No Mark Upon Her

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 Boat Race . Nothing afterwards ever quite lives up to that, whether you win or lose. But Becca, she wanted me to win, even more than I did.”
    “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