Necessary as Blood

and beribboned women with the effeminate, unisex faces that Gemma associated with eighteenth-century portraiture. Again, both chandelier and sconces held candles. But the room looked little used, and Gemma could imagine the difficulty of bringing dishes up from the kitchen.
    She took a breath. Upstairs, then. At the first landing, she looked out. Dusk was falling, and threads of neon from the curry palaces on Brick Lane had begun to dart like lances at the dark shadow of Christ Church. When Gemma reached the first floor, she fumbled until she found a light switch.
    The master bedroom faced the street. It felt almost monastic — simple white-linen roller blinds on the windows, white quilt on the dark, carved bed. But again the chair rail held the eye; hooks held strings of necklaces and beads, tiny bud vases in jewel colours arranged above. There was a woman‘s vanity table, its old mirror fogged, its surface littered with antique perfume bottles, a jumble of dangly earrings, an ornate but tarnished silver-plate hand mirror, a lipstick. A sari-silk dressing gown tumbled across the dressing-table chair.
    The cupboards built into the end of the room, a modern addition, held men‘s clothing on one side, mostly suits, with a few casual shirts and trousers.
    Scent wafted out when she opened the other side, something spicy yet floral that Gemma didn‘t quite recognize.
    There were no business suits here. Dresses, blouses, skirts, many of which appeared to be vintage. A ruffled petticoat, canary yellow. Folded jumpers. T-shirts. Jeans. Boots and flip-flops, and a few pairs of very high heels.
    The sense of presence was so strong that Gemma snapped the doors closed. She realized she‘d been holding her breath.
    Next, Charlotte‘s room. A white iron bedstead. A pony lamp. A pink, painted chest that Gemma suspected had been rapidly ransacked by Alia, as the contents of its open drawers cascaded out like the tiers in a fountain, bits of a little girl‘s clothing flowing over the edges. And on the bedside table, a photo.
    Sandra. Charlotte‘s mum. The same corkscrew curls, but blonde. An alert, intelligent face, pretty but not overly so. She looked directly into the camera, her lips curved in a slight smile. This, Gemma thought, was the face of a woman engaged with the world, not the face of a woman who had walked away from it.
    Gemma went out, started up to the next level. Now the banister was plain, the steps narrower. She was moving into the old servants‘ territory. This time she tried the back room first, a spare bedroom with a simple double bed.
    The front room had been turned into a home office, immediately masculine, legal. A heavy desk. Glass-fronted bookcases with leather-bound volumes. A green-shaded desk lamp. Papers were scattered over the blotter, but a quick perusal revealed nothing but legal documents and what looked like case notes scribbled on a yellow pad. There was no Rolodex or diary. There was a laptop, but it was closed, and Gemma decided it was beyond her remit to open it.
    She went back to the stairs and continued to climb. Enough light filtered up to the top of the stairs for her to see that she had entered a large space rather than a hall. She felt for a switch, found it. Light blossomed, and Gemma breathed an involuntary ‘Oh‘.
    The top floor was a loft. The windows were uncurtained, the myriad panes bouncing colour back into the room. And colour there was, captured in the pools of warmth cast by the simple cone-shaped lights that hung from the ceiling.
    It took a moment for Gemma to organize what she was seeing. A large work table filled the room‘s centre. One side of the table held scraps of fabric, loose sheets of paper covered with pencil sketches. On the other side, muslin had been stretched over a wooden frame about four feet square. Parts of the muslin were covered with fabrics, others were bare or held only faint pencilled lines.
    A collage, then. Unfinished, abstract, yet suggesting the bright flare of women‘s dresses against dark brick. Gilded cording made Gemma think of bellshaped birdcages. It was not birds that peeped through the bars, however, but women‘s faces, eerily featureless.
    Disturbed, Gemma turned away, examining the rest of the room. Everywhere, baskets held fabrics, multicoloured, multitextured, some spilling out onto the floor.
    One end-wall held wooden cubbyholes filled with smaller, folded pieces. At the other end of the room, a simple white desk, and above