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
“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, overstuffed, 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
