Necessary as Blood

by Deborah Crombie

  “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 ab
surd. 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.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The latest arrivals in Brick Lane, the ‘haircuts’ (as some of the locals like to call them), are the ones buying up old warehouses and turning them into vintage-clothing stores or dot.com companies…As the City moves further towards territory traditionally belonging to immigrant groups tensions are increasing.