Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) was the winner of the Midland Railway’s competition to design their London terminal—and by far the best known of the competitors.
—Alastair Lansley, Stuart Durant, Alan Dyke, Bernard Gambrill, Roderick Shelton,
The Transformation of St. Pancras Station, 2008
“Sit.” Kincaid gestured Cam to the sofa, then held up a hand to keep Matthew where he was. “Both of you.” When Cam complied, hugging the duffel bag to her lap, Kincaid pulled up a rickety wooden spare chair so that he could face them both.
“Tell me,” he said. “What happened to Wren?”
Matthew and Cam glanced at each other, but it was Cam who began to speak. “It was New Year’s Eve. The boys had brought in some lager and we were going to just kick back. Ryan was out somewhere, he didn’t say. Paul wasn’t here, either, and I think Ariel was feeling a bit put out. She said we should do something radical. She got this idea about tagging something with our slogan, and she said she knew a place. Ariel’s an artist—she’s good with a paint can.” Cam hesitated. “I shouldn’t even be telling you that—it’s illegal . . .” At a look from Kincaid, she swallowed and continued. “Right. None of the lads was up for it—they’d already had a few beers—so Wren said she’d go. Ariel said she had her dad’s car. They left.” She stopped again, and now she was clutching the duffel bag for dear life. Matthew still hadn’t said a word.
“Go on,” Kincaid said. “I’m listening.”
“Nobody thought any more about it. Ryan came back and asked where Wren was. Then a couple of hours later, Ariel came in by herself. She was hysterical. We couldn’t calm her down. It was Ryan finally who made her talk. He slapped her. He was frantic by that time. We all knew something really bad had happened. But we had no idea—” Cam gave a little sob. When she spoke again, her voice shook.
“She said—Ariel said that they went to a railway embankment, a place she’d tagged before. They left the car—Ariel said it was a good walk. But when they got to the top of the embankment, she discovered she’d left one of the paint cans. She went back to get it. Then she—she heard the train. And then a terrible squeal of brakes. She ran back, but when she got there, the train was stopped. And she could see—she could see that Wren had gone under the train.” Tears were streaming down Cam’s face now. She made no effort to wipe them away.
“What did she do then?” Kincaid asked more gently.
“She said there were lights and shouting and she could hear sirens. She was terrified. She ran back to the car and came straight here. Ryan was—I don’t even know how to describe it. He kept asking her over and over exactly what had happened. Ariel said she didn’t know if Wren had jumped or fallen. And Ryan kept asking if she was sure she hadn’t seen anyone else. If someone had followed them. He was . . . crazy.”
“Why didn’t you notify the police?” Kincaid asked.
“Ryan said not to. She had no family. There was nothing anyone could do. Not that Matthew was eager to tell anyone”—the look Cam gave Matthew was scathing—“because he didn’t want to be connected with it. Ariel was willing, but Ryan said she needn’t do it.”
“And everyone listened to Ryan?”
“You couldn’t not. He took charge of everything. But after that . . .” Cam dug a tissue out the duffel and blew her nose. “Ryan was never the same. He was grieving for Wren. We could all see that. But there was something more. He started taking his things with him whenever he left the flat, and he disappeared for days at a time. I think—I think he was frightened of something.”
Kincaid left Cam and Matthew after getting their new contact information, and telling them that he had better hear from the rest of the group or he would track them down.
Hailing a passing taxi as he walked back towards King’s Cross, he gave the driver Ariel’s address in Cartwright Gardens, but when he got there and rang the bell there was no answer. He debated a moment, then hailed another cab to take him back to Holborn station.
Both Simon Gikas and Jasmine Sidana were still in the CID room. He told them what he’d learned about Wren, which he could do now without bringing Doug into it or telling them he’d already known how Wren had died.
“I’ll track it down,” said Simon, turning to his computer. “Maybe I can get a better idea of whether she jumped or fell.”
Or was pushed, Kincaid thought, remembering that Ryan had kept asking Ariel if they had been followed or if she’d seen anyone else, but he didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t know what—or whom—Ryan was afraid of, but the fear had infected him.
“Any luck on matching the handwriting on the note in Ariel’s cubby?” he asked Jasmine.
“The family liaison officer sent over some papers from Paul’s room at his home. The lab’s handwriting expert hasn’t had time to do a detailed analysis, but from a first look, she says she thinks it’s the same.”
“Right. But that still doesn’t convince me it was a suicide note.” He glanced at his watch. “You two should go home. It’s late, and I don’t think we’re going to accomplish much more here today. I tried Ariel’s house, but no one was home. But it might be better to question her about Wren when you’ve learned a little more, Simon.”
And when he wouldn’t be less likely to slip up and mention that he already knew where the accident had happened, Kincaid added to himself.
Kincaid took the Central line home to Notting Hill. When he came out of Holland Park tube station, the rain was coming down in earnest. With a grimace, he turned up his coat collar and unfurled his umbrella. Starting north on Lansdowne Road, he sidestepped puddles and fought to keep the wind from whipping his brolly inside out.
He passed a man in an overcoat walking a buff-colored cocker spaniel. The dog looked as miserable as Kincaid felt. Were Gemma and the kids back from Leyton? he wondered. He hadn’t heard from her since he had seen them at lunchtime.
Once he felt that odd twitch between his shoulder blades again, but when he turned back, he saw nothing but a few ordinary-looking, umbrella-wielding pedestrians. He laughed at himself for having had visions of being followed by dark cars with tinted windows, and by the time he reached the house, he was looking forward to dry clothes, a fire, and possibly a finger’s worth of his best Scotch before dinner.
Just as he put his key in the door, his mobile rang. “Bugger,” he muttered, dropping both umbrella and keys as he fumbled for the phone.
It was Doug. “I think I’ve found Ryan Marlowe’s wife,” he said. “She’s in a village in Oxfordshire, really a suburb of Reading.”
“Christine Marlowe,” Doug continued. “Age twenty-nine. Two children. Employed as a bookkeeper to a local builder. She lives in Caversham. We can be there in an hour.”
“That’s near Henley,” Kincaid said, recognizing the name.
“Well, I suppose, yes, but nearer Reading.”
“I can pick you up—,” Kincaid began, but he saw the Astra sitting at the curb and remembered that it wouldn’t start. “Damn and blast. My car’s out of commission. I’ll have to use Gemma’s.”
“Melody’s here,” said Doug. “She’s got her Clio. We’ll pick you up. Give us half an hour.”
“What’s Mel—,” Kincaid began, but Doug had rung off.
He had enough time to greet Gemma and the kids and to change into dry shoes, at the least.
“Should I keep it hot for you?” Gemma asked as he bent over to sniff the pot she was stirring on the cooker. “It’s Turkish ratatouille. Hazel and Holly are coming over to see the kittens, so we’re going veggie.”
“Already found a mark, eh? Good for you.” He kissed her ear. “Better not keep dinner warm for me. I’ve no idea how long I’ll be. Give Hazel my best, will you? Any news on the Tim front?”
“From what I gather, they’ve reached a comfortable détente. It seems to be working for them for the moment.” She turned so that she could look up at him. “Want to tell me about this mysterious interview?”
His phone beeped with a text from Doug saying they were pulling up outside. “When I get back,” he promised.
On his way to the door, he gave Sid, who was perched on the kitchen table looking disgruntled, a rub on his furry black head. “Never thought you’d have to share the attention with a girl cat and babies, did you, mate?”
Melody’s little bright blue Renault Clio was idling at the end of the walk. As Kincaid climbed in the back, he got a glimpse of her in the dome light. She looked more rested and seemed to be wearing her own clothes for the first time since the incident. He hoped that meant she’d been home.
“Where’s Andy tonight?” he asked, buckling up as Melody put the Clio into gear.
“They’ve let Tam go home. Andy was helping Michael get him settled in. Then he and Poppy are doing a set at the Twelve Bar. Everyone wants their piece of them now.”
“Only the beginning, I suspect,” Kincaid said; then he told them what he’d learned that day.
“So it’s possible Wren wasn’t a suicide?” asked Doug. “And Marsh wasn’t accounted for during the time she died, nor was Paul Cole. Could either of them have been involved?”
Kincaid thought about it. “From what Cam said, I’d say Marsh was very unlikely. Neither Cam nor Matthew seemed to have had any idea where Cole was that night. But I can’t see why he would have killed this girl.”
“Maybe he’d had a row with Ariel,” Melody suggested. “And that’s why she wanted to do something reckless. He could have followed them, been jealous of Wren, and decided to get rid of her. It doesn’t seem to have been the most functional of relationships, Paul and Ariel.”
“True. But no one’s implied that Ariel and Wren were anything more than casual friends. Why should he have been jealous? How did you find Christine Marlowe?” Kincaid asked Doug.
“Amazing what’s in public records if you know where to look,” Doug answered with such a self-satisfied smirk that Melody spared him a glare.
“Braggart,” she said.
Melody was a good driver, and they fell silent as she navigated through the rain-streaked streets of West London and then onto the M4.
Soon they were driving through Reading, and when they reached the outskirts, Melody used her sat nav to guide them to the northern edge of Caversham.
Christine Marlowe lived in a quiet suburban street. The semidetached house was brick and pebble dash. Its garden looked muddy and slightly neglected, and a child’s bike lay abandoned on the front walk.
“I suppose I should do the talking,” Kincaid said as they got out of the car. “Since you two are not official.”
“I don’t think any of us are official at this point,” Doug reminded him.
“Better my head than yours,” Kincaid murmured as he rang the bell, and then he realized that was exactly the stance that Ryan Marsh had taken with the group over the smoke bomb.
He could hear children’s voices and the sound of a television. A dog began to bark.
The woman who answered the door was a pretty, slightly faded blonde in her late twenties. She held the door open a body’s width, blocking the dog, a Labrador mix going gray at the muzzle. “Get back, Sally,” she told the dog, then said, “Yes?” looking them over warily. “If you’re Jehovah’s Witnesses—”
“We’re not,” Kincaid assured her. “Are you Christine Marlowe?”
“I’m Christie, yeah. No one calls me Christine. Who are you?”
“Mummy?” said one of the two little girls who’d come to stand beside her. “Who is it? Is it Daddy?” They were blond, like their mum, and Kincaid guessed the younger to be about Toby’s age, the elder a year or two older.
“Go to the kitchen,” Christie Marlowe told them sharply, then asked Kincaid again, “Who are you? What do you want?”
Kincaid was glad they had Melody with them. Otherwise he sensed the woman might have slammed the door on them. He took out his warrant card. “Detective Superintendent Kincaid, Camden CID. We’d like to—”
“Oh, God.” All the color drained from Christie Marlowe’s face. Her knees sagged as she grasped the door with both hands. “What’s happened?” She gave a frantic look back to make sure her daughters had left the room. “Is he—”
“Mrs. Marlowe, please, can we come in? We just need to ask you a few questions.”
She stared at them, taking in their casual clothes and perhaps reassured by their expressions and the tone of Kincaid’s voice. “Yes. All right.”
When she stepped back, the dog sniffed eagerly at Kincaid, ignoring Melody and Doug. “You smell my pups, don’t you, girl?” Kincaid said, giving her a pat.
The television, he saw as Christie Marlowe led them into the sitting room, was playing a repeat of Doctor Who—typical Saturday-night children’s fare. This was as normal a household as his own—kids, dogs, the smell of something on the cooker—and he realized he had no idea how he was going to ask this woman the things he needed to know.
The sitting room furniture was a matching suite that had seen better days, and they had to move toys to find a place to sit. There was a half-drunk glass of red wine on the end table, but Christie Marlowe didn’t offer them anything. She sank unsteadily onto the edge of a chair. “Just tell me that Ryan’s all right. That nothing’s happened to him.”
Grateful for the opening, Kincaid said, “That’s what we were hoping you might tell us, Mrs. Marlowe. We’d like to speak to him regarding an incident earlier in the week. He was very helpful in a public emergency, but he seems to have disappeared. Do you know where he is?”
“Oh, God,” she said again. “What incident?”
“The fire in St. Pancras station.”
“That? Where that poor boy burned?” Her hand went to her throat. “Ryan was there? Was he hurt?”
“No, we don’t think so. He assisted a police officer in controlling the crowd and evacuating bystanders.”
Some of the tension seemed to drain from Christie Marlowe. She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned back into the chair, then said, “I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know where he is.”
At a slight nod from Kincaid, Melody leaned towards her. “Mrs. Marlowe, I was the police officer that Ryan helped. Together we cleared the crowd away from the fire, and he helped me reach the victim. I couldn’t have managed without him. But then he disappeared. We think he knew the victim, and we were hoping he could tell us something about what happened. And we want to make certain that he’s all right.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Christie Marlowe repeated, but there were tears in her eyes.
Kincaid said, “What does Ryan do, Mrs. Marlowe?”
“He—he drives lorries. And does landscape gardening, the big sort of jobs.”
“So he’s gone from home a good bit?”
She nodded. “But he almost always gets home on the weekend, or if not, he calls.”
“And this weekend, you haven’t heard from him?”
Christie shook her head. “No.” It was almost a whisper.
“Your husband used to be a police officer, Mrs. Marlowe?”
“That’s right. But he left. Something happened, I don’t know what. They took his warrant card. Since then he’s done a bit of this and a bit of that.”
“Do you know any of the people that Ryan works for now?”
She shook her head. “No. They’re just jobs.”
“Does he bring you a paycheck?”
“No. Just cash—whatever he’s made that week.” There had been a subtle shift in her body posture. She had been openly worried, then relieved. But now her answers felt practiced, and she hadn’t questioned Kincaid’s right to ask such personal questions.
She was lying. And it was a lie she was used to telling.
“Mrs. Marlowe—Christie— Can I call you Christie?” Kincaid asked. He needed a wedge of intimacy.
Christie Marlowe nodded.
Kincaid went on. “Christie, we have reason to think that for the last few years, your husband has been working as an undercover police officer. I think you know this. We’re afraid he may be in some sort of trouble and we want to help him.”
“No.” She pushed herself unsteadily up from the chair. “I’m not talking to you. You’ll have to go.” She darted a glance towards the kitchen, as if making certain the little girls hadn’t heard.
Kincaid raised a hand. “Christie, please. Sit down. We want to help you. We want to help Ryan.”
“How do I even know who you are?” Her voice rose and he could see her make an effort to lower it before she spoke again. “You showed me a warrant card—that doesn’t mean a damned thing. And you two”—she pointed at Melody and Doug—“didn’t even do that. Not that it matters—anyone can make a warrant card. And anyone can lie about anything.”
“Look,” Kincaid said. “I’m going to be honest with you. Whether you believe me is up to you. This is Doug, and this is Melody. We are all Met CID officers, but we’re not here officially. We’re friends who work on different teams.”
Melody took it up, speaking with an earnestness Kincaid had never seen in her. “Christie, I don’t know how to explain this, but those few minutes I spent with Ryan, I felt a . . . a bond. It was something I’d heard about, but it had never happened to me. We ran into the fire together. And then, when he disappeared, I just had a feeling that something was really wrong. It was Duncan’s case”—she nodded at Kincaid—“but Doug and I wanted to help. This is all off the record—and anything you tell us is off the record.”
“I wish I could believe you,” said Christie Marlowe. “But even if I did, I still can’t tell you anything. I don’t know what kind of trouble Ryan is in. He doesn’t tell me.”
The dog, who had been lying beside her mistress’s chair, got up and went over to Kincaid and laid her head on his knee. “Hello, girl,” he said, and stroked her head.
“Oh, Sally.” Christie Marlowe shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t mind her. Ryan spoils her something terrible. She misses him.”
“Christie,” Kincaid said gently. “You’ve been married to Ryan for, what, a decade? Do you have any idea where he is? Where he might go if he was in trouble?”
She wiped her eyes and looked at them. The girls’ voices were getting louder in the kitchen, as if there was a squabble brewing.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said at last. She glanced at the dog, who was now happily drooling on Kincaid’s knee. “Ryan always says that dogs are infinitely more trustworthy than people, and that you should pay attention to their instincts.” She sniffed, then sighed. “Ryan always had a thing about camping and canoeing. I was a big disappointment to him because I could never see any point in being wet, dirty, and uncomfortable. We—” Christie looked down at her hands. “To be honest, we hadn’t been getting on at all well the last year or so. Ryan would come home most weekends, spend time with the girls and the dog, then go off to the river with his canoe.
“Then, last autumn, he didn’t bring the canoe back, but he wouldn’t say what happened to it.”
“Do you know where he liked to go?” asked Doug. It was the first time he’d spoken. “I like the river, too.”
“I—” Christie was looking back at her lap again, twisting her hands together. “I’m—ashamed. He—changed. Last autumn. I don’t know why. He started to shut me out completely. I was afraid he was having an affair. It happens all the time, I know that, I’d always known that, but somehow I never thought Ryan would . . . So one weekend I—I followed him.” She looked up at them. “He was alone. I never admitted to him what I’d done.”
“But you can tell us where he went,” encouraged Doug.
“It was near Wallingford. The river makes some small marshy lakes there, and there are little islands in them. I saw him dig his canoe out from under some brush and head towards the islands. That’s all I know. I never tried to follow him again. I should have trusted him,” she added, sounding anguished.
There was no way that Kincaid would tell her that from what they’d learned about Ryan and Wren, she might have been right.
“Thank you,” he said simply. “We’ll do our best to find him and see that he’s all right.”
Giving the dog a last pat, he stood. His eye was caught by a photo on the mantel. It was a family group, taken perhaps two or three years earlier judging by the age of the little girls. The man they knew as Ryan Marsh was laughing, an arm thrown round his younger daughter. What had happened to him since that day?
As they took their leave, Kincaid gave Christie a card with his mobile number on it. “If you hear anything or need anything, please ring me. And, Christie—I know you have no reason to trust us, but I think it would be better if you didn’t tell anyone else we were here. Or where Ryan might be.”
“I know exactly where that is,” Doug said when they got in the car. “We’d never find those islands at night, but we can get the River Police launch to take us first thing in the morning.”
Kincaid considered it, then shook his head. “No. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with here. And we sure as hell don’t want some sort of a standoff with the Thames River Police involved.”
“Okay,” said Doug. “Then as soon as the boat-hire places open at Wallingford in the morning, we can rent a skiff. Can you row?”