No Mark upon Her

bugger himself. “I’m going to check the racks.”

“I’ll come with you.” Milo paused, eyeing Freddie’s navy jacket and blue-and-pink-striped Leander tie. “You’ll get soaked, man. There’s a spare anorak by the bar.”

But Freddie was already heading out the doors. The first-floor reception area opened onto an outside balcony with a staircase leading down from either side. Freddie took the left-hand flight, towards the river and the boatyard. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but by the time he reached the boat racks, he was impatiently pushing damp hair off his forehead.

The rack where Becca kept her Filippi was empty. “It’s not here,” he said, although Milo could see that as well as he could.

“Maybe she put it in the shed for some reason. She has a key.” Milo pulled up his hood against the drizzle and turned towards the clubhouse. The boatshed was beneath the first-floor dining room, and on a fair day, with the crews going out, the big doors would stand wide open.

This morning, however, they entered through the smaller door on the right, and Milo flicked on the lights. The space was cavernous, dim in the corners. It smelled of wood and varnish, and faintly, of sweat and mildew. The thump of weights could be heard from the gym next door.

Ordinarily, Freddie found the shed inexplicably comforting, but now his stomach clenched as all he saw were the racks of gleaming, bright-yellow Empachers. These were the fours and eights rowed by the crew. Pink-bladed oars stood up in the racks at the rear of the long room like flags. There was no sign of the white Filippi with its distinctive blue stripe.

“Okay,” Milo said. “It’s not here. We’ll ask if anyone else has seen her.” He opened the door that led into the gym and called out, “Johnson!”

The promising young bowman of the coxless four appeared in the doorway in vest and shorts, toweling the sweat from his face. “We going out, Milo?” He nodded a greeting to Freddie.

“Not just yet,” answered Milo. “Steve, have you seen Becca Meredith?”

Johnson looked surprised. “Becca? No. Not since Sunday, on the river. She had a good row. Why?”

“She went out last night, and her boat’s not back.”

“Have you tried ringing her?” Johnson asked with a casualness that Freddie found suddenly infuriating.

“Of course I’ve bloody tried ringing her.” He turned to Milo. “Look, I’m going to check the cottage.”

“Freddie, I think you’re overreacting,” said Milo. “You know Becca has a mind of her own.”

“No one knows that better than me. But I don’t like this, Milo. Call me if you hear anything.”

He went out the way he’d come in, rather than going through the crew quarters in the club. He walked round the lawn to the car park, unmindful now of his shoes or his damp jacket.

Maybe he was overreacting, he thought as he climbed back into the Audi. But he rang her mobile once more, and when the call went to voice mail, he clicked off and started the engine. She might chew him up one side and down the other for intruding, but he was going to see for himself.

Although it took a bit of maneuvering to get the Audi out of the deep, slushy ruts in the gravel, he eventually managed.

A remembered dialogue played in his head. From Becca, Why can’t you get a sensible car for once?

Because you can’t sell expensive property if your prospect thinks you can’t afford the best, he always answered, but there were days he’d kill for four-wheel drive, and this was one of them.

Once out of the car park, he pulled onto the main road and turned immediately left into Remenham Lane. As he drove north, he could see the clouds building again in the western sky.

The redbrick cottage, surrounded by an overgrown garden, was set between the lane and the river. It had been Freddie’s job to keep the grounds, which he had done with regularity if not much talent. Becca had simply let things go until the place had begun to resemble Sleeping Beauty’s briar thicket.

Her battered black Nissan 4?4 sat in the drive. Becca had no interest in cars either, except as a means to pull a boat. If the Nissan wasn’t mud-spattered, it was only because the rain had washed it off. Her trailer had been pulled up on the patch of lawn beside the drive, and the Filippi was not on it.

Just as Freddie opened the Audi’s door, thunder clapped and the sky opened up. He sprinted for the cottage, sliding into the porch as if he’d just made a wicket and shaking the water from his hair.

No lights showed through the stained glass in the door. The bell didn’t work—he’d never managed to fix it— so he banged on the wood surround with his fist.

“Becca. Becca! Answer the bloody door.”

When there was no response, he fumbled for his keys and put the heavy door key in the lock.

“Becca, I’m coming in,” he called as he swung the door open.

The cottage was cold and silent.

Her handbag sat on the bench below the coat rack, where she always dropped it when she came in from work. A gray suit jacket had been tossed carelessly beside it, but otherwise, the sitting room looked undisturbed. Her yellow rowing fleece was missing from the coat hook, as was her pink Leander hat.

He called out again, glancing quickly into the kitchen and dining room. A stack of unopened mail sat on the buffet, a rinsed cup and plate in the sink, and on the worktop a bag of cat food for the neighbor’s cat she sometimes fed.

The cottage felt, in some way he couldn’t explain, profoundly empty of human presence. But he climbed the stairs and looked into the bedroom and the bathroom. The bed was made, the skirt that matched the jacket he’d seen downstairs lay across the chair, along with a white blouse and a tangled pair of tights.

The bath was dry, but the air held the faintest trace of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue cologne, one of Becca’s few vanities.

He opened the door to the spare room that had once been his office, whistling in surprise when he saw the weights and the ergometer. She was serious about training, then. Really serious.

So what the hell had she gone and done?

Clattering back down the stairs, he grabbed a spare anorak from the coat hook and went out into the garden, ducking his head against the driving rain. Becca’s neighbor’s lawn had the river frontage, but he checked it just in case she’d pulled the boat up there. Seeing nothing but upturned garden furniture, he ran back to the cottage and pulled his phone out with cold and fumbling fingers. Thunder rumbled and shook the cottage.

Becca wouldn’t thank him for ringing her boss, Superintendent Peter Gaskill, but he couldn’t think what else to do next. He didn’t know Gaskill well, as Becca had been assigned to his team a short time before the divorce, but he’d met the man at police functions and the occasional dinner party.

Freddie’s call was shunted through by the department’s secretary. When Gaskill picked up, Freddie identified himself, then said, “Look, Peter, sorry to bother you. But I’ve been trying to reach Becca since yesterday, and I’m a bit worried. I wondered if perhaps there’d been an emergency at work . . .” It sounded unlikely even as he said it. He explained about the boat, adding that Becca didn’t seem to have been home since the previous evening, and that her car was still in the drive.

“We had a staff meeting this morning, an important one,” Gaskill said. “She didn’t show or return my calls, and I’ve never known her to miss a meeting. You’re certain she’s not at home?”

“I’m in the cottage now.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, as if Gaskill was deliberating. Then he said, “So what you’re telling me is that Becca went out on the river last night, in the dark, alone in a racing shell, and that neither she nor the boat have been seen since.”

Hearing it stated so baldly, Freddie felt chilled to the bone. Any arguments about her competency died on his lips. “Yes.”

“You stay there,” Gaskill told him. “I’m calling in the local force.”

Two families, for the most part strangers to one another, had spent a long weekend cooped up together in the rambling vicarage that anchored the hamlet of Compton Grenville, near Glastonbury in Somerset, while rain rumbled and poured and the water rose around them. The scene, thought Detective Inspector Gemma James, had had all the makings of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

“Or maybe a horror film,” she said aloud to her friend and new cousin-in-law, Winnie Montfort, who stood at the old farmhouse sink in the vicarage kitchen, up to her elbows in suds. Winnie, a Church of England vicar, was