Deborah Crombie - Necessary as Blood

But by the time she’d finished up in the kitchen, it had grown quiet, and when she entered the sitting room she saw that they had all migrated inside. A pool of lamplight fell on Kit, who was draped sideways over the armchair, cocooned with his iPod and earbuds.

Toby sat cross-legged on the floor a few feet from the television, the sound off, watching mesmerized as Cathy Rigby swooped and swaggered across the screen. The dogs were stretched out, panting, beside him, and Sid had taken up a safe vantage point on the bookcase.

And Duncan…Duncan sat on the sofa with Charlotte cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her curly head tucked under his chin, and on his face was an expression of surprised and wondering tenderness.

When Betty had collected the still-sleeping Charlotte-and it seemed to Gemma that Duncan had lowered her into her car seat with some reluctance-and the boys were in bed, Gemma and Duncan lay side by side, the sheet thrown back to catch a breeze from the open window.

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.”

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.