk and some fresh air.
After parting company with Doug in the lobby, he left the hotel, hesitating for a moment as he took his bearings from what he remembered of his previous visits to Henley. Unlike Doug, whose recollections of the town seemed a schoolboy’s idyll, his were uncomfortable, pricked with flashes of things better not done and roads not taken.
He thought of the woman they had found in the river and of the neon yellow jacket that had not kept her safe. Had she liked her life here?
Death had erased all character from Rebecca Meredith’s face. He could only form an impression from the glimpses of her he’d seen in the few photos on the shelves in her cottage—and from the emotion he’d seen on the faces of those who had known her.
What had happened to her last night on the river, this strong and competent woman?
Crossing the street, he walked to the middle of the bridge and gazed downstream. The Thames looked dark, fathomless, and he couldn’t imagine going out alone, at dusk, in a fragile slip of a boat.
On the far side of the bridge, a light blinked off in Leander. What were they feeling at the club, he wondered, with the loss of one of their own? How would they react to this evidence of their own mortality?
Tomorrow he would talk to them—friends, crewmates, coaches. And he would need to speak to Becca’s boss and her colleagues at the Met.
For a moment, he paled at the prospect. He felt stained by others’ grief, as if it had steeped into his skin like old tea. He had never, in his more than twenty years of police work, become inured to watching people absorb the shock of death.
He’d hated it as a uniformed plod, as Freddie Atterton had so unflatteringly described the constable. He hated it perhaps even more now.
But then his curiosity took hold, as it always did. He wanted to know who this woman had been, who had liked her, loved her, hated her. He wanted to know how she had died. And if someone was responsible for her death, he wanted to see justice done. This was what kept him in the job.
Walking back to the signal, he stood, watching the green crossing light blink. The Angel on the Bridge beckoned on the upstream side of the bridge, but he wasn’t tempted by the pub. It was the walk up Thames Side that threatened to seduce him.
Was the gallery still there? Might one of Julia Swann’s paintings be displayed in the window? And her flat, a bit farther down, where he had once spent a night—did she still live there?
But no. He shook his head. It was better not to know. He was a married—make that much-married—man now, and the past was best left in the past, without regrets.
And it was time to call his boss.
He was turning back towards the hotel when something caught his eye—a glimpse of a man walking down Hart Street and turning the corner by the pub. Then the Angel blocked the figure from view, but the image had registered.
A tall man, his gait a bit unsteady, a black dog at his side. Even in jeans and jacket rather than the dark uniform, he was instantly recognizable as the SAR handler who’d insisted on going with them to the boat. Kieran. Kieran Connolly.
His behavior had been a bit odd that afternoon, Kincaid thought, and added an interview with Connolly to his mental to-do list.
Shrugging, he returned to the hotel, but he still didn’t feel quite ready to go up to his room. He sat on the iron bench under the hotel’s portico and rang his chief superintendent at home, giving Childs a report on the events of the day.
When he’d related his interview with Atterton, Childs was silent for a moment, as was his usual way. Then, he said, “It would certainly be convenient if it turned out to be the ex-husband.”
“Convenient?”
“Well, you know. Domestic tragedy. Nothing to do with us. Quickly wrapped up.”
Kincaid had to admit he was intrigued by the relationship between Atterton and his ex-wife. It seemed an oddly amicable divorce, and he’d sensed that Freddie Atterton’s grief was real, as was Milo Jachym’s.
Not that he hadn’t known murderers who grieved for their victims, and murderers who could project emotion as convincingly as the most skilled actor. Things were always so much more complicated than they appeared on the surface.
But here . . . there was something else at play, some undercurrent running through this case that he couldn’t pinpoint. He would just have to wait and see what developed.
In the meantime, Childs’s offhand comment made him feel profoundly uneasy. “Sir, why would we think it had something to do with us?”
