Necessary as Blood

her thigh, raising goose bumps. ‘I thought — since you‘ve already established that you‘re interested in Charlotte‘s welfare — I thought you might have a word with Gail Gilles after all. lb express your condolences, and your concern for Charlotte.‘
    ‘Unofficially?‘ Gemma shivered and moved closer. Although she certainly wanted to meet Gail Gilles, she wasn‘t sure who was taking advantage of whom in this little arrangement.
    He touched a finger to her lips. ‘You never heard it from me.‘

Chapter Seventeen

Fears are entertained that the locality is being taken over, with Bethnal Green becoming Bangla Green.

Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, Michael Young,
The New East End

    Gemma went into work on Wednesday morning knowing she was going to have to have a word with her boss, Mark Lamb. She couldn‘t take any more time off work unless she discussed it with him. And much as she hated using her mother‘s health as an excuse, she couldn‘t see another option. It wouldn‘t be politic for her to say she was helping Kincaid with an investigation, especially not when she was looking into something that he‘d been 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 ploughed 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 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 grey monument to late-sixties concrete-block architecture, its five storeys squatting incongruously on a patch of green lawn. Every inch of concrete within human reach had been tagged with ugly, leering, giant-sized 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. She 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 shrivelled 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 television 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 that her lime-green linen jacket looked as bedraggled as the washing she‘d seen hanging outside, but she doubted whether a starched