Necessary as Blood

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Fears are entertained that the locality is being taken over, with Bethnal Green becoming Bangla Green.

– Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, Michael Young, The New East End

Gemma went into work on Wednesday morning knowing she was going to have to have a word with her boss, Mark Lamb. She couldn’t take any more time off work unless she discussed it with him. And as much as she hated using her mother’s health as an excuse, she couldn’t see another option. It wouldn’t be politic for her to say she was helping Kincaid with an investigation, and especially not when she was looking into something that he’d been warned against.

Superintendent Lamb’s expression of concern made her feel even guiltier, but the guilt did nothing to dampen the sense of urgency she felt about Charlotte. After she’d left Lamb’s office she plowed through work, trying to clear as much as she could of her caseload, then she called her parents’ house in Leyton to check on her mum. By late morning, she was able to leave her desk with her conscience at least a little clearer.

This time, she took her car to the East End. Although the address Kincaid had given her was not far from the Bethnal Green tube station, she was not keen on the idea of wandering round an unfamiliar-and probably not particularly safe-East London housing estate on foot. And she was still a bit sunburned from yesterday afternoon’s excursion.

She found the estate easily, just south of Old Bethnal Green Road, and it was worse than she’d expected. A gray monument to late-sixties concrete-block architecture, its five stories squatted incongruously on a patch of green lawn. Every inch of concrete within human reach had been tagged with ugly, leering, giant-size faces and symbols. On the upper-level balconies, ragged laundry hung limply, as if wilting in the heat, and Indian pop music blared from an open window.

Finding a place to park, Gemma got out and gazed up at the building, shading her eyes. If Sandra had grown up here, how had she survived with the urge to make beautiful things intact? Or had the desire to create beauty grown out of desperation? Leyton had by no means been beautiful, but this…She thought of the Fournier Street house, with its comfortable and quirky elegance, and felt a new understanding of Sandra’s need to make a welcoming home. Sandra must have wanted to give her daughter what she had never had.

Gemma didn’t bother trying the lift. Even if it worked, which was unlikely, she didn’t want to be trapped within its hot and undoubtedly smelly confines.

The urine-saturated stairwell was bad enough. She climbed to the fifth floor, trying to remember to breathe through her mouth, and being careful not to touch the walls or handrail. Halfway up, she saw a broken tricycle on the landing. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that a child had fallen with it.

When she reached the top floor, sweating and a bit queasy, she saw from the door numbers that Gail Gilles’s flat must be near the end of the long corridor. The concrete floor was awash with plastic bags, empty soda bottles and beer cans, cigarette ends, and against one wall, the shriveled husk of a used condom.

As she approached the peeling blue door at the corridor’s end, she suddenly realized that she had no idea what she was going to say. Having a distant claim of friendship with Naz was not likely to cut any ice with Sandra’s mother, but she’d have to do her best. There was no buzzer, so she knocked. After a moment, the strident shouting of a telly advert coming from inside the flat went quiet, and Gemma was sure she was being scanned through the peephole in the door. Resisting the temptation to knock again, she made an effort to relax her posture and paste a pleasant expression on her face. She imagined her lime green linen jacket looked as bedraggled as the washing she’d seen hanging outside, but she doubted whether a starched wardrobe, like her connection with Naz Malik, would earn her any points here. At least she probably didn’t look like a bill collector.

The door swung open, and Gemma stared at the woman who must be Sandra Gilles’s mother. She saw a busty figure gone to plumpness, blond hair, perhaps once the same burnished straw color as Sandra’s, but now bleached to platinum and piled high on her head. On her bare feet, Gail Gilles sported gold toenails, a fitting accompaniment to the tight black Capri trousers, the clingy leopard-print top, the overabundant makeup, and the immediately apparent attitude.

Hand on hip, she said, “I told you already. They’ve gone. You got no call to come back like the frigging police.”

“Mrs. Gilles?” Gemma hoped her baffled expression was good enough to hide her jolt of shock at the word police. It had taken her a second to realize she hadn’t given herself away-Gail Gilles obviously thought she was a social worker, checking on her sons’ removal.

“Whose business is it?” Gail asked, still sounding hostile but not quite so certain of her ground.

“Um, my name’s Gemma. I thought you must be Charlotte’s grandmother, but you don’t look old enough…”

Gail’s expression softened at the bald-faced flattery. “I might be. Not old enough to be anyone’s grandma, but I was just a baby myself, wasn’t I, when I ’ad my daughter.” She looked more closely at Gemma and frowned. At least Gemma thought it was a frown-her mouth turned down but her brow didn’t wrinkle. “But I don’t know you, do I?”

Gemma rushed into an explanation, babbling a bit, but thinking that if nerves made her sound like a nitwit, all the better. “I’m so sorry about your son-in-law. It must be a terrible shock. I’m a friend of your son-in-law’s-your late son-in-law’s-friend, the one who reported him missing. I helped out with Charlotte until social services came. I don’t know why they didn’t call you straightaway. She’s a cute kid, and I thought, well, she should be with her family, shouldn’t she? And I thought, well, I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I wanted to say I was sorry for your loss, and ask if there was anything I could do, but…” She trailed off, as if unsure of what came next, which was certainly the case, and praying Gail didn’t ask how she’d come by the address.

But Gail Gilles seemed unable to resist the temptation of a sympathetic ear, however unlikely its appearance on her doorstep. Pulling the door wide, she said, “That’s the truth, innit? I always say as kids should be with family. It hain’t natural otherwise. Why don’t you come in and ’ave a cuppa? What did you say your name was?”

“The kettle just boiled,” said Gail. “Should still be ’ot enough. Have a seat and I’ll bring something in.” Glancing in the kitchen, Gemma saw on the work top an open takeaway pizza box, a shiny new espresso machine, and beyond that, an old plastic electric kettle. The flat smelled faintly of bad drains, or perhaps rotting garbage.

As directed, she sat down gingerly on the edge of a new, overstuffed, cream-colored leather sofa, taking advantage of the opportunity to check out her surroundings. Her first impression was that the flat was the center of an ongoing jumble sale. The sofa had both matching chair and loveseat, all squeezed together like puffy cream mushrooms, and every bit of space left in the room seemed to be crammed with something. Odd bits of furniture, some of it broken. Children’s toys. Piles of clothing. Even a rug, rolled up and stood on end in a corner.

The yellowed walls held a motley collection of cheap prints, Princess Diana portraits, and a few family photos depicting two chunky boys and a girl who slightly resembled Sandra. Her face was prettier than Sandra’s, but less interesting and intelligent. Sandra’s younger sister, Donna? In another photo, the same young woman appeared older, with three unnaturally stiff-looking little boys clustered round her. There were no photos that Gemma could see of Sandra-or of Charlotte.

“That’s my Donna,” said Gail, startling Gemma as she came back into the room. She carried two mugs of what Gemma soon discovered was tepid instant coffee. It had obviously been made with water from the old kettle, as bits of scale floated on the top.

“Um, thanks.” Gemma smiled and set the mug on the coffee table, trying to keep up a slightly vague expression. She had been thinking that if Gail’s sons were dealing drugs, they weren’t doing too well at it, when she caught sight of the large flat-screen television half hidden by a pile of moving boxes. Beneath the TV, a satellite box and DVD player sat on the floor, beside a Bose sound system. Plastic Guitar Hero guitars lay to one side, next to toppling stacks of DVD boxes.

Put those things together with the sofas, ugly but probably expensive, and the fancy coffee machine in the kitchen. All were items that could easily be bought with handy, untraceable cash.

“She’s a good girl, my Donna. And those are Donna’s kids,” Gail went on, sitting down on the bloated chair with her own cup. “She had ’em all fixed up for that portrait studio, you know, the one where you get all the different sizes and the little ones you carry in your wallet.”

Gemma noticed that she didn’t refer to the children as her grandchildren. “They’re very good looking. Like Charlotte.”

Her face clouding, Gail said, “That Charlotte. You said you seen her, so you’ll know. She’s a darkie. Still.” Gail gave a gusty, martyred sigh. “She’s my flesh and blood, and it’s my duty to take her in.”

“Will you be moving, then?” Gemma gestured at the boxes.

“Oh, no. Not me. It’s my boys. That social worker says they’ve got to move out before I can have my own granddaughter. My boys pushed out of their own ’ome, if you can credit that! I don’t know as what I’d do without my boys. Why just Saturday, they borrowed their mates’ van and took me to pick out this furniture. Brought it home that very night, too.” Gail shook her head and her blond hair wobbled. “They look after me, don’t they?” She gave Gemma a sudden fierce glare. “It hain’t your friend who told that social worker lady those bad things about my Kev and my Terry?”

“Oh, no. It can’t have been,” said Gemma, thinking it wasn’t an outright lie, as she had been the one who’d passed the drug rumors on to Janice Silverman. “Where will they go, your sons?”

“Well, they can stay with their sister until we get this sorted. Not that she ’as room, mind you, but she wouldn’t turn ’em away. She’s a good sister, our Donna, not like some who think they’re too good for their own.” Gail kicked her gold sandals off under the coffee table, wiggling her toes, and as Gemma glanced down at one toppled shoe she saw that the label read Jimmy Choo.

She had to stop herself whistling through her teeth and put on a baffled look instead. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand…Who-”

“Sandra.” Gail’s tone was venomous. “Always thought she was too good for us, from the time she was no bigger than that daughter of hers. And then she married that Paki, and he turned her. Bad enough we have to live here with ’em. God knows what ’e’s done to that little girl, but we’ll soon see about that. It won’t take me long to sort ’er out.”

The scummy instant coffee Gemma had been forced to taste for politeness’s sake came back up in her throat. She thought the fury coursing through her veins must be visible, throbbing in her face. Swallowing hard, she said, “I didn’t know your daughter, Mrs. Gilles-Gail-do you mind if I call you Gail?” Not waiting for an answer, she prattled on, “About your daughter-I never really heard-what was it happened to your daughter?”

“She run off.” It was aggravation, not grief, that colored Gail’s voice. “Just upped and run off. Probably to get away from that Paki husband of ’ers. How she could leave that baby, I don’t know. It’s unnatural, innit?”

“Oh, I-” Gemma stood up so quickly that the coffee she’d set on the table sloshed from the mug. Her anger boiled up, and she felt she might be physically sick. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she managed to mumble. She fished a tissue from her handbag, grateful that for a moment her hair fell forward to hide her face. Mopping at the brown liquid, she said, “I-I’m afraid all of a sudden I’m not feeling too well.”

“Not catching, is it?” Gail looked at her suspiciously.

“No, no, I’m sure it’s not. It’s just the heat. Listen, ta ever so much for the coffee. I hope things work out for you. And for little Charlotte.” She flashed Gail a sickly smile and headed towards the door, dodging round the packing boxes.

“You,” Gail called after her. “What did you say your name was? Gemma?”

She turned back, her heart thudding. “Gemma. That’s right.” She had blown it, and now she was going to have to bail herself out, somehow, and without blowing the narcotics op as well.

“You said you helped look after Charlotte before the social worker lady took her.” To Gemma’s surprise, Gail’s voice had taken on a wheedling tone. “So you know that Silverman woman. Any way you could put in a good word for me?”

Gemma clattered down the stairs, barely missing the tricycle, and cannoned out onto the patch of green lawn. She was breathing as if she’d been running a sprint, and it was only when she reached her car and pushed her hair back from her face as she fished for her keys that she saw them.

Two young men, one more heavyset than the other, both with heads shaved to a dark stubble, watched her from near the bottom of the stairwell. Although they were older than they had been in the photos, she recognized them from the family portraits in Sandra Gilles’s flat. Kevin and Terry Gilles, undoubtedly. Had she gone right past them? Did they know she’d come from their mother’s flat? If not, they would soon enough.

She glanced away, keeping her face deliberately blank, just as her searching fingers found her keys. Casually, she inserted the key in the lock, opened the door, and climbed into the Escort. The driver’s seat scorched the backs of her thighs even through her trousers, and the steering wheel felt molten, but she switched the blower on high and drove slowly, cautiously away, without lowering the windows, and without looking back.

Crossing Bethnal Green Road, she made the first right turn she saw and pulled the car over near a quiet churchyard. It seemed miles from the council estate. With the car idling, she lifted her shaking hands from the wheel and lowered the windows.

What had she been thinking, going into that flat as unprepared as a lamb? What if the sons had come in?

And what had she accomplished for the risk?

She thought it through. She now knew that although Gail Gilles seemed to have no means of support, her sons, who had menial jobs at best, kept her well supplied with high-priced merchandise, and God knew what else that was not so visible. That made it pretty certain that Kevin and Terry had undocumented-and probably illegal-income.

And they had seen her. She hadn’t identified herself, hadn’t given her last name, but would it be enough to make them, or their hypothetical bosses, suspicious?

And what if Gail hadn’t been fooled by her dithery act? What if Gail had been playing her, having marked her as an undercover cop? And a lousy undercover cop, at that.

Bloody hell. The worst thing was that she could not-absolutely could not-repeat anything she’d learned to Janice Silverman. Gail Gilles was vain, grasping, callous, bigoted, and still seemed to hold a vicious grudge against her missing daughter. Nor did she seem to feel an iota of genuine concern for her granddaughter. The thought of Charlotte being abandoned to the woman’s care-if you could call it that-made her feel ill again.

As she wiped her sweaty face with a handkerchief, trying to work out what to do next, her phone rang, and she saw with relief that it was Melody and not Kincaid. She wasn’t ready to tell Kincaid that she just might have made a balls-up of things.

“Boss.” Melody sound reassuringly crisp and cheerful. “You said to call if anything came in, so I am. There’s been a burglary, a hairdresser’s shop down the bottom of Ladbroke Grove. Last night, but they just now got round to reporting it. Manager apparently waited until the owner came in. Want me to put Talley’s team on it?”

“What?” It took Gemma a moment to make sense of what Melody had said. In the last two weeks, they’d had a string of nighttime burglaries of small shops, although the culprits usually didn’t manage to get much more than a little merchandise and some petty cash. “Oh, right,” she said, recovering. “Yes, Talley should take it. He’s been working the others.” A thought occurred to her. “Look, Melody, could you get away for a bit? I’m in Bethnal Green.”

Melody had suggested they meet at the Spitalfields Market. “There’s a good salad place there. I haven’t had lunch, and I’m watching my calories.” If she was curious as to why Gemma was in Bethnal Green when she’d said she was going to Leyton to visit her mum, she kept it to herself.

Although Gemma hadn’t far to drive, it took her so long to find a place to park that Melody, having come on the tube to Liverpool Street, was there before her.

On this Wednesday afternoon, the vendors’ tables in the main arcade of the old market were stacked and folded, and the empty trading space seemed to echo a little wistfully under the great glass vault. She found the salad kiosk round the corner, across the arcade from some of the trendier cafés. It had a buffet line on the inside, and a few tables with umbrellas out in the arcade, as if it were a sidewalk café.

“I finally parked in the Bangla City carpark,” Gemma said when she reached Melody. “I hope I don’t get towed.” The Asian supermarket was at the Brick Lane end of Fournier Street, and she had walked past Naz and Sandra’s house on her way to the market. The house seemed to her to have taken on an indefinable air of desertion in the few days since she had seen it.

“What are you doing here?” Melody asked. “I thought your mum had been sent home.”

“She has. I-It’s…complicated.”

Melody looked at her critically. “Well, I’m starved, and you look positively knackered. Have you eaten?”

“No, but-”

“We’ll get something. And then you can tell me about it.” When Gemma started to protest, Melody overrode her. “You have a seat and I’ll choose. I know what’s good here, and I know what you like.”

Gemma sat down at one of the little round tables, willing enough to be managed for the moment. The shade and the drafts of air moving through the arcade were welcomingly cool, and by the time Melody came out, with plastic boxes of salad and cups of coffee, she had begun to feel a bit more collected.

The prospect of coffee made her quail, but then she thought perhaps she should approach it as if she were getting back on a horse-if she didn’t erase the taste of Gail Gilles’s horrible brew now, she might never be able to face coffee again.

Melody had brought her a plain latte, her favorite coffee drink, and the salad was a colorful mix of beetroot, carrot, chickpeas, and hard-cooked egg on greens. “How did you know about this place?” Gemma asked, finding as she tasted the salad that she was hungry after all. And the coffee was deliciously strong and mellow.

“Oh, I like to come to the Saturday market.” Melody shrugged offhandedly, displaying her usual reluctance to discuss her personal life. “It’s mostly touristy tat now, but there are still some good stalls. So, is this about the Malik case?” Melody asked, changing the subject before Gemma could question her further.

Gemma finished a bite of salad, considering. She badly wanted someone to confide in-but how much could she say without betraying Kincaid’s confidence?

And she was Melody’s boss, which made it even trickier to admit that she’d skived off work and lied about going to visit her ill mum, especially when the one thing she absolutely could not say was that she’d done it at Kincaid’s instigation. But then, Melody was so solidly dependable, and had never let her down. If there was anyone she could talk to…

“I went to see Gail Gilles,” she blurted out. “Sandra’s mother. I wasn’t supposed to, and I can’t talk about it. I can’t have been there, do you see?”

“Okay,” Melody said thoughtfully. “You weren’t there. I get that. So what didn’t you see when you weren’t there?”

Gemma pushed her salad away, her appetite suddenly gone. “Oh, Melody, she’s horrible. She doesn’t care anything about Charlotte-in fact, I’d say she actively dislikes her, or at least the idea of her. I don’t think she actually knows her at all. And I can’t imagine her looking after a child, although her own children seem to have grown up by hook or by crook. Crook being more like it.”

“The sons?”

Gemma nodded. “And I cannot talk to Janice Silverman about the things I saw that will probably be tidied up before social services make their first home visit, or about the things she said to me that she would probably never say to a social worker.”

“Eat,” Melody ordered, scooting the salad back in Gemma’s direction. “And let’s think about what else you can do. If she doesn’t want Charlotte out of grandmotherly concern, then why is she willing to take on a child?”

Picking obediently at the shredded beetroot, which had stained the hard-cooked egg a lovely pink, Gemma said, “It’s got to be money. If the house is unencumbered, it’s worth a lot. And Sandra’s unsold artwork-it may be valuable, too.” She thought of the prices she’d seen on the works in Pippa’s gallery. “I should have thought to ask Pippa Nightingale.”

“Nightingale?” Melody looked bemused, but waved her fork. “Never mind. Go on.”

“Duncan said Naz’s law partner is the executor of his will, but Naz and Sandra didn’t name a guardian for Charlotte.”

“But the estate will have to make provision for her care, so maybe Grandma thinks if she gets the kid, she’ll get a piece of it, or at least a regular allowance,” suggested Melody. “But I would think that the mother’s disappearance would complicate matters. Can you talk to the lawyer?”

“I don’t see why not,” Gemma said slowly. “As long as I don’t mention anything about…where I didn’t go.”

“That’s one avenue, then. So who’s this Pippa person? That’s a posh name if I ever heard one. Could she add anything you could repeat about Gail Gilles?”

“Pippa is-was-Sandra’s art dealer. Roy Blakely told me they’d had a falling-out, but Pippa says it was a disagreement over the way Sandra was marketing her art. She says she didn’t know Sandra’s family, and that Sandra never talked about them.”

“I’m beginning to see why,” said Melody.

Gemma grimaced. “That’s an understatement. But the odd thing was, Pippa said she and Sandra and Lucas Ritchie were all three friends.”

“Lucas Ritchie was the guy Naz Malik told Tim Sandra was rumored to have had an affair with-well, that’s a bit garbled, but you know what I mean.” Melody waved her fork dismissively. “Did you ask Pippa about the alleged affair?”

“No.” Gemma drank some of her latte, savoring it. “I was there as a friend, because of Charlotte, and Pippa seemed so upset about Naz’s death, and about Sandra…it just seemed…inappropriate. Duncan asked Lucas Ritchie, though, and he said he and Sandra had been friends since art college, and that Naz would never have believed such a rumor.” She went on to recount Kincaid’s description of the club. “It’s just round the corner here, in Widegate Street. And the interesting thing is that when Duncan asked Ritchie who started the rumor, he said it might have been a former employee, who is now conveniently missing.”

“So.” Melody tossed both their salad containers in the nearby rubbish bin and came back wiping her fingers with the paper napkin. “Is there any reason you can’t talk to Lucas Ritchie, as a friend of Naz’s?”

“I’d have to have got the information about the club from the police-”

“Tell him you got it from Pippa Nightingale.”

“But-”

“Or tell him you want to know if you can hire his posh club for your hen party. Ask him if he’ll allow a male stripper.” Melody grinned impishly.

Gemma groaned. “Don’t be absurd. And I don’t want to have a hen party. Why would you think I did?”

“Because some of the girls at the station have been talking about it.” Melody grew serious. “They think they’re being snubbed. That they’re not good enough for the boss.”

“Snubbed? But I haven’t even made plans for the wedding,” Gemma protested.

Melody hesitated, then said, “And I’m not usually one to repeat gossip or to pry, but tongues are starting to wag about that, too. Boss, are you and the super not getting along?”

Gemma gaped at her. She’d had no idea people were talking. “Of course we’re getting along. We’re fine. It’s just-it’s just that I don’t want a wedding.” There, she’d said it, and the world hadn’t fallen in. At least, not yet. “It’s turned out to be something for everyone except us, and I just hate the whole idea.” She thought of the way things had been the previous evening, with Duncan and the boys and Charlotte, and it was that…that intimacy she’d wanted to celebrate.

“Well, post banns and go to the register office, then,” Melody suggested. “I’ll be your witness.”

Touched, Gemma said, “Thanks, Melody.” Then she shook her head. “But my mum really wants this for me, and right now-I just don’t think I can disappoint her.”

Melody gave her a searching look, then shrugged. “It seems to me that you can either disappoint your mother or disappoint Duncan.” She stood. “So Duncan said this Ritchie guy is good looking? Come on, let’s go see for ourselves. I’ll be your partner in crime.”