He soon discovered that although the lane looked idyllic, the hamlet was considerably farther than he’d remembered. By the time he reached Becca Meredith’s cottage, he was warm, even in the lightweight leather jacket he’d worn that day, and he’d have given a king’s ransom for his trainers.
The cottage looked less tidy by daylight, the lack of routine maintenance more evident. The hedges needed trimming, the lawn needed cutting, and the paint round the front porch was beginning to peel.
The front gate was off the latch, and as Kincaid stepped through it, he realized the cottage’s front door was standing ajar. A dozen scenarios ran through his head in an instant, none of them pleasant.
He stopped, his heart pounding, examining what he could see of the house and the garden. After lecturing Gemma about being careful, he didn’t need to be the one who carelessly walked into a dangerous situation.
There was no sound, no movement. Then he saw the footprints. There had been heavy dew that morning, and the overlong grass in the front garden, which had been shaded by the hedge, was still damp. A distinct single line of footprints led from the front porch into the grass, and around the side of the cottage.
Kincaid followed cautiously. When he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Freddie Atterton standing at the far end of the garden, looking out over the river. He wore jeans and a faded Oxford-blue T-shirt, and his feet were bare.
“Freddie,” Kincaid said quietly, and Atterton turned.
“Oh. It’s you.” The smile Freddie gave Kincaid was tentative, and he seemed a little disoriented.
“Are you all right?” Kincaid asked, going closer. He saw that the Oxford-blue T-shirt really was Oxford blue—it bore the Oxford University Boat Club emblem on the front. “You’ve had us all a bit worried. Especially DC Bell.”
“Imogen. Nice name. Pretty girl.” The smile was a little stronger this time, then Freddie’s brow creased in a frown. “She was looking for me?”
“You haven’t checked your messages.”
“No. Turned the bloody phone off. Press.”
“You’ve been here since last night?”
Freddie nodded.
“What are you doing out here in the garden?” Kincaid asked, as gently as he would have asked one of his children.
“I wanted—I just wanted to see—” Freddie stopped, his teeth chattering. Kincaid saw that the legs of his jeans were soaked halfway to the knees from the damp grass, as were his own trousers. “You can’t quite make it out from here,” Freddie went on. “Temple Island. But she was so close.”
“Yes,” Kincaid agreed. “She was.” Just as matter-of-factly, he added, “You seem to have lost your shoes.”
“Oh.” Freddie looked down, and seemed surprised to see that he was barefoot. He touched the front of his shirt. “I found these. My things from uni. In the wardrobe. She’d saved them.” There were tears in his eyes.
“I think,” Kincaid said reasonably, “that we should go inside, have a cup of tea, and get warm. Then we can talk about it. All right?”
It was obvious from the rumpled duvet on the sofa that Freddie had slept there, and not upstairs in the bedroom. Kincaid couldn’t blame him. Sleeping in one’s dead ex-wife’s bed would be bad enough. Sleeping in the bed you now knew your dead ex-wife had shared with another man would be even worse.
“You should change,” he suggested as he followed Freddie into the room.
“I’ll dry. I’m a rower, remember? Or I was, anyway. Wet is a fact of life for rowers.”
The sitting room was cold in spite of the bright day, as it had been the first time Kincaid had come to the cottage. “Why don’t you light the fire, then? I’m not quite as hardy as you. I’ll make us something hot.”
He found tea bags in the kitchen—Tetley’s. Apparently Becca’s taste had run to down-to-earth. A plastic jug in the fridge was half full of milk that was just skating its use-by date. When he had the kettle on, Kincaid glanced back into the sitting room and asked, “Milk and sugar?”
Freddie nodded. “Lots of both. Another old rower’s habit. Never let a good calorie pass you by.” Having lit the gas fire, he pushed the duvet aside and sat on the sofa, then began to shuffle what looked like old photos that were spread out on the small coffee table.
When Kincaid had filled two mugs, skipping the sugar in his, and deciding at the last minute to pass on the milk as well, he carried them into the sitting room and took the chair nearest Freddie. “What are you looking at?” he asked, handing over Freddie’s mug.
“She saved these, too. I’d no idea. I was looking for a pen and I found them stuffed in the drawer of the writing desk.” He began to turn the photos so that they faced Kincaid.
In every one, Kincaid saw a much younger Freddie, in Oxford rowing kit. In several, he was at stroke in an eight, his face contorted with a grimace of effort. Several seemed to be at parties or after races. In one, a much younger Becca was pouring a bottle of champagne over his head, and they were both laughing.
Freddie picked that one up and ran a finger over its surface. “It was the second year I was in the Blue Boat,” he said. “We’d just got engaged. No surprise it was Ross who put Becca up to the champagne.”
“Ross?”
“My mate who took me to—” He faltered, drank a sip of his tea. “To the mortuary,” he went on. “We were all at uni together, Becca and me, and Ross and his wife, Chris.”
Freddie nodded at a framed photo of the same Boat Race crew on Becca’s bookshelf. “See, there he is. That one was taken right before the race. Ross was a last-minute substitution from Isis, the second boat.”
Kincaid saw a stocky young man, smiling, as were all the crew, with what looked like a mixture of pride and nerves. “I thought maybe the champagne was a Boat Race celebration.”
“Not for the losing crew. We were nearly swamped that year. Could have bloody drowned. I think Becca—I don’t know. Things were never quite the same after that. Maybe that marked me as a failure in her eyes.”
“It was just a race,” Kincaid said.
Freddie stared at him as if he’d gone utterly daft. “It was the
“Was she jealous of you, of your opportunity?” Kincaid asked, thinking of everything he’d learned about Becca Meredith. “That was the one thing she could never do, row in the Boat Race.”
Freddie’s eyes widened in surprise. “Maybe. It never occurred to me. Maybe that was why it mattered so much.”
“Your loss was her loss.”
“She took it hard. Not just angry. Not just disappointed. She was . . . bitter.” He shrugged. “We went on, got married, as if things were the same. But they weren’t. Then—well, you know what happened then.”
“The Olympic trials. Her injury. Her failure.”
Freddie nodded. “I didn’t think we would get through that. But then she went into the job, and for a while, things got better. She put all that ferocious energy into work. But there was always a distance between us, a wall, and I could never break through it.”
“And, eventually, you sought solace.” Kincaid said it without censure.
Freddie’s smile twisted. “I suppose you could call it that. But it never helped. Now I keep wondering if there was anything I could have done that would have made a difference. And I’ll never know.”
It was true. There was nothing Kincaid could say that would change it. And now he knew that the things he would have to say at some point would only increase the burden of Freddie’s guilt, at least in Freddie’s eyes.
If Freddie and Becca had stayed married, Angus Craig might never have had the opportunity to rape Becca. And Becca might not be dead.
Kincaid looked round the cottage, realizing that when he’d been here the first time, on Tuesday evening, he’d had no knowledge of what had happened here.
Now, in his mind’s eye, he saw again the crime-scene photos from Jenny Hart’s flat, and imagined this room, and Becca, violated. He felt sick.
“What is it?” asked Freddie. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
Kincaid met his eyes, and in that instant he made a decision. Freddie would have to know what had happened to Becca.
But not yet. Because with knowledge would come rage, and if Freddie sought out Angus Craig, Kincaid had no way to protect him from the consequences.
