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few vanities.
    He opened the door to the spare room that had once been his office, whistling in surprise when he saw the weights and the ergometer. She was serious about training, then. Really serious.
    So what the hell had she gone and done?
    Clattering back down the stairs, he grabbed a spare anorak from the coat hook and went out into the garden, ducking his head against the driving rain. Becca’s neighbor’s lawn had the river frontage, but he checked it just in case she’d pulled the boat up there. Seeing nothing but upturned garden furniture, he ran back to the cottage and pulled his phone out with cold and fumbling fingers. Thunder rumbled and shook the cottage.
    Becca wouldn’t thank him for ringing her boss, Superintendent Peter Gaskill, but he couldn’t think what else to do next. He didn’t know Gaskill well, as Becca had been assigned to his team a short time before the divorce, but he’d met the man at police functions and the occasional dinner party.
    Freddie’s call was shunted through by the department’s secretary. When Gaskill picked up, Freddie identified himself, then said, “Look, Peter, sorry to bother you. But I’ve been trying to reach Becca since yesterday, and I’m a bit worried. I wondered if perhaps there’d been an emergency at work . . .” It sounded unlikely even as he said it. He explained about the boat, adding that Becca didn’t seem to have been home since the previous evening, and that her car was still in the drive.
    â€œWe had a staff meeting this morning, an important one,” Gaskill said. “She didn’t show or return my calls, and I’ve never known her to miss a meeting. You’re certain she’s not at home?”
    â€œI’m in the cottage now.”
    There was silence on the other end of the line, as if Gaskill was deliberating. Then he said, “So what you’re telling me is that Becca went out on the river last night, in the dark, alone in a racing shell, and that neither she nor the boat have been seen since.”
    Hearing it stated so baldly, Freddie felt chilled to the bone. Any arguments about her competency died on his lips. “Yes.”
    â€œYou stay there,” Gaskill told him. “I’m calling in the local force.”
    Two families, for the most part strangers to one another, had spent a long weekend cooped up together in the rambling vicarage that anchored the hamlet of Compton Grenville, near Glastonbury in Somerset, while rain rumbled and poured and the water rose around them. The scene, thought Detective Inspector Gemma James, had had all the makings of an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
    â€œOr maybe a horror film,” she said aloud to her friend and new cousin-in-law, Winnie Montfort, who stood at the old farmhouse sink in the vicarage kitchen, up to her elbows in suds. Winnie, a Church of England vicar, was married to Duncan Kincaid’s cousin Jack.
    And Gemma was now married to Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, a fact that still caused her a flutter of wonder when she reminded herself of it. Married. Really and truly. And three times, which Duncan still made a point of teasing her about. She touched her ring, liking the physical reminder.
    They’d begun as professional partners, Gemma a detective sergeant assigned to Duncan’s Scotland Yard Major Crimes team. When their relationship had become personal—much against Gemma’s better judgment in those early days—Gemma had applied for detective inspector. Her promotion had been a mixed blessing. It had ended their working partnership, but it had allowed them to make their personal relationship public.
    Still, Gemma had harbored deep reservations about commitment. They had both failed at first marriages; they both had sons who had been subjected to enough change and loss. And she had resisted, sometimes obstinately, what she saw as a loss of autonomy.
    But Duncan had been