Deborah Crombie - Necessary as Blood

“Blood?”

“And semen, they think. Maybe from last night’s little soirée.”

“Jesus.” Kincaid looked as sick as Gemma felt. The fact that they’d seen these things before didn’t make it easier. “His mates will have got the girl out after we had Alexander picked up. Bloody hell. We should have kept a watch on the house. I hope she’s still alive.”

Cullen nodded agreement. “I’ve got a call in to the sergeant who was in charge last night, to see if he can match any of the men he saw with the photos in Alexander’s albums. Then we can start trying to put names to the faces.”

“Lucas Ritchie may be able to help there. And I suspect he’ll be glad to cooperate if he wants to hang on to any shred of reputation.” Kincaid glanced up the road. A shiny red tow truck came round the corner and pulled up behind a new-model silver Lexus parked near the house.

“Is that Alexander’s car?” asked Gemma.

“His pride and joy, looks like,” Cullen answered, crumpling his empty cup. “But if he took Naz Malik to the park in it, the lab should be able to find traces of hair or fiber.”

Kincaid nodded. “That would be a start, although it wouldn’t prove that Naz was in the car the day he died unless they were found in the boot. And I don’t see how he could have carried him out of the house and dumped him in the boot here. It wouldn’t have been quite dark, and the car would have been in full view of all the neighbors. I imagine he walked him out as if he were very drunk, or ill, and put him in the backseat.”

“Has there been anything in the house so far that links Alexander to Naz or Sandra?” Gemma asked.

“Not yet, but the SOCOs are working on it.” Cullen sounded as if he took the failure personally, but Gemma hadn’t really expected more. She was, in fact, astonished by Alexander’s arrogance in leaving evidence of his trade in children in plain view.

A woman came out of the house next door and stood on her front step, watching them. She had a toweling dressing gown pulled tightly around her, as if she were cold. Her blond-streaked hair was pulled up with a band, and her thin face free of makeup.

“Is this the woman you talked to last night?” she asked Cullen and Melody.

“Her name is Anna Swinburne,” answered Melody. “Nice woman. She seems very distressed by the whole business.”

“Can’t say as I blame her. I’ll just have a word.” Gemma walked next door. “I’m DI James,” she said, holding out her hand. “I just wanted to thank you for talking to our officers last night.”

Anna Swinburne’s fingers were icy. “Is this because of me?” she asked, nodding towards the patrol cars and tow truck as Gemma released her hand.

“Well, at least in part. That’s why-”

“Will he go to jail?”

Gemma looked at her a little more carefully. “I don’t know. That’s not up to us. It’s just our job to gather the evidence.”

“Well, I hope he does,” said Anna vehemently. “I don’t like him. I never felt safe with him next door.”

“Was there any particular reason?”

“Oh, I suppose at first there was a bit of hurt vanity.” Anna Swinburne smiled, and Gemma decided she was pretty in an intense sort of way. “I’m divorced. This was a new start, this house, and he was a nice-looking single man. But he made it clear he wasn’t interested in giving me the time of day, and I was all right with that even if it was a bit ego dampening. But the more I saw of him-”

“Did he say something, or do something?” Gemma encouraged.

Anna shrugged. “No. He was just unfriendly, even for a Londoner. And…odd. I’m a television writer, so I work from home a good bit. He was always popping in and out at different times, sometimes just for a minute or two. I know he’s a doctor, but I thought they kept more regular hours-that he’d be in surgeries all day or something.”

If he’d been keeping a girl in the house, Gemma thought it quite likely that he’d been checking on her. It would have been a good way to keep the child too cowed to go out.

“After you stopped seeing the little girl, did he still pop in like that?”

Anna Swinburne frowned and pulled her toweling dressing gown tighter. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think he did.”

“And you never talked to her, the little girl?”

“No. Once or twice, when I saw her at the window on nice days, I waved to her. One time she waved back. But then all the landscapes were in and out, and after that I didn’t see her again.”

“Landscapers?”

“Oh, these houses have quite large gardens in the back. That’s one reason I bought here, so my daughter would have a place to play. I don’t know what he had done in his garden, but it must have been quite a big project.”

“When was this?” Gemma asked, but she had a sinking feeling that she knew. Anna had already told Cullen and Melody that she’d last seen the little girl in May.

“May-ish, I’m sure. We had a warm spell, and I remember I could hear them working next door when I was sitting in my garden.”

“Ms. Swinburne-Anna. We may have some photos for you to look at later. We’d like to see if you can identify this little girl.”

The woman paled. “But I don’t want to see-my daughter’s ten. I don’t want to think about-”

“It will be all right. It will just be the girls’ faces.”

Gemma thanked her and rejoined Kincaid. Cullen and Melody had gone to speak to the tow truck driver. “I want to go into the house,” she said.

“I thought you would.” Kincaid handed her the white overall he’d taken from the boot of the Escort. “I’ll be right behind you. I just want to have a word with the SOCOs about getting those photos copied as soon as possible.” The head of the crime scene team had just come out, carrying samples to the van.

When Gemma had slipped on her overall, she walked in slowly, studying the house. The decor seemed late Georgian, and was based, she guessed, on the period when they had begun to use gilt to reflect light. And although the rooms were laid out simply, as in the other Georgian houses she’d seen, the furnishings looked authentic, and of museum quality. The few pieces of contemporary art on the pale-stone-colored walls worked well, rather to Gemma’s surprise.

The ground-floor rooms were the grand reception rooms, and in both sitting and dining rooms the elegant fireplaces served as focal points. But in the sitting room, the wall above the mantel was empty-a look at odds with the careful placement of furniture and artwork elsewhere in the house.

Gemma gazed at the room, and at the size of the empty space, and thought of the unfinished collage on Sandra’s worktable. Had it been meant to go here?

That would explain so much. If Sandra had been working on a piece commissioned by Alexander, and had come to the house to get a feel for what her client wanted, and where the piece would go, she might have stumbled across something that made her connect the story she’d heard at the clinic with Alexander. Could it have been the little girl the neighbor saw, the latest of Alexander’s victims?

But if so, what had become of the child?

Gemma went downstairs, and through a sleek, modern kitchen into the high-walled garden beyond.

The garden, like the house, was formal, with rows of neatly clipped hedges around the borders, and a paved courtyard with a fountain at its center. There were no flowers, and no color other than the green of the shrubs and the pale ocher of paving, gravel, and fountain. And although there were two stone benches, it was not a place in which Gemma could imagine spending time.

She looked down at the paving stones, so perfectly, newly laid. And she thought of Sandra’s haunting, faceless girls and women, preserved forever behind the bars of their gilded cages.