Necessary as Blood

liked the little eccentric touches. Sandra‘s influence, he guessed, remembering the conservative tidiness of the reception room in Naz Malik‘s office, echoed here in the office he kept at home. He didn‘t spend time looking through Naz‘s papers. The computer was gone, in the hands of the boffins, and he would have Doug, whose father was a solicitor, look through anything that remained.
    Reaching the top floor, he felt again for the light switch there, then stood, dazzled. Gemma had described Sandra‘s collages, but he supposed that he had visualized something dated, slightly fussy, if he had bothered to think about it at all. Nothing had prepared him for the blaze of colour and shape that leapt out to meet him. He moved closer, drawn to study the work-in-progress on the table, others propped against the walls.
    The images were not as abstract as he‘d first thought. They teased mind and eye, as the hauntingly familiar merged into the unexpected. In one, the glass towers of the City dwarfed small shop fronts in crumbling buildings. Bright-coloured bolts of fabric spilled, like fallen bodies, from the shop doorways.
    Kincaid dragged himself away and went to the white trestle table that apparently had served Sandra as a desk. Over it hung a large painting of a red horse on a white ground, and he realized that nowhere in the house had Sandra displayed her own collages.
    The desktop was a jumble of notebooks and loose papers, and he saw at once that it would take more time than he had that evening to go through the clutter. But he picked a few things up idly — a sketchbook filled with drawings and jottings, a folder of press cuttings from gallery shows, a bound album filled with photos and handwritten captions. When he looked more closely, he saw that the photos were all of Sandra‘s installations, with the captions noting the place.
    A school, a library, several in what appeared to be corporate offices, a local clinic, some private homes and businesses — Kincaid had flipped through to the end of the album, and now he went back more carefully, looking for the notation that had caught his eye.
    There. The collage was more representational than most, and depicted a narrow, canyon-like street, its wall of buildings broken by the flower-draped facade of a pub, and by recesses that held small sculptures of various traditional tradesmen and, incongruously, a tilting cannon.
    The caption read: Lucas‘s good-luck piece. Not sure he appreciated the joke.
    Lucas. Lucas Ritchie. In the photo, the collage hung in an elegant, high-ceilinged lounge.
    Kincaid recognized the pub, the Kings Stores, in Widegate Street, near Artillery Lane. He vaguely recalled the sculpted tradesmen set into the recessed alcove on the front of the building next door, but he was sure there was no cannon. Had that been a private joke between Sandra and Ritchie — some play on Artillery Lane and perhaps loose cannon?
    In any case, that gave him enough to go on. If the collage was a representation of the club, he would start in Widegate Street.
    Only then did Kincaid examine the photos tacked to the corkboard on the far wall, and he stood for a long moment. Sandra Gilles — for it was obvious that Sandra had been the primary photographer — had not posed her subjects, but had captured the family in a testament to the ordinary: eating, talking, cooking, playing, reading. His throat tightened and he swallowed, blinking as he gazed at a snap of a little curly-haired girl, her faced pinched tight with concentration as she drew with a crayon.
    Charlotte. Charlotte Malik. He would never again think of her as ‘the child‘.
    A thought struck him and he looked round the studio, examining Sandra‘s work table and desk, shelves and baskets. It was obvious that she had been an avid and talented photographer. Where was her camera?

    Gemma pulled up in front of Betty Howard‘s house just as Hazel walked out of the door and started down the steps. She‘d tried ringing Hazel once more and, getting no answer, had asked Wes to wait for the boys, then bolted out of the house.
    Now, she pulled the Escort awkwardly into the kerb and jumped out. ‘Hazel!‘
    Hazel looked up. ‘Gemma. I was coming—‘
    ‘What are you doing here?‘ Gemma found she was trembling with a surge of anger mixed with relief. ‘Why didn‘t you answer your phone? Tim‘s been worried sick about you. I‘ve been worried sick about you-‘
    ‘I didn‘t mean... I forgot I‘d