No Mark Upon Her

front, and screeched to a stop directly in Abbott’s path.
    Abbott slammed the Mercedes to a halt, an inch from the Escort’s side panel. She was out of the Merc while it was still rocking from the sudden brake.
    “What the fuck do you thing you’re doing?” she shouted. “Move your damned car, you bloody—” Then she saw Gemma get out of the driver’s side and stopped dead. “You,” she said, but it came out a croak.
    “Where are you going, Chris?” asked Gemma. She reached Melody, who’d climbed out of the Escort’s passenger side, but she didn’t take her eyes off Abbott.
    “None of your business. I told you. Get out of my way.” Abbott’s mouth was pinched in a tight, white line.
    “I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you, unless you reverse out of here, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.” Another car was coming down the lane behind Abbott, and Gemma suspected they’d have an irate motorist added to the mix any moment. “Get us backup,” she mouthed to Melody.
    Abbott looked over her shoulder, saw the oncoming car, then turned back to Gemma. “You move your car, or your job won’t be worth the paper your warrant card’s printed on.”
    “That’s not going to work with me,” said Gemma, keeping her voice level. “You’re a cop, Chris. Whatever you’ve done, you know the only thing that will help you now is to talk to us.”
    “Done?” Abbott shrieked at her. “I haven’t done anything. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you don’t let me out of here, God help us, you’re going to be the one regretting it. I won’t be responsible.”
    “Responsible for what, Chris?”
    “Backup’s coming,” whispered Melody, moving the phone cupped in her hand down to her side.
    “I don’t know.” Chris’s anger seemed to collapse, and her voice rose in a wail of despair. “But my gun’s gone.”
    “Your gun?” Gemma felt her own jolt of panic as she thought about Duncan. Where was he now? Why the hell hadn’t she called him and told him what she suspected?
    “Don’t look so surprised. I work bloody Vice, for God’s sake. You know people who know where to get things. After that bastard Craig, I said I’d never let anything like that happen to me again. You’d have done the same.”
    Gemma nodded. “Yeah, I would. Especially if I thought I might need to protect my kids.” She saw a little of the tightness leave Abbott’s body as she heard the sympathy in Gemma’s voice. It didn’t matter that Abbott would have used the same technique herself hundreds of times, her body had responded to Gemma’s tone with a will of its own.
    “Where’s your gun, Chris?” Gemma asked, as gently as if she were talking to an old friend. “Think about your kids. They need you, and that means you need to do the right thing now.”
    The car behind Abbott flashed its headlamps, then beeped its horn. Gemma cursed the driver under her breath. The last thing she needed right now was a confrontation.
    A bearded man leaned out the window. “Move your damned show, ladies,” he called. “This isn’t the freaking Globe.”
    A siren whooped faintly in the distance. Abbott looked back again, then forward, her head whipping round. There was no way out.
    Then suddenly, she sagged, her body curved in despair, fear etching lines like crevasses in her thin face.
    “I keep it on the top shelf of the bedroom cupboard, where the kids can’t reach it,” she said. “It’s gone. My gun’s gone. Ross has it.”
    “I ’ve no idea where Ross went,” said Freddie. “I told you, he just took off.”
    “Does he live in Henley?” Kincaid asked, trying to master a sense of urgency so strong that his palms were beginning to sweat. He knew he had to keep Freddie calm, steer him away from the thought of what Craig had done to Becca, if he were going to get anything helpful from him. The large space of Freddie Atterton’s flat suddenly seemed breathlessly stuffy. The humidity must be rising.
    “No, he lives in Barnes.” Freddie sounded confused. “But he rows out of Henley Rowing Club. Why do you want to know?”
    “Why not row out of Leander?” asked Doug. “Especially as he was a Blue?”
    Freddie fidgeted and moved away from them for the first time, going to the far end of the dining table, where he pulled out a chair, but didn’t sit. “To tell the truth, some of the members don’t like him. He’s a bit of a braggart, Ross, and he tends to make