Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (23 page)

Bish should have been angry to see Rachel sitting on the front step of his flat when he got home, but concern for her overrode it.

‘You’ll get piles,’ he said, putting the key in the lock.

‘I’m pregnant at forty-six, Bish. Piles are the least of my health issues.’

He held out a hand and she took it, groaning as she got to her feet.

‘Are you hiding the spare key from me?’ she asked.

‘Bee’s got it.’

‘You know, a welcome mat would work a treat out here,’ she told him.

‘Yet welcoming people into my home is the last thing I want to do.’

Inside he made her a cup of tea while she settled herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. He concentrated on the teabag, taking his time in order to choose the right words.

‘Why did you go see her?’ he asked.

‘LeBrac,’ he said, when she didn’t respond.

Rachel removed a file from her satchel and placed it between them. ‘I think Noor and I are on first-name terms,’ she said. ‘We’re besties. Like this.’ She twisted two fingers together, and managed to look both surprised and angry at herself. ‘Don’t ask me why, Bish, because you know. Bee’s involved with this business whether we like it or not, so let’s not put our heads in the sand. David says —’

Bish put up a hand. ‘Can we leave out what he says? Just this one time?’ It seemed to him that whenever David Maynard spoke, his words were quoted and spun into pure gold. David Maynard’s take on education. David Maynard’s views on youth. David Maynard was the most quoted wife-stealer in England.

‘Okay, I won’t go into what David says, although he did say hello.’

Sod off, David.

‘Noor LeBrac made mention of something and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.’ Rachel was searching through the file with one hand and sipping her tea with the other. ‘She told me that all those years ago, she’d given a doctor a letter to send to me.’

‘To you?’

‘She was looking for a human rights lawyer. This doctor apparently recommended me.’

‘You never mentioned Noor LeBrac contacting you back then,’ he said. When they were married he had always known what she was working on, just as she had known what was going on in his world.

‘Well, she did, but too much was happening and I must have forgotten to tell you,’ she said. ‘It was two weeks before Stevie was born. I passed on all my cases to Robert Houghton and forgot about it. Forgot about her.’

From the file she removed an envelope with handwriting on it, still pristine. Bish couldn’t believe she had spent the day travelling from Ashford to Holloway to her chambers and then here to the Docklands.

‘She was guilty, Rach. She confessed.’

‘This letter is logical, smart, and convincing,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘And on that basis you believe what, that she’s innocent?’ he asked in disbelief. ‘Rachel, she has a copious amount of degrees from Cambridge. You’d hope for the sake of British education that she does know how to string a sentence together.’

‘It’s unbelievable to me that the person who wrote this letter then confessed the day after.’

She pushed the file towards him. Another volume on the subject of Noor LeBrac to sift through.

‘I’m not investigating Noor LeBrac’s case,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m trying to work out where those kids are.’

Rachel glanced over his shoulder towards the pantry. Her way of hinting that her sweet tooth was about to make her narky if she didn’t get a fix.

‘I’ve only got Scotch Fingers,’ he confessed.

‘Buttered, please.’

‘It’ll go straight to your arse.’

‘Fuck, you’re cruel for saying that to a pregnant woman.’

He couldn’t help smiling and went searching through the pantry for the biscuits.

‘Robert Houghton jumped ship a couple of months later for the corporate world,’ Rachel said, ‘and that was that. But what he collected before he left is interesting.’

‘Rach—’

‘I can’t do this now, for obvious reasons. But there’s something here, Bish. Please don’t ignore it. If not for me, then do it for Bee. Because whenever she’s locked in her room with that iPad, I think she’s looking for those kids. I think she’s worried rotten that something’s going to happen to them, and I think the only way to get Violette LeBrac off the streets is to sort out why she’s on the run. I honestly don’t believe it’s because she’s scared of an arrest.’

Bish thought of the message Violette had sent her mother.

‘LeBrac received a postcard from her. A cryptic message about telling the truth and shaming the devil.’

Rachel was nodding. Bish could tell she had already thought this through.

‘What if this kid’s trying to prove her mother’s innocence?’ she said.

He finally sat down, and she seemed to take it as a sign that he was ready to listen. Perhaps he was.

‘I’ve done a bit of research of my own,’ she went on, indicating the top left-hand corner of the envelope where the doctor’s name and personal address appeared on a gold-coloured sticker. ‘I searched everywhere for this Dr Owen Walden. It’s not such a common name, and the only one I could find was out at St Therese’s. When I rang they told me he retired five years ago and now runs a B&B in Rye.’

He went to protest but she stopped him.

‘Bish, just read what’s in this file,’ she said, ‘and you’ll see that the arrest of the Sarraf family would never have stood up at trial. Whoever was in charge at the time found a way to get around one. They were desperate to keep the public happy. Elections were won on the back of those arrests. It would have been humiliating for Blair’s people to admit they got it wrong.’

‘Do we have to blame everything on Blair?’

‘No. Just the War on Terror, and Iraq, and having his head stuck up Bush’s arse.’

‘Rachel, let me repeat yet again, LeBrac confessed.’

‘Stop calling her that,’ she said, irritated.

‘What the hell am I supposed to call her? She won’t let me use her first name. You won’t let me use her last.’

She ignored his question and pointed once more to the file. ‘It’s all in there. The week of the bombing, she handed in her dissertation. I don’t know too many people who have the time to make a bomb, complete a doctoral thesis in molecular biology, and hold down a full-time job when they live with their extended family and have to take their mother to chemo as well as bring up a child.’

She looked at him, waiting for a reaction.

‘Listening,’ he muttered.

This time she smiled. ‘The single flimsy piece of evidence they had was the dynamite on the soles of her shoes. In her letter she claims that her husband Etienne had spoken to experts who confirmed the high probability of explosives being on the shoes of
anyone
living with the bomber. Anyone who walked into that flat. That was the key evidence at the time of her arrest, Bish!’

‘And the fact that she’d threatened the manager of the supermarket the week before,’ Bish reminded her. ‘“Your time will come,” she was heard to say. And the fact that she wouldn’t let the police into the house without a search warrant, and when they returned with one it was obvious someone in that house had burnt evidence. And the fact that they found residue from the bomb in the boot of her car.’

Rachel was shaking her head. ‘All circumstantial. It should have gone to trial, that’s all I’m saying.’ She had a look in her eyes that Bish recognised, and he took a childish pleasure in knowing that David Maynard wouldn’t. Maynard had never seen her hungry for a legal case.

Bish relented and took the file.

He walked her down to the Tube station, knowing Maynard would be waiting for her at Ashford, and it made him melancholy. His hand was almost tempted to take hers. It seemed the natural thing to do, and because Rachel was more evolved than Bish, she took his. The next time he saw her, she’d likely have had the baby. How strange it would sound to hear Bee speak about a brother who wasn’t Stevie. Who wasn’t theirs.

He stood with her on the platform in silence until the train came.

‘Would it seem odd to say that I want you to have a place in this kid’s life?’ she asked.

Bish could hardly be a player in his own life, let alone another man’s child’s. He pressed a kiss to her brow. ‘Text me when you get home,’ he said.

Robert Houghton’s file on Noor LeBrac contradicted the one provided by Grazier, so Bish set down the identifiable truths. Fact: the Brackenham Four spent twenty-eight days of incarceration at Paddington Green police station, in underground cells built especially for terror suspects. Fact: they were imprisoned separately in twelve-foot-square cells with no windows. Fact: the new post-September 11 terrorism laws allowed the government to hold them without a hearing or trial for as long as Downing Street wanted. Fact: they were then transferred to prisons in four different counties and didn’t see one another again until six months later, when Noor LeBrac confessed. Fact: Noor LeBrac’s confession came one day after Etienne LeBrac’s suicide.

As Rachel had pointed out, Noor’s letter wasn’t written by someone who was about to confess. It told the story of the family’s last days together in Brackenham. Written in a way that Bish found strangely haunting; it wasn’t so much a letter outlining a case as a plea for help. Well into the night something niggled at him, and he searched his own notes on the Boulogne bombing. Searched Facebook pages, interviews, notes on phone conversations with parents and students. He googled the date of the confession. Found nothing. Went back to the letter Noor had sent to Rachel’s chambers thirteen years ago. Who was Owen Walden in all this? Bish found something online about Walden delivering a paper in 2005 in Nova Scotia on fibroids in the womb during pregnancy. A strange sort of alarm bell went off in Bish’s head as he scrolled to the end of the pdf for a brief biography and realised that St Therese’s hospital, where Walden had been head of obstetrics, was four miles away from Foston Hall prison in Derbyshire, where LeBrac had been transferred after Paddington Green. Bish started his search again, sifting through every single document he had in his possession. And there it was. On that faithful handwritten list of student names from the day of the bombing.

Eddie Conlon had been born on the same day Noor LeBrac confessed.

His hunches didn’t really come out of the blue. They brewed and festered and kept Bish awake for yet another hour. Until he called Layla Bayat’s number.

‘What did Violette say to Eddie that day in Boulogne?’ he asked.

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘What’s the connection between Noor LeBrac and Eddie Conlon?’

There was silence, but he knew she was still there.

‘Layla?’

‘I’m not answering personal questions about Noor. Not at this time of the night and not over the phone. Someone’s probably tapping us now like everyone’s tapping phones these days, So can I say, Fuck off to you all and I hope none of you ever get a good night’s sleep again!’

Layla hung up.

A thought suddenly came to him. Bee had used his phone more than once at the campsite. Had she used it to set up contact points with Violette? He scrolled urgently through his calls back to the day after the bombing. He went through the list of everyone he’d rung then until he came across a number he couldn’t identify. He called it, and after a few rings someone picked up without speaking.

‘Violette?’ he said.

Silence.

‘Violette, listen, it’s Bee’s father. Please trust me. I’d never let anything happen to Eddie. You know that.’

He was disconnected. Bish tried again, but this time an automated voice told him that the phone was switched off. He tried three more times before he fell asleep, cursing himself for being so slow on the uptake. A link to Violette had been right there all along, in his hands.

The next morning he was surprised to see that Layla had finally accepted him as a Facebook friend. She’d accompanied it with a message. Short and to the point.
Princess Victoria. Uxbridge Road. Noon.

Watching his daughter run a race was one of the few pleasures left in Bish’s life. He had always been in awe of his children’s accomplishments, but was particularly astounded by the idea that any such talent might have come from his half of the genes. Bee wasn’t just fast, she had grace. Ever since she won a ribbon in the twenty-five metres at the age of four, Bish had gone to most of her track meets. He’d been watching her run up north on the day Stevie died on a beach in Newquay, learning to surf. It was bad enough that he would never forgive himself for not being there, but now Noor LeBrac’s words were in his head. It killed him more than a little inside to learn why Bee had stopped competing. He knew it was due to Stevie’s death, but hadn’t known she was cutting herself. He and Rachel were both happily surprised when she started training again this year. She easily made the junior British Athletics team sent to Gothenburg for the European titles and had come home with a gold and a silver.

Early on Tuesday morning he stood watching Bee warm up for the two hundred metres at a London club that was putting on a summer-holidays carnival. It was her strength and it was Bish’s favourite race to watch, whether it was his daughter or an Olympic runner. It was the race of champions. He liked the fact that Bee had chosen it, rather than the length choosing her.