No Mark Upon Her

suit—he’d got married in it on Saturday. Again.
    Cullen, arriving just then with a bulging Boots carrier bag in hand, said, “What’s so funny?”
    Kincaid grinned. “Nothing.” He gazed up at the hotel. “I was just thinking that the wisteria would be glorious in the spring. It must be ancient.”
    Cullen looked at him quizzically. “I don’t know about that. I’m not very good with plants. But the inn dates back to the sixteenth century, and the first recorded guest of note was Charles I.”
    “Not an auspicious omen,” Kincaid said. “Let’s hope we don’t end up with our heads on the block. And that the food and the beds have improved over the last five hundred or so years. I’m starving.” It was after seven, and food was beginning to seem a distant memory.
    “I always wanted to stay here.” Cullen looked round with obvious delight as they entered the building.
    There was a small, cozy bar on the right, and on the left a more formal restaurant, with starched white tablecloths and linen. Ahead, tasteful antique furniture and wood floors gleamed in the lamplit reception area. Near the desk stood an imposingly hooded cane chair, and Kincaid immediately thought it would make a perfect hiding nook for a child.
    “I used to beg my parents to come and stay here whenever I had a race in Henley when I was at school,” Cullen continued, “but they never did.”
    Kincaid looked at his partner in surprise. “They never came to watch you row?”
    “Not that I can remember,” answered Doug, but his tone was a bit too casual, and Kincaid suspected he’d trodden on sensitive territory. “My dad was busy, and I was never likely to win,” Doug added, shrugging. “And what I really wanted was to be allowed to have a drink in the bar, and pigs were more likely to fly.”
    “Well, the drink in the bar can be remedied, at least,” Kincaid said, dropping his voice as the young woman at the desk looked up and smiled at them in welcome. “I’m not sure we can do anything about the flying pigs.”
    W hen they had settled into their respective rooms—Kincaid’s with a four-poster that he would certainly have preferred to share with Gemma—they eschewed the formal dining room and met in the aptly named Snug Bar for drinks and dinner. This, tucked behind the small bar they had seen by the entrance, had dark wood-paneled walls and dark leather furniture, relieved by softly lit bookcases and oil portraits of bewigged men. A fire burned cheerily in the grate.
    “An Englishman’s dream,” Kincaid murmured as they chose a low table near the fire. He realized that the dining room at Leander, with its cane-backed furniture, had given him the same teasing impression as this place. There was a hint of the colonial, the cane furniture a reminder of the last vestiges of empire. And there was a very definite sense that generations of entitlement had stamped their imprint on this rich market town on the Thames. The atmosphere would raise his liberal father’s hackles.
    But Kincaid was not about to turn up his nose at the steak and mushroom pie, an Englishman’s dream of a dinner, nor at the bottle of Benvulin single malt that he’d spied behind the bar.
    When they’d ordered and brought back their drinks, he raised his glass to Doug. “Cheers, mate. To long-delayed pleasures. And to the trials and tribulations of homeownership.”
    Looking pleased, Cullen raised his glass, sipped, and promptly turned pink. “Nice whisky,” he said, wiping at his watering eyes. “Bit stout.”
    “Sip,” Kincaid suggested. “But first add the tiniest bit of water. Remember your whisky-tasting lessons.”
    He took another sip himself, closing his eyes and savoring the heathery-honey-buttery layers of the scotch. Was the trip to Scotland that had introduced him to Benvulin really the last time he and Gemma had been away together without the children? And on that trip they’d been involved in a very distressing case, not on holiday.
    This definitely needed to be remedied. Having married Gemma three times, he thought that he should at least be able to give her a honeymoon. Maybe he’d bring her back to the Red Lion, once she was settled into her job again and they could make arrangements for the children.
    Their food arrived, and both he and Doug tucked in with the silent single-mindedness of the truly ravenous. When the last bites had been scraped off the plates, Kincaid finished the coffee he’d ordered to chase the