“Wes,” said Gemma, delighted. “What are you doing here? I thought you had to work tonight. And where is everyone?”
“The boys are walking the dogs. Toby and the mutts were bouncing off the walls-it was like Arsenal versus Man United in here. And I’m borrowing your oven.” Wesley put the spatula in the bowl and wiped his fingers on the tea towel tucked into the waist of his jeans. He wore an orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words PEACE, LOVE, AND REGGAE, and had tied his dreadlocks back with a royal blue bandanna. Like his mother, he embraced color. “Tuesday is our slow night at the café,” he added. “I don’t have to be in for a while yet.”
“What are you making? It smells heavenly.” Gemma sniffed again, following him as he headed back into the kitchen. She had a sudden worried thought about Charlotte. “Tell me the cooker in your flat hasn’t gone out.”
“No, just didn’t want to heat the place up any more. You know how small the kitchen is, and it was already stifling.”
Gemma took in the empty layer pans scattered across the work top. On the kitchen table, a large plate held a beautiful cake, half iced.
“And I thought Kit and Toby might like to help with the cake,” Wes continued. “It be verra good strawberry,” he added for emphasis, making Gemma laugh. She’d learned early on that Wes was a chameleon-he turned the West Indian accent on to suit, and usually as camouflage when he didn’t feel comfortable with someone. “You’ve missed your calling, Wes. You should be an actor.”
“I think we’ll save the stage for Toby.” Wes danced a little fencing step, using the spatula as a rapier.
Gemma raised her hands in mock horror. “Oh, no, please don’t encourage him. He’s bad enough already.”
Wesley returned the spatula to the bowl, scooping out more icing and smoothing it carefully onto the top layer of the cake. “I’ll tell him pirates didn’t have cake. Especially not cake with cream cheese icing and pureed fresh strawberries in the batter.”
Sid, their black cat, jumped up on the table and eyed the cake, his whiskers quivering. “No, you don’t, you bad cat. You know you’re not supposed to be on the table,” scolded Gemma. She scooped him up gently, however, and set him on the floor, pausing to rub his head. “So what’s this all about?” she asked Wes, teasing. “Is there a new girlfriend?”
“You might say that.” Wesley dolloped more icing on the top of the cake. “Her name is Charlotte,” he added, grinning. “I brought home a slice of Otto’s best chocolate gâteau from the café last night, but she wouldn’t eat it. So I thought I’d try something different.”
“Oh, Wes.” Gemma sank down in one of the kitchen chairs, feeling a rush of gratitude. “I knew you’d spoil her.”
“You mean you were hoping I’d spoil her.”
“I was counting on it.” She smiled. “How’s she doing today? Will she talk to you?”
“Not much, yet, but I’ll keep trying. Maybe strawberry cake will do the trick. Mum got out some of the girls’ old toys this morning, but she doesn’t seem much interested in anything but Mum’s sewing. She’s a natural for the camera, though-not the least bit self-conscious.”
“I think her mother took a lot of photographs.”
“That would explain it, then.” Wesley finished smoothing on the last of the icing. Reaching for a bowl of carefully sliced strawberries, he began to make a border round the top of the cake.
“I’ll check on her,” said Gemma. “But first I have to go to Battersea to see Hazel.”
Wesley gave her a puzzled glance. “But isn’t Hazel coming for tea? I’ve got out the best teapot and mugs.” He gestured towards a tray on the work top, where he had placed Gemma’s treasured Clarice Cliff teapot and cups. “I thought I’d have the cake iced by the time she got here. The two of you can have some with the boys, then I can take the rest home for Mum and Charlotte.”
Gemma stared at him, equally perplexed. “Wes, why would you think Hazel was coming for tea? I’ve been ringing her for an hour with no answer, and Tim hasn’t been able to get her for two days. I’m worried about her.”
Frowning, Wesley said, “But she was at my mum’s when I left. I just assumed she was coming here afterwards.”
“Your mum’s?” Gemma felt even more confused. “Why was Hazel at your mum’s?”
Wesley looked at her as if she’d missed the nose on her face. “She came to see Charlotte, of course.”
“Well, that’s put the wind up him,” Cullen said as Azad’s gate clicked shut behind them. He cast a disapproving glance at Neal Weller.
“That’s simply marked your position on the board,” Weller shot back. “Don’t think you could have put anything over on Azad. The question is whether he knows more than he’s told us.”
“And do you think he does?” Kincaid asked as they moved away, heading back towards Commercial Street.
“Azad prefers to be cooperative as long as it doesn’t interfere with his interests, and he didn’t get prickly until I mentioned the missing nephew.” Weller stopped at the corner. “And that surprised me, to tell the truth. I wasn’t expecting a reaction to the dig-he’s usually too cool for that. Maybe Malik’s death has him worried about his prospects in court.”
“Will he stay with Louise Phillips?” Kincaid asked.
They had stopped by the ancient horse trough in front of Christ Church. The pedestrian traffic flowed around them as if they were three suited boulders in a stream, while Weller scratched at the stubble on his chin, considering his response. “He’s not the sort to appreciate women in their professional capacity,” he said after a moment. “But at this point, I don’t think he has much choice, and I suspect that’s making him unhappy.”
“According to Louise Phillips, Naz was getting cold feet about Azad’s case,” Kincaid said. “Maybe Azad was afraid Naz would complicate things. He was certainly ready to lay blame for Naz’s death.”
“Laying blame and being responsible are two entirely different things.”
“You almost sound as if you like him,” said Cullen.
“No law against it.” Weller shrugged and looked at his watch. “I’m off. I’ll see you two hearties bright and early at the station. Thanks for the drinks.” He raised a hand in salute and turned into the crowd.
“Cheeky bastard,” muttered Cullen. “Who the hell does he think he is?”
“We’re on his patch, Doug,” Kincaid said. “He knows the currents and undertows-he can read things we’d miss altogether. We need him.” He gave a shrug as expressive as Weller’s. “At least for the moment. I suspect that Ahmed Azad isn’t the only one who knows more than he’s telling.”
“You think Weller’s involved in this somehow?”
“No. Why would he have called us in if he was?” Kincaid shook his head. “But there’s something…I just haven’t quite put my finger on it yet.” He looked round. Shops were closing, passersby carried bags of shopping, and the front of the church had begun to take on a faint gold glow in the western sun. “I’ve got to go, as well. I’m going to stop in at Naz Malik’s house.”
“I’ll come with you,” offered Doug.
“No, you go on, Doug. I won’t stay long. And you should have a look at some more flat adverts.” He clapped his sergeant on the shoulder. “I don’t want you to lose your momentum.”
Fournier Street was a canyon of shadow. The chimney pots looked starkly uniform in the flat light, marching across the tops of the terraces like rigid orange soldiers. Kincaid found the house easily in the short row. There was no crime scene van in the street, and when he tried the door, it was locked. He took out the copied key Sergeant Singh had given him before he left Bethnal Green, unlocked the door, and stepped in.
The house was shuttered and dim. He fumbled a bit for the switch-in these old houses, the wiring was often exposed, and terminated in odd places. In this one, the switch for the entry hall was coupled with the switch for the sitting room, and was just outside the sitting room door. His fingers came away smudged with black
-the fingerprint demons had made their appointed rounds.
The illumination revealed more black dust: the doorknobs and stair rail, the handlebars and crossbars of the bike that stood propped against the wall, the jauntily flower-decaled helmet hanging from one rubber grip.
He looked into the sitting room, then went downstairs to the kitchen, where he checked to make sure no rubbish had been left in the kitchen bin. As far as he knew, the house had no caretaker, and the odor of rotting garbage could permeate the place quickly. Someone had tidied, however, either Naz Malik’s nanny or the SOCOs-or Gemma.
Returning to the ground floor, he stood for a moment, wishing he had seen the house the way Gemma had seen it on Saturday. It would still have had human presence then, a pulse of life and energy. Now it had taken on the too-quiet pall of the uninhabited. The air felt stale, unused, and the fingerprint dust gave the rooms an atmosphere of shabby neglect.
And as he stood in the stillness, Kincaid realized something else. In spite of the differences in age and architectural style, this house felt very much like their own. There was the same comfortable feel to the mix of contemporary and antique furniture, the splashes of rugs and artwork, the clutter of books and children’s toys.
Gemma would have felt very much at home here. Perhaps that had contributed to her attachment to the child.
He climbed the stairs, looking briefly into the rooms on each landing, finding he liked the little eccentric touches. Sandra’s influence, he guessed, remembering the conservative tidiness of the reception room in Naz Malik’s office, echoed here in the office he kept at home. He didn’t spend time looking through Naz’s papers. The computer was gone, in the hands of the boffins, and he would have Doug, whose father was a solicitor, look through anything that remained.
Reaching the top floor, he felt again for the light switch, then stood there, dazzled. Gemma had described Sandra’s collages, but he supposed he had visualized something dated, slightly fussy, if he had bothered to think about it at all. Nothing had prepared him for the blaze of color and shape that leapt out to meet him. He moved closer, drawn to study the work in progress on the table, others propped against the walls.
The images were not as abstract as he’d first thought. They teased mind and eye, as the hauntingly familiar merged into the unexpected. In one, the glass towers of the City dwarfed small shop fronts in crumbling buildings. Bright-colored bolts of fabric spilled, like fallen bodies, from the shop doorways.
Kincaid dragged himself away and went to the white trestle table that apparently had served Sandra as a desk. Over it hung a large painting of a red horse on a white ground, and he realized that nowhere in the house had Sandra displayed her own collages.
The desktop was a jumble of notebooks and loose papers, and he saw at once that it would take more time than he had that evening to go through the clutter. But he picked a few things up idly-a sketchbook filled with drawings and jottings, a folder of press cuttings from gallery shows, a bound album filled with photos and handwritten captions. When he looked more closely, he saw that the photos were all of Sandra’s installations, with the captions noting the place.
A school, a library, several in what appeared to be corporate offices, a local clinic, some private homes and businesses-Kincaid had flipped through to the end of the album, now he went back more carefully, looking for the notation that had caught his eye.
There. The collage was more representational than most, and depicted a narrow, canyonlike street, its wall of buildings broken by the flower-draped facade of a pub, and by recesses that held small sculptures of various traditional tradesmen, and incongruously, a tilting cannon.
The caption read: Lucas’s good-luck piece. Not sure he appreciated the joke.
Lucas. Lucas Ritchie. In the photo, the collage hung in an elegant, high-ceilinged lounge.
Kincaid recognized the pub, the Kings Stores, in Widegate Street, near Artillery Lane. He vaguely recalled the sculpted tradesmen set into the recessed alcove on the front of the building next door, but he was sure there was no cannon. Had that been a private joke between Sandra and Ritchie-some play on Artillery Lane and perhaps loose cannon?
In any case, that gave him enough to go on. If the collage was a representation of the club, he would start in Widegate Street.
Only then did Kincaid examine the photos tacked to the corkboard on the far wall, and he stood there for a long moment. Sandra Gilles-for it was obvious that Sandra had been the primary photographer-had not posed her subjects, but had captured the family in a testament to the ordinary: eating, talking, cooking, playing, reading. His throat tightened and he swallowed, blinking as he gazed at a snap of a little curly-haired girl, her faced pinched tight with concentration as she drew with a crayon.
Charlotte. Charlotte Malik. He would never again think of her as “the child.”
A thought struck him and he looked round the studio, examining Sandra’s worktable and desk, shelves and baskets. It was obvious that Sandra had been an avid and talented photographer. Where was her camera?
Gemma pulled up in front of Betty Howard’s house just as Hazel walked out of the door and started down the steps. She’d tried ringing Hazel once more and, getting no answer, had asked Wes to wait for the boys, then bolted out of the house.
Now, she pulled the Escort awkwardly into the curb and jumped out. “Hazel!”
Hazel looked up. “Gemma. I was coming-”
“What are you doing here?” Gemma found she was trembling with a surge of anger mixed with relief. “Why didn’t you answer your phone? Tim’s been worried sick about you. I’ve been worried sick about you-”
“I didn’t mean…I forgot I’d turned it off.” Hazel dug in her bag for the phone and switched it on. Then her eyes widened in horror. “Oh, god, is Holly all right? I didn’t think-”
“No, no, she’s fine,” Gemma assured her, regretting her outburst. “I just saw her an hour ago. But you’ll have fifty million voice messages from Tim and me.” Gemma noticed that although her friend still looked gaunt, her hair had been washed and her clothes were clean. “Are you all right?” she asked, her anger evaporating.
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” Hazel said haltingly. “I think I might be.”
Gemma stared at her, baffled. “We need to talk.” Looking up and down the street, she saw rows of cars baking in the still-brittle evening light, but nowhere to sit. “Let’s go back to the house. Or we can get something to drink at Otto’s.”
“No, I-Not yet.” Hazel swayed a bit. “My knees feel a bit like jelly, all of a sudden.”
Gemma thought for a moment, then linked her arm through Hazel’s. “Let’s just walk for a bit. I have an idea.” She guided them round the corner into Portobello Road and turned north. Their steps fell into a rhythm, and after a few minutes she felt some strength return to Hazel’s stride. At Tavistock Road, the trees provided welcome shade, but Gemma led them on, under the cavernous shadow of the Westway.
“We’ll get some juice,” she said, leading Hazel into a natural foods store, one of the small shops built under the motorway.
Gemma bought them both plastic bottles of mango-orange juice and thanked the proprietor. Then she led Hazel out the far side of the underpass and into the rectangular green of Cambridge Gardens.
The small garden looked deserted without the jumble of its Saturday market stalls, but farther down the parallel arcade, kids were taking advantage of the empty pavement to skateboard. The hum of the overhead traffic meshed with the whoosh of the boards’ wheels in a comforting symphony of white noise. Gemma picked the bench that seemed to have the least accumulation of pigeon droppings and sat, pulling Hazel down beside her.
She popped the top off the juice bottle and sipped, then turned to face her friend and said, “Tell me.”
Hazel drank, then closed her eyes and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “It’s good. So mango-y. I never realized that mangoes don’t taste like anything else.”
&nbs
p; “Hazel-”
“I know-It’s-It’s just that I don’t know how to explain-talking about how I felt-how I feel-seems horribly self-indulgent now. I’ve done enough damage thinking about me as it is.”
“Don’t go all therapist on me. Just tell me what happened,” said Gemma patiently. “Start with the phone. Why did you turn it off?”
Hazel shook her head. “I-You’re going to think-” She saw Gemma’s fierce expression and went on hurriedly. “All right, all right. It was Sunday. After I got ho-back to the bungalow, from Islington. I was so angry. At you, at Tim, at myself.”
“At me?” said Gemma, surprised.
Hazel gave a small smile. “You didn’t want me there on Saturday night, at the house in Fournier Street.”
She hadn’t, Gemma remembered with a flush of guilt. “But, Hazel, I didn’t know what had happened. I had to-”
“Oh, I know you had good reasons, professional reasons. But the truth was that you could have worked round them if you’d had the mind. I was being a bitch and you didn’t want me there. And I knew it.” When Gemma started to protest again, Hazel touched her arm. “No, let me finish. I knew it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I was jealous of that family, those poor people. And Sunday, even when I knew he was dead-Tim’s friend-it just got worse. I felt like-oh, I don’t know-like I was sinking under a weight of black oil, suffocating in it.
“And then, when I got home, and I realized I had done nothing to comfort that little girl…and that I had been so mired in my own nasty, seeping bitterness that I hadn’t even cared for my own child’s feelings…I-” Hazel stopped, drinking a little more juice and watching the skateboarders, and Gemma waited.
After a few minutes, Hazel went on. “That was when I turned off the phone. I couldn’t bear the thought of talking to anyone. I couldn’t explain myself. I sat for a long time, in the dark. And it began to seem as if it might be better for everyone if I just…disappeared. Like Sandra Gilles. I wanted to just step into the street and vanish. I wanted to find some way-”
Necessary as Blood Page 16
