Atterton turned to him. “Miss Larssen says you’re a rower.” His accent immediately pegged him as upper class, university educated. “So you’ll understand. I know it sounds mad, taking a shell out at dusk. But Becca wouldn’t have been careless. She’s too experienced.”
Kieran’s heart squeezed tight in his chest, as if all the vague dread had crystallized instantly in one spot. “Becca?”
“Rebecca. Rebecca Meredith. My wife—my ex-wife—kept her maiden name. That’s how she was known as a rower. And now she’s training again. For the Olympics.”
“Becca,” Kieran said again, through lips suddenly gone numb. A hole had opened in the fabric of the universe, and he felt himself falling through it.
“Kieran, are you all right?” Tavie had waited until they were on their own, and in position, before she asked.
She’d deployed two teams on either side of the river, each team consisting of two handlers and two dogs, to cover the area between Henley and Hambleden Lock.
Once she’d convinced Mr. Atterton that he would be more useful staying behind at the club in case his ex- wife rang or returned, she and Kieran had driven separately down Remenham Lane, then over the farm track that gave the closest access to the river path and their segment.
They’d stopped at the last fence that lay between them and the Thames meadow. Beyond the meadow she could see the river, bisected by Temple Island, which looked absurdly manicured against the shaggy Buckinghamshire bank on the river’s far side. They would take the dogs through the gate into the meadow, boggy from the morning’s downpour, and start downriver on foot from there.
Fortunately, the morning’s bad weather seemed to have discouraged the usual contingent of dog walkers, joggers, and pram pushers that used the Thames Path, and once the search had been instituted, the police had cordoned off the path between Henley and Hambleden on both sides of the river. This would reduce the number of confusing scents for the dogs.
Opening Tosh’s crate, Tavie snapped on her lead. Tosh jumped down lightly and sat, half on Tavie’s foot, looking up at her in quivering anticipation. She was eager to go to work.
Tavie glanced back at Kieran, who still hadn’t responded. He was pulling his gear out of the back of his old green Land Rover—pack, radio, water bottle, Finn’s lead, the squeaky ball that was Finn’s reward for a find—all automatic motions—and he didn’t look at her.
“Kieran, are you sure you’re up to this? I can do this on my own if the storm—”
“I’m fine,” he said, still not meeting her eyes, but something in his voice made Finn stop whining to get out of his crate. The dog gazed at his master, his lip wrinkled in a puzzled expression Tavie would have found comical if she hadn’t been worried.
She knew that Kieran had bad days, and that he was uncomfortable with storms. He’d never said much about his past, and as for the present, she knew only that he fixed boats in the little shed on the island above Henley Bridge, and that he rowed.
But in spite of his reticence, they’d become friends. A chance meeting in the park had led her to offer him help in training Finn, then to her suggesting that Kieran join the SAR team. At first he’d resisted the idea, but as Finn grew, Kieran began to admit that the dog needed a job. Tavie never said she thought that it was Kieran who really needed a reason to get up in the morning, but as he began to ask her to recount the details of searches and finds, she saw a spark come back into his eyes.
Before his first training session with the group, however, she’d stopped, moved by some impulse to protect him. “Kieran, you know a good many of our finds are deceased. Will that be a problem for you?”
He’d given her a crooked smile. “Not as long as they’re strangers.”
His answer came back to her now. She touched his arm. “Kieran, I have to ask. You turned white as a ghost when you heard this woman’s name. She’s a rower, you’re a rower, and I think it’s a pretty small world here in Henley. Do you know her?”
Melody Talbot gazed at the bow-fronted, terraced house, furrowing her brow. “It’s, um— it’s very—suburban.” Then, seeing her companion’s crestfallen expression, she amended. “It’s nice, Doug, really it is. It’s just not exactly single-guy territory, Putney, is it?” She gave him a calculating glance. “Unless you have plans you’re not sharing, mate?”
Doug Cullen flushed to the roots of his fair hair. “No. It’s just—I wanted something as different as possible from the Euston flat. It’s an easy commute to the Yard. I wanted to be near the river and the rowing clubs. And it was a good deal.” He surveyed the house with obvious pride. “Just needs a bit of fixing up, is all.”
Gazing at the peeling paint on the window frames and the door, and the damp stains in the plaster, Melody suspected that might be an understatement. “You’ve actually bought it, then?”
“Signed the last papers an hour ago.” Doug fished a set of keys from his pocket and held them up like a trophy.
Melody had been surprised when he’d rung her at Notting Hill Station that morning, asking her if she could meet him in Putney for lunch. She knew he’d been flat hunting. And Gemma had told her that Duncan intended to take a few days’ holiday before starting his official family leave, so she’d supposed that Doug, as Duncan’s sergeant, might be at a bit of a loose end. She hadn’t expected to be told that he’d taken the plunge into homeownership.
“You’re full of surprises today. I never thought of you as the DIY type.” She’d never thought of Doug as the athletic type either, although he’d told her one of the reasons he’d settled on Putney was because he wanted to take up the rowing he hadn’t done since school. When she’d driven across Putney Bridge, she’d seen a lone sculler working his way upriver, and hadn’t been able to picture Doug huffing and puffing in sweaty rowing gear. She’d never seen him exert more effort than it took to attack a keyboard.
“I can paint as well as the next bloke,” he said, sounding a little insulted. “And as for the rest, there are loads of books, and the Internet . . .”
Melody had no doubt that Doug could find out how to fix things—his research skills rivaled her own—but she’d no idea if he had the manual aptitude. Reading about pipe wrenches and actually using one were entirely different propositions, at least in her limited experience. She wasn’t exactly the DIY type either.
“I want to see you in your workman’s overall.” She grinned and hooked her arm through his, earning a startled glance. “Come on, then. Show me the goods.” A snake of wind eddied down the quiet residential road, swirling the brown leaves in the gutters and lifting the hair on Melody’s neck. Although the terraced houses blocked any view of the river to the north, they were near enough that she imagined she could smell its dank, earthy scent.
Releasing Doug’s arm so that she could turn up her coat collar, she could have sworn she saw a fleeting look of relief cross his face.
She chided herself for teasing him. She suspected he wasn’t comfortable with physical contact, and she was not usually demonstrative herself. But there was something that seemed to goad her into pushing his boundaries.
They’d developed an odd sort of friendship in these last few months, and friendship in general was something that it seemed neither of them was very good at. She wondered, in fact, if he hadn’t been able to think of anyone else with whom he could share his new acquisition.
Melody had always been guarded in her relationships. When she was younger, she’d never been sure if people liked her for herself or were just sucking up to her because of her father. Then, after she’d joined the police, she hadn’t wanted to let anyone get close because she’d been afraid of being
But Gemma had learned the truth, as had Doug Cullen, and then Melody had gone to Duncan. Although she didn’t work directly with Duncan, their friendship had made her feel that he was the senior officer to whom she most owed the truth.
When Duncan had heard her story, he’d given her an assessing look before nodding once. “Your family is no one else’s business,” he’d said, “as long as you don’t make it so.” That had been that. The revelation had given Melody, for what seemed like the first time, the opportunity to be herself. And it had changed her relationship with Doug Cullen in some indefinable way.
“It’s two up and three down, basically,” said Doug, leading the way up the steps to the front door. “But there’s a garden.”
