Deborah Crombie - Necessary as Blood

Or cover up what he was spending on something else, Gemma thought. “Did he know Sandra?”

“He might have met her at an opening…” Pippa’s eyes widened, and what Gemma saw in their ice-blue depths made her think that Pippa Nightingale’s unusual physical poise was a mask for suppressed rage. Pippa walked to the window and looked out. “That bastard,” she breathed, her back to Gemma.

“Truman?” Gemma asked.

“No. Bloody Lucas. Truman met Lucas here, at more than one opening. Of course Lucas would have recruited him for his club. It’s just the sort of secret thing that would appeal to a little snot like Truman, and if Truman bought Sandra’s work, it will be because Lucas displayed it in the club. John Truman never had any confidence in his own taste-he only bought things if someone he considered important had got in first.”

“Do you think Naz would have known Truman?”

“Not socially, if that’s what you mean. If he bought work from Sandra, he might have met Naz at some point, although Sandra did her best to keep her work separate from her personal life.” Pippa turned, and the flash of anger Gemma had seen had been replaced with amusement. “You could ask Lucas.”

Gemma knew there was something she was missing, some game between Pippa and Lucas Ritchie that she didn’t understand, but she thought it revolved around Sandra. “I think I’d do better to ask John Truman,” she said. “Do you know where I could find him?”

“Hoxton. His surgery’s not far from the square, and he lives above it.” She walked back to her office, checked a file, and wrote an address down on a note card stamped with the gallery name.

Gemma took the card and studied it, replaying her mental geography. “It’s quite near, then.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pippa. “A Georgian house, like Sandra’s, but butchered. I doubt Truman was inspired by the thought of the Huguenot silk weavers.”

Gemma thanked her and turned to go, but as she reached the top of the stairs she turned back. “You and Lucas. You seemed quite angry with him. Will you stay friends?”

Pippa smiled. “If you want to call it that. He always comes back to me.”

Gemma stood on the pavement just outside the gallery door as she pulled out her phone to ring Kincaid. He would need to pay an official call on this John Truman. Gemma had done as much as she dared. Any further action on her own and she would be seriously trespassing on a Scotland Yard investigation.

But she stopped, finger hovering over the keypad, as she thought about the implications of her conversation with Pippa. Had Sandra and Pippa become estranged, not because Pippa disapproved of how Sandra was marketing her work, but because a long-standing jealousy over Lucas Ritchie had come to a head?

Could Sandra have come here that day, from Columbia Road? Could Pippa have told her something, out of spite, that had made her run away? Or what if they had argued, and Pippa had killed Sandra?

Although Gemma could have sworn, on her first visit, that Pippa’s grief over Sandra’s disappearance had been genuine, theirs had obviously been a complicated relationship, and love and jealousy had brought about stranger things. But even if the slender Pippa had been able to kill Sandra, could she have disposed of her body-and so efficiently that it had not been found? And then killed Naz Malik? For Gemma was now utterly convinced that Sandra’s disappearance and Naz’s murder were connected.

She shook her head, staring absently at the front of the Rivington Street Health Clinic a few doors down. No, she was spinning theories out of air, and they wouldn’t wash. Pippa’s little display of spitefulness had been directed at Lucas, not Sandra. Truman, the vet, who was more than likely to have known Sandra, and who had easy access to the ketamine that had been found in Naz’s system, seemed a more likely prospect. Maybe-

Gemma’s speculations came to an abrupt halt. A young woman wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her dark hair pulled up in a haphazard ponytail, had stopped in front of the clinic, glancing up and down the street before slipping inside. The profile had been familiar, although recognition took Gemma a moment, because the last time she had seen the young woman, she’d been wearing a head scarf. It was Alia Hakim, Charlotte’s nanny.

Traffic in children has been going on for as long as mankind has been sinning and suffering. Josephine Butler (1828-1907) writes in her journals, pamphlets and diaries of the second half of the nineteenth century about seeing thousands (yes, thousands) of little girls, some as young as four or five, in the illegal brothels of London, Paris, Brussels and Geneva.

– Jennifer Worth, Farewell to the East End

Doug Cullen yanked the copy of Melody’s e-mail from the printer tray on Kincaid’s desk and stared at it. “Where the hell did she get this?”

“Let me see.” Kincaid got up and took the pages from him. When he had read through the list of names, he said, “I’m not sure I want to know. It’s called deniability, Doug. But this could prove very useful.”

For all their digging, they had not been able to come up with anything dodgy on Lucas Ritchie or his club, and they had been warned off interviewing him again by powers higher than Kincaid’s guv’nor.

“What I would like to know,” Kincaid continued, “is what Gemma’s up to. Melody was a bit cryptic when she rang. Something about the vet on the list…” He scanned the page again. “Truman, John. RCVS. Look him up, why don’t you?”

Cullen did an Internet search and read off an address. “I would guess it’s this one, in Hoxton. You’re thinking a vet would have had access to ketamine? But did he have any connection with Naz Malik?”

“Worth talking to him.” The staff at Bethnal Green was keeping a phone line available for calls from the public notice board. But as no new information had come in, there had been little else for them to do, and Kincaid had returned to the Yard. He was still thoroughly blocked from pursuing the one lead into Naz Malik’s murder that had looked most promising: Kevin and Terry Gilles.

Now he grabbed his jacket, adding, “We’ve got eff-all else to go on with, and this case is getting colder by the minute.”

Gemma’s first response on seeing Alia’s furtive entrance into the clinic was that the girl was in some kind of trouble. Needing contraceptives, or worse, pregnant. She didn’t like to think how Alia’s father would respond to either alternative, but she was certainly going to have a word with the girl and see if she could help.

Slipping her phone back into her bag, she walked the few yards to the clinic and pushed the entry buzzer. But much to her surprise, when she entered the small reception area, she found Alia not in the waiting area, but sitting behind the reception desk.

“Alia! You work here?”

“Miss-it’s Miss James, isn’t it?” Alia looked pleased to see her, then alarmed. “Is Charlotte okay? How did you-What are you doing here?” She dropped her voice, even though there was no one else in the room. “My parents didn’t-”

“No, no, don’t worry. Charlotte’s fine, and I haven’t spoken with your parents. I was just on the street and I happened to see you. Do your parents not know you work here?”

“I volunteer,” Alia said defensively. “I don’t work for pay. But no, they don’t know. My dad, he’d go ballistic, like.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because it’s important. And because she did.”

Following Alia’s glance, Gemma turned and saw two of Sandra’s collages on the wall above the slightly tatty sofa and magazine table in the waiting area. They were smaller works, but beautifully textured and colored, and in this room they looked like peacocks among sparrows.