Deborah Crombie - Necessary as Blood

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.”