Toby, however, was indefatigable. “Where’s Charlotte’s mum, then?”
Wide awake now, Gemma glanced at Charlotte and said quickly, “Toby, we discussed this-”
Charlotte looked up and said very clearly, “My mummy went away. My daddy went to find her.”
“Did he-Ow!”
Kit had pinched Toby, and now they got into a scuffle. Kit wrestled Toby into an arm hold, still managing to grip the book in his other hand. “I think you need to go downstairs now, sport. I can hear the dogs calling you.”
“They don’t talk.”
“Yes, they do. I’ll prove it to you.” Setting the book down, Kit wrapped an arm round Toby and, casting a conspiratorial glance back at Gemma, frog-marched him from the room. Gemma settled back, hoping that Charlotte hadn’t been upset by the mention of her parents. But Charlotte had gone back to playing with Bob, seemingly unperturbed by Toby’s questions.
Gemma wrapped one of Charlotte’s curls round her finger, frowning as she remembered something. Charlotte had said the exact same thing once before, that day at Tim’s when Janice Silverman had told her her father was dead. At the time, Gemma had assumed it was a child’s way of dealing with the idea of her father’s death. But what if Charlotte hadn’t meant it metaphorically, but quite literally?
What if Naz had told Charlotte that day that he was going to find her mother?
As Gemma mulled it over, Charlotte’s breathing slowed and the plush elephant fell from her relaxed fingers. Very gently, Gemma tucked the elephant back under Charlotte’s arm and brushed a stray strand of hair from her face. She eased herself down a bit into the pillows, taking care not to disturb the sleeping child, and closed her eyes. The late-afternoon light coming in the west windows seemed uncomfortably bright.
Drowsily, her mind went round and round, trying to make sense of the confluence of geography. Columbia Road, the center point, the vanishing point. Around it, like uneven spokes on a wheel, Lou Phillips’s flat…Naz and Lou’s office…Gail Gilles’s council flat…Pippa Nightingale’s gallery. All within a veritable stone’s throw, a five-minute walk of each other.
Were they connected by more than coincidence? Where had Sandra gone that day? If she had gone to confront her brothers, had it been at her mum’s flat? If they had killed her, had Gail Gilles been a party to it, or at least an accessory after the fact?
And if Naz had come to the same conclusion, would he have gone to talk to them, alone, and allowed them to drug him without putting up a fight? There had been no mark of violence on his body.
And if any of these things were true, where did Lucas Ritchie come into it? Or Ahmed Azad?
No, Gemma thought, there was something she was missing, some part of the pattern she couldn’t see. Sandra’s decision to leave Charlotte with Roy Blakely, when she had only a few minutes before she was to meet Naz for lunch, had surely been spur of the moment. What had happened to Sandra that Sunday afternoon, between Fournier Street and Columbia Road? And there was something about Sandra’s collage, the one on her worktable…Why did the girls have no faces? Why…
The next thing Gemma knew, Duncan was lifting Charlotte from her arms, and the room had grown dim. She reached out, making a little sound of protest, but Duncan said, “Shhh. Betty’s here. Go back to sleep.”
But now the space beside her seemed empty, and she felt oddly bereft. Voices drifted up the stairs, then the front door slammed-Toby’s doing, no doubt. Gemma sat up, switching on the light against the dusk, trying to bring back the remnants of an interrupted dream.
The phone rang and she swore. Whatever it had been, the fragment of clarity was gone. The ringing went on. Duncan and the boys must still be outside talking to Betty, Gemma thought. She stretched towards the nightstand and picked up the handset.
When Duncan came upstairs a few minutes later, she was still crying. The tears had come unexpectedly, uncontrollably, when she’d hung up the phone, and she had been horrified to find herself sobbing.
“Gemma! What’s happened?” He hurried to her and sat down on the bed, peering at her anxiously. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No,” she said, on a hiccup. “I mean, it’s not me. That was Jack. Winnie’s not doing well. They’ve admitted her to hospital. Enforced bed rest, and the baby’s not due for another month.” She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Duncan handed her a tissue from the nightstand and she blew her nose. “But she’ll be okay,” he said, “now they’re looking after her.”
“They’ve managed to stop the contractions, but her blood pressure’s up…I can’t bear thinking they might lose the baby-not Jack and Winnie, after everything they’ve been through. And not after-Yesterday, the hospital-” She couldn’t finish.
He pulled her to him gently and stroked her back. “Oh, love, I know,” he said, and his voice was rough. “But try not to worry. Are you sure you feel all right?”
Gemma gave a strangled laugh. “I think this stupid head injury is making me daft. I never cry like this.” She pulled away so that she could look at him. “And the worst thing is, it’s not just because I’m worried about Winnie. Part of it is just because I’m selfish. I so wanted Winnie and Jack to be here for the wedding, and now it seems everything’s gone wrong…”
He glanced away, his face very still. When he spoke, his voice was flat, colorless. “I understand if you don’t want to go through with it, Gemma.”
“No, no,” she said, taking his hand and rubbing her thumb across the fine skin between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s not that at all.” He looked at her then, but she wasn’t sure she could read the expression in his gray eyes. “The thing is…” She struggled to find the words. “I just want us to go on as we are. I don’t want to
“Oh, Gemma.” This time he pulled her to him so tightly it hurt her head, but she didn’t protest. His heart beat beneath her ear, and she thought she felt him tremble.
“I’m so sorry, love,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to-”
“No, no. Don’t you worry about anything. We’ll sort something out, and I’ll deal with your sister.” His tone made her glad she wasn’t Cyn. “If we have to, we’ll take your mum with us and run away to Gretna Green.”
“That would be very romantic,” she said, managing a sniffled laugh.
“Well, I’m sure that as brilliant detectives, we can come up with some solution that will make you and your mother happy.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “And I-I don’t care if we have a wedding on Mars. I just want to be with you.”
Kincaid stood in the kitchen, trying to collect himself enough to make Gemma another cup of tea and something to eat-simple enough tasks-but he found he was staring at the refrigerator and the teakettle as if they were alien artifacts.
The house seemed unnaturally quiet-Betty had taken the boys home with her for a bit, saying she needed help with the frames for the costumes she was making, but had whispered to him that she just wanted to give Gemma a bit of peace.
But it was he who had been given the respite by the children’s absence. It had allowed him to think, allowed him to admit for the first time, even to himself, how terrified he had been that he might lose Gemma, how afraid he’d been that she’d come to regret her impulsive proposal. He’d felt as if she were slipping away from him, and he hadn’t known how to stop it.
When he’d gone up to get Charlotte, he’d stood for a long moment, watching Gemma sleep with the child beside her, and he’d realized that now he simply couldn’t imagine his life without their oddly cobbled-together family. And then doubt had assailed him-he’d wondered if Gemma would ever be entirely willing to commit herself to them, or if there would always be some secret core in her heart that refused to yield.
And then she’d admitted, at last, how much she still grieved for the child they had lost. And she had cried. It meant, perhaps, that she could heal-that they could both heal, and that their loss would not separate them, but bind them closer.
But that thought brought him back to the problem at hand. What in bloody hell was he going to do about the
