“Bollocks.”
“What did Yimi used to say? All roads lead back to Alexandria.”
Sarraf was unimpressed. “We’d better not be related to him.”
LeBrac removed something from inside the pages of the book she had brought with her, and Bish saw they were Bee’s photographs. Sarraf pointed to Eddie but LeBrac wordlessly pushed his hand away. A warning not to talk about the boy, as if Bish hadn’t worked it out yet.
“Fuck, she’s gorgeous, Noor. But you don’t want to cross her. She’s Yimi and Khalti Sadie mixed together, you know.”
LeBrac laughed her throaty laugh again and Bish wanted to be in on it. He wanted to know what it was about Yimi and Khalti Sadie that produced someone like Violette.
He interrupted them. “We need to work out what her plan has been, and what it is now,” he said, removing a map from his pocket. He had spent the night in Rye marking every place where Violette and Eddie had reportedly been spotted. A red asterisk for a confirmed sighting, black for unconfirmed. “We’ll start with France. Why that trip? It wasn’t to see you, Sarraf. She could easily have stayed in London and just crossed the Channel any time she wanted. So why an eight-day tour of Normandy?”
Neither of them spoke. Bish didn’t know whether it was because of the guard or because they didn’t trust him. He got to his feet and scribbled down a number, tearing the page from his notebook and handing it to the guard standing outside the door.
“Ring it,” he said. “Tell whoever answers that I can’t have a guard in this room if they want me to get the job done.” He went back in and sat down.
LeBrac and Sarraf were staring at the map. “Violette spoke to him,” Sarraf said, referring to Bish. “So it seems he’s got more to tell us than we do.”
LeBrac stared at Bish in surprise. “When?”
“Yesterday.” He reached across the table and tapped the red asterisk at Olympic Park, in Stratford.
“You actually saw her?”
“Didn’t know she was there until it was too late. She phoned.”
“What did she say?” LeBrac demanded.
“She spoke about her father. His watch. I got a history lesson.”
“Nothing else?”
Bish shook his head. He didn’t think now was the right time to bring up the conversation about sex.
“Start with what you know,” Noor said. “When did she fly in?”
“The day before the tour began. She was only planning to stay for two weeks and then was flying out of Heathrow.”
He pointed to the red asterisks at St. John’s Wood tube station and Buckland Hospital, in Dover. “What we know is that she stayed with Georgette Shahbazi, then went to see the three injured kids.”
LeBrac was silent, studying the map. There was a knock on the door, and without a word their guard was beckoned out, leaving them alone.
“I know Eddie’s your son,” Bish said. “I know where he was born and who delivered him.”
LeBrac’s eyes met his. He couldn’t read her expression. She turned to her brother. “Have you been in contact with anyone in Australia, Jimmy?”
Sarraf didn’t respond, but LeBrac was staring at her brother with a strange expression. Bish realized she had read something in his eyes that told her he had more information.
“The federal police there are monitoring the LeBrac phone line,” Bish said. “So who’s Violette going through to get a message to her grandparents?”
“These are other people’s lives we’re involving,” Sarraf said to Bish. “They don’t deserve to have their phones tapped and their lives poked into. Give me your word that you won’t drag them into this. On your kid’s life.”
“Leave my kid’s life out of this,” Bish said.
“Tell him, Jimmy,” Noor said.
Sarraf sighed. “Violette emailed a photograph of her and Eddie to Nick Scolari.”
“Etienne’s best friend,” Noor told Bish. “He lives in a town close to Coleambally.”
“She told him to pass on a message to her grandparents that they were not to worry. She was heading north. She had things to do before she came home.”
It was a game changer. Bish could see from LeBrac’s expression that she agreed. Perhaps Rachel was right and the reason Violette was on the run had little to do with fear of an arrest. There had always been another purpose for the trip.
“Violette’s being Violette,” Sarraf said. “When she has a plan, nothing gets in her way.”
“Not even a bomb on a bus.” LeBrac was again focused on the map. Bish watched a sequence of expressions cross her face. Finally heard her halting breath.
She leaned an elbow on the table and buried her face in her hand. Bish almost reached out but checked himself. Sarraf took his sister’s hand.
“What is it, Noor?”
She composed herself. “I know where she’s heading.”
They waited as she moved the map closer.
“Remember Etienne’s tours, Jimmy? We’d go to the local market, or the park, or wherever, and it was all a history tour. You loved them as a kid, and years later, when we had Violette, she loved them more. They were funny. Idiotic at times. Full of facts. Because the history tours included us in them. ‘This is where Mummy kissed Daddy for the first time, and where the Beatles recorded at Lime Grove Studios and where the Germans bombed during the war and where Uncle Jimmy dropped his chocolate ice cream and cried all the way home.’”
Sarraf gave a watery smile.
“What’s that got to do with heading north?” Bish asked.
She held out a hand to Bish. “May I?” she asked. He stared at her outstretched hand until she pointed to his pen and he gave it to her. “They’re on a history tour of our lives. Starting in Normandy, where you and I and Etienne and Violette were all born. That’s why she chose the French tour.”
“Fuck,” Jamal muttered under his breath.
“So let’s presume they meet for the first time at the port of Dover the day after she arrives,” Noor said, marking the map at Dover. “The plan is to take Eddie to Le Havre.”
“But why not come to me?” Jamal asked. “She waited seven days to come to me.”
“Because there goes her plan if she does. You would have contacted Etienne’s parents straightaway and Christophe would have been on the first flight over.”
“But if the bomb hadn’t gone off, John Conlon would have been waiting for Eddie in Dover. That would have spelt the end of their history tour.”
“The Conlons live less than an hour out of London,” she explained. “So if John Conlon is there to pick up Eddie after the tour, what’s to stop Eddie meeting Violette every day after that? If Anna was still alive, I’d say none of this would have been possible. But it’s school holidays and John Conlon’s at work, so who knows where Eddie would have spent his days?”
She pointed to Richmond on the map. “Twickenham Cemetery, where Yimi is buried, is close by.” She looked at Bish. “Violette knows how Jamal and I feel about neither of us having seen our mother’s grave.” Bish heard the catch in her voice. “She would have gone there for us.”
He dared not look at them. Let them have their time.
Some moments later, Sarraf tapped Edgware Road tube station on the map. “Paddington Green,” he said, in a voice resigned to the truth of what his sister was saying.
Where Bish had taken Violette out of her mother’s arms. Was he part of this history tour?
“So heading north can only mean one thing,” LeBrac said. “She’s taking Eddie to Malham Cove. To the last place she ever saw her father.”
“It’s been almost two weeks,” Bish said. “There’ve been no sightings up north.”
“She knows everyone’s on the lookout for them,” Jamal said. “In London it’s easy for them to get lost in the crowd, but they’ll get noticed the moment she gets on a train heading north, or hitchhikes. Fewer people around, and much harder to blend in. They’d stick out for sure.”
LeBrac nodded
. “If the bomb hadn’t gone off, it would simply have been Normandy, London, Malham Cove, me, Jimmy back in Calais, and home. All within two weeks. Her destinations haven’t changed. The chronology has.”
Sarraf looked gutted, gripping his sister’s hand. “Why now? How did they find each other?”
“Talk to John Conlon,” she said to Sarraf, and Bish heard the anger in her voice. “Remind him that Eddie’s thirteen years old and that Anna would never have let this happen. Tell him to be a damn father to his son.” Her tears spilled now. “Because Violette wouldn’t have gone behind our backs if Eddie didn’t need her, and if Eddie needs her it means John Conlon has screwed up!”
When it was time to go, Bish joined the guard outside the door, leaving them to say their good-byes. A couple of minutes later they stepped out and Noor said, “Take him to my mother’s grave.” It wasn’t an order or a plea, and she waited for neither a refusal nor confirmation. She pressed a kiss to her brother’s hand and cupped it to her face before the guard led her away.
He drove Sarraf to Twickenham Cemetery and asked for directions at the office, which prompted a lecture from the woman behind the desk about the desecration of graves being an offense. When they came across Aziza Sarraf’s grave he understood why. Someone had taken to the headstone with a sharp object, and there were traces of old graffiti.
Sarraf couldn’t contain his fury. “After she died, they pissed on her grave and left their shit. No one did anything about it except for a bunch of the old women from the council estate. People are only outraged when Muslim men are violent towards Muslim women. That’s the only time you people care about our women.”
“Don’t generalize,” Bish said. “I’m not a racist and most people I care about aren’t either.”
“You like to think you’re not a racist.”
“No, actually, I’m fucking sure of it.”
“Watch your mouth around my mother’s grave,” Sarraf said. “And give me some privacy.”
Bish walked away, reading the pamphlet he had picked up at the office. Plots in the Islamic section were on unconsecrated land, the bodies buried with their heads facing Mecca. He had always been fascinated with rituals for burying the dead. Until he had to bury his son.
Twenty minutes later he saw Sarraf stand up and walk away from the grave and figured it was time to go.
“Don’t tell my sister we found it like this,” Sarraf muttered as they went back to the car.
“Your sister and I don’t get into that sort of conversation.”
“She’ll ask. She obsesses over things like this. The only reason she let Etienne’s parents take his body home to Australia was because she knew he’d be buried on the farm.”
“Where’s your father buried?” Bish asked, and got no response at first.
“My uncle took my father’s ashes back to Egypt,” Sarraf said suddenly, when they reached the London Road roundabout. “He was a Christian, you know. Not many people remember that. They were too busy labeling the bombing an act of Islamic terrorism.”
Bish had known that, from reading one of Sarraf’s interviews.
“My parents met in Alexandria in the sixties. My mother was said to be amazingly beautiful. By the time she had me she’d let herself go, but my uncle Joseph always said that if my father hadn’t married her, one of the other brothers would have.
“When they moved here in the late sixties, my father was determined to be accepted by everyone, and refused to belong to the Arab packs, as he liked to call them. Whereas my mother’s whole identity revolved around the community. She worked like a dog to get Noor into a private school, to compete with the other Arab mothers who were just as ambitious for their smart daughters. But my father couldn’t seem to catch a break. His obsession with fitting in changed him and I got to experience the changed man, not the man he was when my mother met him. He was embarrassed that my mother wore the hijab, and he believed that her being a Muslim held them back socially. They fought a lot. Some women feel strongly about being forced to wear the hijab, and my mother felt strongly about being forced not to wear it.”
“And yet your sister didn’t wear one?”
“Noor felt that too many women wore it because they had to rather than wanted to. She and my mother agreed to disagree. They did that a lot over culture and religion, but they loved each other.”
Bish pulled up in front of Waterloo Station. He retrieved his wallet from the glove box, searching for his Oyster card.
“You’ve got a forty-eight-hour visa,” he said. “If you violate the rules you’ll be back behind bars and on your own.”
Sarraf was at first speechless. Then: “I get to stay for two days?”
“I want to know the moment Violette makes contact,” Bish said.
“She won’t know I’m here.” Sarraf cleared his voice of emotion.
“Then you need to find a way to let her know.”
The two-day visa was a condition agreed to by Grazier and the home secretary. Setting him loose in London wasn’t. When he gave Sarraf his business card, Bish’s hand was shaking. The only consolation was that the hand that took it was shaking even harder.
30
It’s dark by the time Layla gets home from a booze-up at the Defector’s Weld. The first of her university friends is finally engaged, and although she doesn’t feel left behind, she was hoping for good news of her own that day. The junior partnership was within her reach, but those hopes are down to nothing now. The mood changed around her during the week. Elliot and Ortley’s visit didn’t help, but it was more than that. Once or twice she saw Jemima in Frank Silvey’s office, and her manner with Layla went from indifferent and unimpressed to awkward and slightly guilty. It meant Jemima knew something, as office spies usually did.
And yet it isn’t the inevitable failure to get junior partnership that is humiliating so much as the realization of what she’s allowed herself to become this past year. A yes-person. The sort who doesn’t question anything. Who checks her tone and volume when speaking to the partners. Who lets them believe they’re teaching her something she doesn’t already know. Layla’s greatest regret is that she has sold a piece of her soul and still missed out.
It’s rare that she switches on the main light in the staircase, even when she’s back late. Most of the time it turns itself off when she’s halfway up the stairs, which frightens her more than the dark. But tonight she wishes she switched it on. She feels a quick thump of fear when she sees the shadow at her door.
“It’s just me.”
Him.
“I need a place to stay for the night,” Jimmy says quietly, as if it hasn’t been twelve years since they last saw each other. He has nothing with him. No overnight bag, just the clothes he’s wearing.
“Are you legal?” she asks. “Because I don’t need trouble.” She doesn’t care if that sounds harsh. After Calais all those years ago, she owes Jimmy Sarraf nothing.
“I’ve got two days,” he says, and she’s reminded of how much pleasure his voice always brought her. Unlike Noor, educated at the best schools on scholarship, Jimmy would always sound like the neighborhood.
“They think Violette might show her face if she knows I’m in London,” he says.
Layla unlocks the door and lets him in. Already, he fills the space of the room. “Have you seen Noor?”
He nods, looking around.
“How is she taking it?” Layla is trying to ignore how uncomfortable she feels having him look at everything she owns. The art on her walls and the flawless cream furniture suddenly look pretentious. When they were teenagers they knew each other’s interests by heart. Layla knows nothing about him now.
His eyes settle on the piano in the corner. It’s ridiculous to have one in a flat this size, but it belonged to his family. Both their mothers forced them to learn to play. Layla failed miserably. Jimmy never failed at anything and showed as much talent for the piano as for football. When Etienne sold off everything belonging to Noor and her fami
ly to pay the lawyers, people were getting their belongings for a steal, so Layla’s mother bought the piano to stop others from taking it.
“Does my mother know you’re here?” she asks.
“I rang Jocelyn.”
“She’ll want to see you. My mother.”
There was always a complicated but profound relationship between their mothers. Especially at the end.
Layla walks past him into the kitchenette to dump the groceries she picked up on her way home.
“I know who Eddie is,” she says, sensing him close behind her, and when he doesn’t respond she figures that if he didn’t trust her enough to tell her about Noor’s pregnancy all those years ago, then he wouldn’t want to speak of it now.
“Do you want a drink?” She’s desperate for another herself.
“I don’t drink.”
To the point. She feels judged. “The couch turns into a bed,” she says, and without a second thought walks out of her flat.
She flags a taxi and tells the driver to take her to St. John’s Wood. Jocelyn phoned earlier that day. “School’s starting soon, the kids need to be home,” she said. “And Mum was driving me insane.”
When Jocelyn opens the door she doesn’t ask any questions. Gigi’s the only one of the kids still up. Sulking.
“She didn’t come home until an hour after I told her to,” Jocelyn says. “She’s angry because I checked in on her a couple of times last night.”
“You think Violette and Eddie are hiding in her closet?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.” Jocelyn is watching her closely. “Is he staying with you?”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Good,” Jocelyn says. “You can stay up with Ali and smoke your lungs out. He doesn’t want to talk to me either. I’m going to bed.”
“You don’t have to be so judgmental!”
“What do you want me to say, Layla? Go home. Deal with Jimmy so you can get on with your life.”
Layla ends up on the back balcony with Ali, smoking a couple of cigarettes and arguing about Jocelyn.