No Mark Upon Her

have been common petrol in both cases.” Morris gave Kincaid a speculative frown. “And even if forensics can narrow it down to the refiner, it may not get you anywhere. You think Craig had something to do with Rebecca Meredith’s murder and with the boatshed?” The question was rhetorical, as Morris looked back at the smoldering house and added, “That would explain why he decided to go out with a bang.”
    Except, Kincaid thought, that it didn’t. He could believe that seeing no way out, Craig had burned his wife’s beautiful house as a last act of viciousness. But they still had no proof that Craig had been connected with Becca Meredith’s murder or with the attack on Kieran. “We don’t—” he began when his phone rang.
    W hen Kieran had managed to wrestle both dogs up Market Place and back into Tavie’s house, he found her gone. She’d left him a note on the little chalkboard in the kitchen, saying she’d gone out to the shops and would pick up something for their dinner.
    “Go lie down, both of you,” Kieran told the dogs. Looking chastened, they did as they were bid. But Finn was still panting and trembling, and Kieran’s heart was still racing from the shock of seeing his friendly, easygoing dog become suddenly unhinged. When he pulled out his phone to ring Superintendent Kincaid, he realized his hands were shaking, the way they had in Iraq when his unit had seen action.
    Closing his eyes, he took a breath, and when Kincaid answered, he made an effort to give him a clear description of what had happened. “It wasn’t Freddie,” he said. “Both dogs spent a couple of hours with him yesterday, and they were fine. It was the other guy. I’ve never seen Finn do anything like that. I thought he’d take the guy’s head off.”
    “You’re sure you didn’t recognize this man?” Kincaid had asked.
    “No. Never seen him before,” Kieran had said. But now his mind was beginning to play little tricks on him, little fragments of memory flaring like ghosts, just on the edge of perception.
    He shook his head, but that made him dizzy.
    Tea. Tea would help, he thought. But when he went to put the kettle on, he found himself getting dog biscuits instead. Fighting the spinning in his head, he took the biscuits into the sitting room and knelt by the dogs, praising them as he gave them their treats. He’d shouted at Finn, and Finn had only been trying to—
    Kieran sat back so hard it made the room rock. Protect him. Finn had been trying to protect him.
    But why would Finn—wait. Kieran reached out, touched the dog’s black coat, now warm from the fire, as if the contact could give him an answer.
    Something familiar . . . There had been something familiar . . . The image tickled the edge of his subconscious, then suddenly the fuzzy outline became clearer . . .
    The man on the riverbank, in the dusk . . . Was that where Kieran had seen Freddie’s friend? But Finn wouldn’t have recognized someone seen at a distance as a threat . . .
    “Oh, Jesus,” Kieran whispered as realization hit him.
    It hadn’t been sight, it had been smell that Finn recognized. That was what had terrified him.
    When Kieran and Finn had found the spot where Becca was killed, he had been there, close enough for Finn to scent him.
    And then, when he had rowed right up to the shed with his petrol bomb, Kieran remembered, Finn had lifted his head, nostrils flaring, a moment before the bottle crashed through the window. Both the window and the door of the shed had been open to clear solvent fumes.
    It hadn’t been the sound of voices that had alerted Finn that night. The wind had been blowing downriver. Finn had caught the bastard’s scent.
    And tonight—tonight Finn had associated that scent with Kieran’s fear on the riverbank and with the terror of the fire.
    His hand still unsteady, Kieran lifted his phone again.
    Then he stopped, his fingers going lax on the keypad. There was something more.
    He closed his eyes and tried to bring back the man’s face, first glimpsed in that instant when he’d walked out of the Red Lion after Freddie.
    But what Kieran saw against the blackness of his eyelids was not the scene outside the Red Lion, but a photograph. And in that photograph, he saw a younger version of that likeness amid a group of faces, all in a frame on a shelf in Becca’s cottage . . . a photo of a Boat Race crew.
    “H e’s a bit bonkers, don’t you think?” said Cullen when Kincaid had told him about