“If you’re worried about your chief superintendent,” said her father, “we should listen to the news. I’m curious to see what the Yard is going to release.” Before Melody could protest, he got up and went into the house, returning with the brown kitchen radio and tuning it to BBC1.
It was ten to two and the hourly update would be coming on soon. The song in progress finished and then came Sunday-afternoon host Alice Levine’s familiar voice, burbling on about something that Melody only half heard.
“I’m not at all sure the Met press office will say anything,” Melody told her father, abandoning even the attempt to eat the whitefish spread.
Unless he dies, thought Melody, and felt her heart skip painfully in her chest. Could Gemma have learned anything yet? She crumpled her napkin in her lap and shifted in her chair. What had happened? She couldn’t just sit while—
Alice Levine’s voice faded and the music started again, but this time Melody felt a jolt of recognition at the first note. It was the one song she avoided on the YouTube videos. Andy and Poppy had been playing it live when the grenade had gone off in St. Pancras Station.
She stood and reached across the table, fumbling to switch off the radio, knocking it over in the process and starting her champagne glass toppling. Her father grabbed the glass, his quick reflexes saving it, but both parents were looking at her as if she’d suddenly gone mad.
“Melody, what on earth?” said her mother, frowning as she righted the radio. “And I like that song.”
Oh, God. Her mother, a fan? Should she say, “Oh, by the way—that guy, the one who was playing at St. Pancras? He’s my lover.” It was all she could do to hold in a strangled laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “I just remembered. There’s something I have to do. At work.” She leaned over and kissed her mother’s smooth cheek, then gave her father a quick hug. “I’ll ring you. Thanks for the lunch.”
“But, darling,” her mother said, pushing her chair back as if to stop her, but Melody was already ducking into the kitchen. She hadn’t missed the speculative look in her father’s eyes, and she ran up the stairs and out the front door like an Olympic sprinter.
She didn’t stop until she’d turned the corner into the east side of the square. When she halted, gasping, she was suddenly aware that people were staring at her.
The sunlight seemed too bright. Her head was pounding, and her heart was still racing. For a moment she thought she might be sick. She grasped the top of the garden’s fence and the iron felt cool under her hand.
Better, she thought. Better. Then she heard a siren in the distance and suddenly she couldn’t get her breath at all. Her vision blurred. A wave of terror gripped her, wrenching at her gut. Panting, she clutched the fence now with both hands. Was that smoke she smelled?
She could hear Andy and Poppy’s song playing in her head. Then people were shouting and crying. The sirens were getting nearer. The smoke burned her eyes and seared her throat, then the ground seemed to tilt beneath her feet. Christ, what was happening to her?
Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder and a woman’s voice said, “Melody? Melody, is that you? Is something wrong?”
Spinning round, Melody caught a glimpse of a red dress, then tried to focus on the worried face before her. “Hazel?”
Chapter Six
Kincaid’s route had taken him down City Road and then Commercial Street, into the heart of Whitechapel. Even though Brick Lane was one street to the east, with the Astra’s windows down he could swear he smelled halal chicken and curry mixed with the exhaust fumes from the traffic.
The stark spire of Christ Church rose ahead as he neared Spitalfields Market on the right. And just before Christ Church on the left came Fournier Street, where Charlotte had spent most of the first three years of her life. The impulse to turn and drive down the street was almost irresistible, but that would take him into Brick Lane, which was one way in the opposite direction, and he didn’t want to backtrack.
But in his mind’s eye he saw the tall, narrow Georgian house with its blue door and heavily shuttered windows. Charlotte’s parents, Sandra and Naz Malik, had bought it when no one wanted to live in Whitechapel and had restored it with much love and little money. When they’d died, the house had sold for more than they could have dreamed, and that money had gone into trust for Charlotte.
This was Charlotte’s heritage, he thought, the bold graffiti and the women in silks bright as butterflies, the accents of the passersby mingling Cockney, Punjabi, and Urdu. How much did Charlotte remember, even now?
Her mother, Sandra, a brilliant fabric artist, had used the colors and textures of the East End in her work. Her father, Naz, a second-generation Pakistani, had been a lawyer who’d made a good practice representing local clients.
After their deaths, unwilling to let Charlotte go to maternal relatives who were both grasping and criminal, Kincaid and Gemma had petitioned social services to allow them to foster Charlotte. Although Louise Phillips, Naz’s law partner and the executor of Naz and Sandra’s estate, was fond of Charlotte and assiduous in looking after her financial affairs, she’d had no desire to take on the everyday care of a small child.
The thought reminded him that he’d been neglecting to check on Louise, who was recovering from a case of tuberculosis—and on Tam, Louise’s friend and neighbor, who’d been badly injured in the grenade explosion at St. Pancras. He felt, for the first time in his life, overwhelmed by others’ troubles.
And now this. He shook his head, forcing himself to concentrate as he turned into Whitechapel, nearing the hospital. But he was afraid of what he would find.
The Royal London Hospital was, in Kincaid’s opinion, an architect’s nightmare. The classical eighteenth-century frontage had grown additions over the years that ranged from Victorian to the latest in postmodern glass blocks, all jumbled together as if they’d been dumped from a grab bag. But the sight of the bright red air ambulance on its pad cheered him, and he thought that one day he must bring the children to see it.
And how lucky for Denis—or so Kincaid hoped—that he had been injured so near London’s major trauma hospital and hadn’t needed the air ambulance to get him here.
Once he’d managed to park the car and find his way to the main desk, a receptionist pointed him to the Adult Critical Care ward and he found it quickly enough. As he entered the ward’s waiting area, Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Faith rose to greet him.
Faith wore golfing clothes, the sportiness of the attire incongruous with the worried frown on his face. “Duncan. Good of you to come.” He clasped Kincaid’s hand in a firm grip, then sat again, motioning Kincaid to an adjacent chair.