No Mark upon Her

by Deborah Crombie

  “What about Charlotte?” Winnie asked, her kind face suddenly creased with concern.

  “I think Cyn told her kids not to play with her. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Well, I did think they seemed a little . . . awkward—”

  “How could she? They’re going to be cousins, for heaven’s sake.” The anger in Gemma’s voice made Constance screw up her little face in a frown. Gemma took a calming breath, then reached out to stroke the baby’s cheek with a finger. “Sorry, lovey.” Constance had Winnie’s English-rose complexion, Jack’s bright blue eyes, and the downy beginnings of Jack’s blond hair.

  But Charlotte, with her caramel curls and light-brown skin, was every bit as beautiful, and a wave of fury swept over Gemma at the idea that anyone could think differently, or treat her differently, because of her color. “I heard Cyn call Charlotte something unrepeatable,” she admitted. “I could just kill her.”

  “Gemma, you must have been prepared—”

  “Oh, we were warned, all right. The social worker was very thorough. ‘Mixed-race children are sometimes not accepted by adoptive parents’ extended families,’ ” she quoted. “But I suppose I’d seen too many rainbow children adverts,” she added with a sigh. If her sister had been rude, her parents had remained standoffish with the child, which upset Gemma deeply. “Charlotte’s been through enough without this.”

  She and Duncan had become foster parents to the little girl in August, after their investigation into the disappearance of her parents.

  “How is she doing, really?” Winnie asked, jiggling Constance, who was beginning to fuss. “This weekend has been so hectic that I’ve never really had a chance to ask, or to say how lovely she is.”

  “Yes,” said Gemma, her voice softening. “She is, isn’t she?” Her arms felt suddenly empty without the baby, and she watched Winnie holding her daughter with an affection tinged only very slightly with envy. “But—” She hesitated, listening to the happy childish shrieks coming from the back garden. Charlotte’s excited shouts rose unmistakably over the boys’. Perhaps, thought Gemma, she was overreacting, making too much of normal adjustment issues.

  “But?” prompted Winnie, settling Constance over her shoulder.

  “She doesn’t sleep well,” Gemma confessed. “She dreams, I think, and sometimes when she wakes, she’s inconsolable. She—” Gemma stopped, making an effort to steady her suddenly wobbly voice. “She calls out for her mummy and daddy. It makes me feel so—so—” She shrugged.

  “Helpless. Yes, I can imagine. But she’s becoming very attached to you. I’ve seen that.”

  “Sometimes a bit too attached, I’m afraid. Downright clingy.”

  She and Duncan had agreed that they’d take family leave in turns until they felt Charlotte was secure enough in her new situation to attend child care during the day.

  Gemma had gladly taken the first stint, but she was due to return to her post as detective inspector at Notting Hill Police Station the following week, and she felt a little guilty over how much she was looking forward to work and adult company. She worried whether she was really doing the right thing in planning to go back to work. “I just hope Duncan will be able to cope on his own.”

  “Give the man credit,” Winnie said with a grin, nodding towards the garden, where Duncan and Jack were stomping in puddles with the children. “He seems to be doing pretty well. He obviously adores Charlotte. And if the two of you are going to make this commitment, she needs to be as bonded to him as she is to you.” She gave Gemma a searching glance. “You are sure about this? There must be other placements that would keep her out of her grandmother’s clutches.”

  Gemma leaned forward, hugging herself to stop an involuntary shiver. “I cannot imagine being without her,” she said with complete certainty. “And I wouldn’t trust anyone else to keep her safe, although I don’t think it’s likely that Charlotte’s family is going to have much leverage anytime soon.”

  Charlotte’s grandmother and her uncles had been arrested in August, and it looked as though they would be playing Happy Families in prison for a good while to come.

  “We’re officially fostering for the time being,” Gemma went on. Hesitating, she added, “But we intend to apply for permanent custody, and eventually adoption. I just hope my family will come round, and that nothing will happen to muck up Duncan’s leave—”

  She was interrupted by a loud crash, then the clump of feet in the hall.

  “Toby, boots off,” Gemma heard Duncan shout, but it was too late. Her six-year-old son cannoned through the door, his red Wellies mud-spattered, his blond hair sticking straight up in damp spikes. He looked, as usual, like an imp from hell.

  The door swung open again, this time revealing Charlotte, who had obediently removed her boots. In her striped socks and pink mac, she ran straight to Gemma and climbed into her lap. She wrapped her arms round Gemma’s neck in a fierce hug, as she did whenever they had been separated for more than a few minutes. But when she looked up, she was beaming, her face flushed and her eyes sparkling. Gemma thought she had never seen the child look happier.

  “I jumped biggest,” Charlotte announced.

  “Did not,” said Toby. At his grand age, he considered himself superior in all ways.

  Duncan came into the kitchen. Tall, tousled, and as red-cheeked from the cold as the children, he looked quite as damp as Toby, if a bit cleaner. Glancing out the window, Gemma saw that the rain was coming down harder than ever.

  “You, sport,” Duncan said severely to Toby, “are incorrigible.” Pointing at the muddy boot prints on the floor, he pulled some towels from the kitchen roll and handed them over. “Apologize to Auntie Winnie and mop up. And then”—looking almost as impish as Toby, he grinned at Gemma and abandoned his policeman voice—“Dad’s ordered us all outside, rain or not. He’s stage-managing at his most annoyingly coy, and he’s roped in Jack and Kit. Knowing Dad, I shudder to think.” He rolled his eyes for emphasis, and Gemma couldn’t help but smile. She had adored Duncan’s dad from the moment she’d met him, but Hugh Kincaid was not always the most practical of souls.

  “He says he has a surprise for us,” Duncan went on. “And that we are absolutely, positively, going to love it. I think we’d better go see what he’s done.”

  The rain came in waves that spattered against the windows of the converted boatshed like buckshot.

  Kieran Connolly clenched his jaw, trying to ignore the sound, but the rumble of thunder over Henley made him shudder. It was just rain, he told himself, and he would be fine. Just fine, and the shed had withstood worse.

  It was one of several such structures scrunched between the summer cottages on the small islands that dotted the Thames between Henley and Marsh Lock. Built of wood siding on a concrete pad, it had not been meant for human habitation, but it suited Kieran well enough. The single space provided him with a workshop, a camp bed, a woodstove, a primus, and a primitive toilet and shower. There was nothing more he needed—although he suspected that if Finn had been given his choice, he’d have preferred someplace that allowed him a run in the park without having to motor from island to shore in the little skiff Kieran kept tied up at his small floating dock.

  Not that Finn couldn’t have swum the distance. A Labrador retriever, he was bred to it, but Kieran had taught him not to go in the water without permission. Otherwise, Kieran wouldn’t have been able to leave him when he rowed, as he did every morning, or he’d be sculling up and down the Thames with a big black dog paddling in his wake.

  Almost every morning, Kieran amended, when the thunder rumbled again. He didn’t go out in storms. The boatshed shook in another gust and the windows rattled in concert. He jerked involuntarily, pain searing his hand. Glancing down, he saw a spot of blood on the fine sandpaper he’d been using to smooth a fiberglass patch on the old Aylings double he had upside down on trestles. He’d sanded his own damned knuckles. Shit. His hands were shaking again.

  Finn whined and pushed his blunt sno
ut against Kieran’s knee. The thunder cracked again and the shed vibrated like a kettledrum. Or an artillery barrage.

  “It’s just rain, boy.” Kieran heard the tremor in his voice and grimaced in disgust. Some reassurance he was, sweating and quaking like a leaf. Pathetic. Making an effort to steady his hand, he folded the sandpaper and set it on his worktable.

  But even if he could make his hand obey, he had no command over his knees. When they threatened to buckle, he staggered two steps to the wall and slid down with his back against it. He felt as if the very air were a massive weight, pressing him down, squeezing his lungs. Finn nuzzled him and climbed half into his lap, and as he wrapped his arms round the dog, he couldn’t tell which of them whimpered. “Sorry, boy, sorry,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. It’s just a little rain.”

  He repeated to himself the rational explanation for his physical distress. Damage to middle ear, due to shelling. Swift changes in barometric pressure may affect equilibrium. It was a familiar mantra.

  The army doctors had told him that, as if he hadn’t known it himself. They’d also told him that he’d been heavily concussed, and that he’d suffered some loss of hearing. “Not enough,” he said aloud, and cackled a little wildly at his own humor. Finn licked his chin and Kieran hugged him harder. “It will pass,” he whispered, meaning to reassure them both.

  The room reeled, bringing a wave of nausea so intense he had to swallow against it. That, too, was related to his middle ear, or so they’d told him. An inconvenience, they’d said. He slid a little farther down the wall, and Finn shifted the rest of his eighty-pound weight into his lap.

  So inconvenient, along with the shakes and the sweats and the screaming in his sleep, that they’d discharged him. Bye-bye, Kieran Connolly, Combat Medical Technician, Class 1, and here’s your bit of decoration and your nice pension. He’d used the pension to buy the boatshed.

  He’d rowed at Henley in his teens, crewing for a London club. To a kid from Tottenham who’d stumbled across the Lea Rowing Club quite by accident, Henley had seemed like paradise.

  It was just him and his dad, then. His mum had scarpered when he was a baby, but it was not something his dad ever talked about. They’d lived in a terraced street that had hung on to respectability by a thread, his dad repairing and building furniture in the shop below the flat. Kieran, white and Irish in a part of north London where that made him a minority, had been well on his way to life as a petty thug.

  Kieran stroked Finn’s warm muzzle and closed his eyes, trying to use the memory to quell the panic, the way the army therapist had taught him.

  It had been hot, that long ago Saturday in June, just after his fourteenth birthday. He’d stolen a bike on a dare, ridden it in a wild, heart-hammering escape through the streets of Tottenham to the path that ran down along the River Lea. And then, with the trail clear behind him, his legs burning and the sun beating down on his head, he’d seen the single shells on the water.

  The sound of the storm faded from his consciousness as the memory drew him in.

  He’d stopped, gazing at the water, all thought of pursuit and punishment gone in an instant. The boats were stillness in motion, graceful as dragonflies, skimming the surface of the mercury-gleaming river, and the sight had gripped and squeezed something inside him that he hadn’t known existed.

  All that afternoon, he’d watched, and in the dimness of the evening, he’d pedaled slowly back to Tottenham and returned the bike, ignoring the taunts of his mates. The next Saturday he’d gone back to the river, drawn by something he couldn’t articulate, a longing that until then had only teased the feathery edges of his imagination.

  Another Saturday, and another. He learned that the boat place was called the Lea Rowing Club. He began to name the boats; singles, doubles, pairs, quads, fours, and the eights—if the singles had made him think of dragonflies, the eights were giant insects, moving in a rhythm that seemed both alien and familiar and that made him think of the pictures of Roman galleys he’d seen in school history books.

  And they talked to him, the oarsmen, when they noticed him hanging about. He was tall, even then. Awkward, scrawny, black-haired, pale-skinned even at summer’s height—all in all, not a very prepossessing specimen. But although he hadn’t realized it then, his inches had made him rowing material, and they’d been assessing his potential.

  After a bit, they’d let him help load the boats onto the trailers or lift them back onto the trestles that waited in the boatyard like cradles. One day a man tossed him a cloth and nodded at a dripping single. “Wipe it down, if you want,” he’d said. Other days, it was a wrench to adjust the rigging, oil for the seat runners, filler for the dents in the fiberglass.

  By that August, he’d become the club dogsbody, his mates forgotten, his dull terraced street subsumed by the river. He learned that the burly-shouldered man who gave him chores was a coach. And when one day the coach had looked him levelly in the eyes and handed him a pair of oars, the world had opened like an oyster, and Kieran Connolly had seen that he might be something other than a poor Irish kid with no future.

  The Lea—and rowing—had given him that. His coach had encouraged him to join the army. He could row, Coach said, and get an education, too. And so he had done, training as a medic, rowing in eights and fours, and then in the single scull that had been his true love since that very first day on the Lea.

  What neither he nor his coach had foreseen in those halcyon days before 9/11 was that the world would change, and that Kieran would see four tours of duty in Iraq. On the last, his unit had been taken out by an improvised explosive device, and he had been the only survivor.

  There’d been nothing left for him in Tottenham when he came home. His dad had been taken by cancer, the house sold to pay his debts, although Kieran had managed to salvage his father’s woodworking tools. After that, he couldn’t bear to go back to the Lea, to meet anyone he had known, or who—worse still—might offer him sympathy.

  So he’d bought an old Land Rover and drifted round the south of England, sleeping in a tent, always drawn by the rivers, but unable to imagine what he might do or where he might fit.

  Then, early one May morning, two months after his discharge, he’d stood on Henley Bridge, watching the scullers, feeling as insubstantial as a ghost.

  Later he’d walked through town, intending to buy some supplies, and he’d seen the advert for the boatshed in an estate agent’s window. It had seemed like a spar held out to a drowning man.

  A few weeks later, now the proud owner of the one-room shed, he’d moved in his few possessions, bought a used single shell, and begun to row for the first time in years. It was, he thought, like riding a bike—once learned, never forgotten. His body, still healing, had protested, but he’d kept on, and slowly he’d grown stronger.

  There was a small fixed dock that allowed him to tie up the little motor skiff he’d bought, and the boatshed’s small floating raft gave him a private place from which to launch the shell. He’d had no interest in rowing from a club, or competing again. He rowed for sanity now, not sport.

  But it was impossible to row on the Thames at Henley every day without encountering other rowers, and a few had recognized him from his competition days. A few others remembered that he had a knack for fixing boats, and as the months passed, he’d found himself taking on a repair here and there.

  The jobs helped fill his days between morning row and evening run, and when he wasn’t working on someone else’s boat, he’d begun very tentatively to work on a design for a wooden racing single. He was, after all, a furniture maker’s son. To him, wooden boats had a life and grace not found in fiberglass, and the project was in a way a tribute to his father.

  But he’d had no one to talk to but himself, and that small voice was little buffer against the memories that thronged inside his head and kept him awake in the night.

  And then one day he’d gone to pick up a boat that needed patching, and he’d seen the pen full of p
uppies in the owner’s garden.

  He’d come away with the boat, and Finn.

  That fat, black, wriggly puppy had, in the two years since, given Kieran a reason to get up in the morning. Finn was more than a companion, he was Kieran’s partner, and that union had given Kieran something he’d thought gone from his life—a useful job.

  Not that Tavie didn’t deserve credit, too, but if it weren’t for Finn, he’d never have met Tavie.

  Finn, as if aware that he was the subject of Kieran’s ruminations, spread his back toes in a luxurious doggy stretch and settled his heavy head a bit more comfortably on Kieran’s knee.

  Shifting position, Kieran grimaced at the prickle of pins and needles. His legs had gone to sleep. And, he realized, the storm was passing. The rain was pattering now, not ricocheting, the shed was no longer shaking in the wind, and his nausea had passed.

  “Get off, you great beast,” he said, groaning, but he stroked Finn’s ears while he gingerly flexed his legs to get the circulation back.

  He felt another tingle, but this time it was his phone, vibrating in his back pocket as it binged the arrival of a text.

  “Shift it, mate,” he said, gently moving the dog before scrabbling for his phone as he stood.

  The text was from Tavie—she was the call-out coordinator that morning.

  MISPER. ADULT FEMALE ROWER. PLS AND LKP LEANDER. REPORT AVAILABILITY FOR SEARCH.

  Kieran’s translation was now as automatic as breathing. Missing person . . . Both the Place Last Seen and Last Known Position, Leander Club. He felt a jolt of adrenaline, and Finn, up now, whined and danced in anticipation. He recognized the sound of a text, and he loved working almost as much as he loved Kieran.

  “Right, boy,” said Kieran. “We’ve got a job.” And thank God the worst of the storm was over, and he was steady enough on his feet to report in. But he didn’t like the sound of this, not one bit.