No Mark Upon Her

back. “Abbott. It’s Abbott. What of it?”
    Waving his hands in agitation, Doug turned to Kincaid. “That’s who Becca saw, that last day. Remember, at Charlotte’s party, I said I’d got her name from Sergeant Patterson? The old friend who came into the station—it was Chris Abbott.”
    Kincaid stared at him. A female police officer, a female police officer who knew Angus Craig—and hadn’t Freddie also told him, after he’d been to the mortuary, that his friend’s wife was a cop?
    Bloody hell. He’d been so focused on Angus Craig—and on proving Denis Childs wrong about Freddie—that he’d walked right over a bloody land mine and hadn’t seen it. He was the one who’d been blind and stupid.
    “Christ,” he said. “She—this Chris Abbott—has to have been one of the victims. But did Becca find out that day, or did she already know? Something happ—”
    “Victims?” Freddie broke in. “What the hell are you talking about? Victims of what?” He looked from Kincaid to Cullen, but it was Kincaid who answered.
    There was no longer any need to protect Freddie from Craig or vice versa. Freddie would have to know the truth and it might as well be now. “Look,” Kincaid said. “Why don’t we sit down.”
    “I’m tired of being told to sit,” Freddie retorted. He was less fragile today, edgy, rocking on the balls of his feet, and the look he gave them was challenging. “Say whatever it is you’ve got to say.”
    “Okay, then,” Kincaid agreed, although he was still reluctant. “A year ago, Becca reported a sexual assault. She didn’t identify her assailant. She did, however, tell her superior officer, Peter Gaskill, what had happened.
    “Deputy Assistant Commissioner Craig had offered her a lift home after a Met function in London. He asked to come in to use the toilet. He then assaulted her.
    “Afterwards, he threatened her. He told her he’d make sure she lost her job, and her credibility, if she told anyone what had happened.”
    Any doubts Kincaid might have harbored about Freddie’s knowledge disappeared in that moment.
    Shock made Freddie’s features sharp, as if the skin had fallen away from his bones.
    Then the rage flooded in, suffusing his face, and Kincaid remembered that this was a man who had been strong enough—and bloody-minded enough—to earn the oars mounted on the sitting room wall.
    As had his friend, Kincaid realized, with dawning horror. Becca’s killer had known how to drown a rower and had been strong enough to do it. Kieran’s attacker had rowed near enough to the boatshed to throw a bomb through the window, then disappeared, a feat that had required speed and accuracy in a boat. Had it—
    “I’ll kill him,” said Freddie. “That bastard Craig. She wouldn’t have stood for it, Becca wouldn’t. He killed her, didn’t he, to shut her up. And you—” He turned on Kincaid, his hands balled into fists. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You’ve been protecting him. You’re just as bad as—”
    “Freddie, shut up and listen to me.” Kincaid had to restrain himself from shaking him. “I haven’t been protecting Craig. I’ve been trying to find proof that he killed Becca and attacked Kieran Connolly, but I don’t think he did.
    “And now he’s dead. He killed himself, and his wife, last night.”
    “What?” Freddie stood, his hands still raised, looking like a boxer reeling from a knockout blow. “But why—what—”
    “We found out something else about Craig,” Kincaid said. “Something that had nothing to do with Becca. Something he knew he couldn’t cover up.”
    “Then—if it wasn’t Craig—who killed Becca?” Freddie’s handsome face contorted as he bit back a sob. “Why would someone else kill her?”
    Kincaid thought of the man Kieran had seen on the riverbank and of big, friendly Finn, suddenly frightened into a frenzy by the sight of a man in the street.
    And he went back to Freddie’s friend Ross Abbott, the rower, the Oxford Blue—a rower whose wife had known Becca and Angus Craig. But why, if Craig had raped Chris Abbott, would her husband kill Becca, not Craig? And why was Ross Abbott so frantic now to learn what Freddie knew about Craig?
    Kincaid shook his head. He didn’t have all the pieces, but he felt the violence building, the hair on the back of his neck rising in atavistic anticipation. This wasn’t over.
    And if Ross Abbott was their killer, he’d targeted Kieran once. After that afternoon’s