Necessary as Blood

Gemma had gone back out to the balcony and sat for a while longer with Louise. She had tried to imagine Charlotte with Louise, and found to her dismay that she couldn‘t.
    There was something about Louise, something more than her obvious grief, that wasn‘t quite right. She seemed damaged, crippled in some indefinable way, and there was a solicitousness in the way Michael and his partner, Tam, looked after her.
    In the end she had got Louise to agree that she would do what she could, if Gail should gain custody of Charlotte, to restrict Gail‘s access to the estate‘s funds.
    And then, as she drove the short distance to Fournier Street in the fading light, Gemma wondered if that had been a wise request. Would putting a damper on the money only make Gail more likely to mistreat the child?
    She parked across from Sandra and Naz‘s house, struck once again by the contrast between the severity of the church at one end of the street and the play of neon from Brick Lane at the other. How hard had it been for Sandra and Naz to balance between the two worlds? And the two cultures?
    Once inside the house, she switched on lights and opened the garden door in an effort to bring in light and fresh air. In just a few days the house had begun to smell musty, and ordinary dust had gathered on the furniture, joining the black powder left by Forensics.
    She walked through the rooms, feeling oddly divided between a sense of trespass and a sense of aching familiarity. In the sitting room she picked up a stray picture book and a stuffed toy, stowing them in their respective containers, just as she would have in her own house.
    Then she climbed the stairs to Charlotte‘s room. She found a flowered holdall in the wardrobe and began to fill it with things from the chest of drawers. She held up a pink-printed sundress with a matching white cardigan, remembering the little girls‘ clothes she had looked at in the shop windows when she was pregnant, daydreaming of the daughter she would dress.
    Carefully, she folded the sundress and cardigan, then reached for a jacket in the same corally pink, a pink-and-white-striped T-shirt, white cuffed dungarees. Then a yellow eyelet top with a pink-and-yellow-flowered skirt, and a pair of pink-and-white ballet flats. Had Sandra loved picking out these things, just as Gemma had imagined doing?
    She added a few more clothes and more worn stuffed toys — company for Bob the elephant — and the most well thumbed of the picture books on the table by the bed. The photo of Sandra still stood beside the books. Gemma hesitated, but in the end she left it. Not yet, she thought. It was too soon for such a vivid reminder.
    She made notes for Louise of the things she‘d taken, and then, leaving the bag on the landing, she climbed up to the studio.
    The cup of coloured pencils stood on the work table, just where she had remembered. Looking round for a box or a bag, or even an elastic band to contain them, she was struck once more by the beauty of the collage Sandra had left unfinished.
    ‘The Caged Girls‘, as she had come to think of it. The shrouded, unfinished faces of the girls and women were haunting, and she wondered what story had motivated Sandra to design this piece — and who had been the intended recipient.
    Still searching for an elastic band, she moved to the desk and riffled through the drawers. The shallow one held the flotsam and jetsam that accumulated in desks as if drawn by magnets — broken pencils, defunct pens, paperclips and pennies. There were a half-dozen coloured elastic bands, but they were too small for the bundled pencils. Pulling the drawer all the way open, Gemma saw a bit of paper crumpled at the back. She fished it out and smoothed the crinkles. It was a receipt, written out to Sandra Gilles for one pound, in payment for an unspecified work of art, and stamped with the name and address of the Rivington Street Health Clinic.
    Gemma remembered seeing a clinic on Rivington Street when she‘d gone to Pippa Nightingale‘s gallery — was it the same place?
    On an impulse, she took out her notebook once more and found the page on which she‘d written Pippa‘s number. As she looked in her bag, she found one of her own elastic hair bands, which she thought would do quite nicely for the pencils.
    Bundling up the pencils, she put them in her bag, then took out her mobile and rang the number for the Nightingale Gallery. It was late, and Gemma had begun to think it a wasted call,