No Mark upon Her

She eyed the length of her small sofa. “I’ll sleep down here,” she said. “You can take the bed. It’s a queen- size, so I don’t think your feet will dangle off the end.” The bed was one of the few things she’d kept from the divorce.

Kieran leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. His face looked gaunt in repose, and when he spoke, his voice was heavy with exhaustion. “Tavie, I am not going to take your bed. I appreciate everything you’re doing for me. I really do.” He touched an exploratory fingertip to the bandage on his forehead, then winced. “But that’s too much. I’ll sleep on the floor. And as soon as they’ll let me, I’ll go back to the shed. I can buy another camp bed if I need to.”

Remembering the flames and aware of how much damage the pumped water would have caused, Tavie shook her head. “Kieran, there may not be anything le—”

“I have to see.” He sat up, urgency back in his voice. “It’s all I have. Whatever there is.”

Tavie sank down on the edge of the sofa. Immediately, Tosh came over and rested her head on Tavie’s knee, looking up at her with her dark shepherd brows drawn in a V. She, too, seemed unsettled by the change in their household routine. Tavie stroked the soft spot on the top of her head. “The boat—the one under the tarp—you said you were building it for her. Did you mean Rebecca Meredith?”

“I’d wanted to build a wooden shell since I first started rowing, as a kid,” he said more quietly. “My father was a furniture maker, so I knew about wood. It was— She seemed— I thought my boat might take her to the Olympics.

“It was daft, a stupid daydream.” He shook his head. “Even if she’d wanted the shell, no Olympic committee would have let her compete in a wooden boat. She’d have had the best carbon-fiber racing single money could buy.”

“Could she have done it?” Tavie asked. “The Olympics? Was she—was she that good?”

Kieran rubbed his fingers against the stubble on his jaws and blinked hard. “I’d never seen anyone row like that. For her, it was like breathing. Perfection. But winning takes more than that gift. It takes obsession, and she had that, too.”

“And you . . .” Tavie took a breath. She knew she was treading on forbidden territory, but she had to ask. “Where did you fit into that obsession?”

Kieran’s smile was brief, self-mocking. “I was . . . convenient.”

“How did you—I mean—” Tavie could feel herself blushing—“I know it’s none of my business, but how did the two of you—”

But he seemed almost relieved to talk about it. “Last summer. I used to see her rowing when I was out on the river in the evenings. Then one day she had trouble with one of her riggers, and I stopped to help. We chatted.”

Finn, having failed in his attempts to get Tosh interested in a rope tug, settled at Kieran’s feet. Kieran put his hand on Finn’s head, a mirror image of Tavie and Tosh, and for a moment she wondered if they would be whole without their dogs. Who had Kieran been with Rebecca Meredith, without Finn for armor?

He went on, his words slowing as the memory caught him up. “After that, we seemed to take our boats out at the same time. We’d row pieces, but I couldn’t quite beat her, even with the advantage of my height. And we’d talk.

“Then one evening I didn’t go. I was having—a bad day. She knew where I lived—we’d rowed upriver past the shed dozens of times. So she came to see if I was all right.”

The silence stretched into awkwardness. “And after that, you were,” said Tavie lightly, past the tightness in her throat.

Kieran shrugged, gave her the same half-mocking smile as earlier. “I always knew I was a diversion. I’m just not sure from what.”

“Yesterday . . .” Tavie thought about how to put it, then continued hesitantly. “Yesterday you said she was too good to have had an accident on a calm evening. And then tonight—the boatshed. You said it was a petrol bomb. Why? Why would someone do that to you, unless it was to do with . . .” She suddenly had trouble with the name, although yesterday she had so blithely told the dogs to Find Rebecca. Rebecca Meredith had been no more than that to her yesterday. A name. “To do with her,” she finished.

His face closed, like a shutter coming down. “I don’t know.”

“Kieran—”

Shaking his head at her, he put his hands on the arms of the chair and struggled to stand. “I should go, Tavie. It’s not—I don’t want to—whoever threw that bottle tonight could come back.”

So much for getting to spend the night in his own bed beside Gemma, Kincaid thought. He’d thrown his overnight bag back in the car and driven straight to Henley, without stopping to pick up Cullen.

When he’d rung Cullen from his mobile, Doug had offered to take the train straightaway, but Kincaid told him to wait until morning. “Let me talk to this guy, Kieran, and see what happened. I told Singla I wanted the first interview.”

“Yesterday he seemed a bit off to me, that Kieran bloke.” Doug’s voice crackled as the mobile signal faded in and out. “You’d have thought that boat was the Holy Grail, the way he was fussing over it. Maybe he killed Becca Meredith, then tried to blow himself up.”

“I can’t see him trying to burn his dog to death,” Kincaid said. He’d dealt with suicides who had shot their dogs, but not something like this. But if the relationship between man and dog was as close as it seemed, he supposed Kieran could have sedated the dog and set the blaze as some sort of ritual funeral pyre.

He thought it much more likely, however, that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through Kieran Connolly’s window. “Nor do we have any idea why Connolly would have murdered Becca Meredith,” he went on.

“He was a rower,” Doug said. “He’d have known how to capsize her.”

“True enough.” Kincaid was driving down Remenham Hill, with the lights of Henley ahead. “But that’s means without motive, which doesn’t do us much good. I’m almost there. I’ll ring you when I know more.” He disconnected and was soon across the bridge and through the town center. Checking the address Singla had given him, he pulled the car up in West Street, not far from the fire station.

Warm light shone through the leaded windows of the little terraced house. As he knocked, the murmur of voices from inside was immediately drowned out by a chorus of barking.

“Tosh, Finn, easy,” a woman commanded, and Kincaid recognized the team leader’s voice from the previous day. The barking stopped and the door swung open.

“Superintendent Kincaid, isn’t it?” Tavie Larssen looked surprised. “I thought it would be DI Singla.”

When Kincaid had met her yesterday, she’d been wearing a dark SAR uniform. Tonight she was in her paramedic’s uniform, which was black as well. The severe, dark clothing suited her, he thought, giving some authority to her small frame and delicate features.

“He sent me. May I come in?”

“Oh, of course.” She stepped back and grabbed a black Labrador retriever by the collar. Connolly’s dog—what was his name? “Sorry, Finn’s not used to the house protocol,” said Tavie, answering his unspoken question.

She opened a tin on the table by the door, looked the Lab in the eyes, and said, “Sit.” The dog plopped his rear onto the floor immediately and was joined by the German shepherd, who sat as well. They snapped up the two dog biscuits Tavie fished from the tin with an alacrity that made Kincaid fear for her fingers. “Good dogs,” she said. “Go lie down.”

They did.

No longer distracted by the dogs, Kincaid focused on Kieran Connolly, who sat across the room. Connolly’s forehead was bandaged, his face still smudged with soot and blood, his brown T-shirt and carpenter’s trousers splashed with darker brown splotches. He started to rise, but Kincaid waved him back. “No need to get up.”

“Here.” Tavie gestured Kincaid towards the sofa. “I’ll just make some tea, shall I?” she said, a little uncertainly.

“That would be brilliant.”

“Right.” She smiled at him, then glanced at Connolly with a slight frown before stepping into the adjoining kitchen.

Through the doorway, Kincaid could see a cream-colored enamel range, and on the room’s two high, wide ledges, an antique mirror and a few pretty china plates. In the center of the kitchen, a vase of bright autumn foliage