Necessary as Blood (19 page)

Drowsily, she shifted towards him until their thighs touched, wondering if the warm, humid air would stick their limbs together like glue. “So, what are you going to do about Gail Gilles and her sons?” she asked. He’d told her that the plainclothes officers he’d put on watch had seen Kevin and Terry Gilles moving some of their belongings from their mother’s council flat to their sister Donna’s flat nearby. “Have you let Janice Silverman know Kevin and Terry are under investigation?”

“I’m not to contact her. They don’t want any chance of a leak. But…” He trailed his fingers over her thigh, raising goose bumps. “I thought—since you’ve already established that you’re interested
in Charlotte’s welfare—I thought you might have a word with Gail Gilles after all. To express your condolences, and your concern for Charlotte.”

“Unofficially?” Gemma shivered and moved closer. Although she certainly wanted to meet Gail Gilles, she wasn’t sure who was taking advantage of whom in this little arrangement.

He touched a finger to her lips. “You never heard it from me.”

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, over
stuffed, 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.