“It’s them,” Bish said.
“How can you be sure?” Cook asked.
“Because I’ve met them,” Bish said. “My question is, how did this happen? Two kids of Middle Eastern appearance wander into the visitors’ center, and no one takes the time to check them out?”
“So now we’re going to intimidate every single teenager of Middle Eastern appearance who walks through those gates?” Cook demanded.
“No,” Bish said with forced patience. “You’re going to interview every single teenager of Middle Eastern appearance who visits Noor LeBrac.”
“The girl offered to take off her hijab for security,” said Farrington, who was clearly keen to avoid taking any blame. “But Lorna said we wouldn’t want any trouble from the bleeding hearts who think they have a right to be covered.”
Vasquez shot Farrington a dark look, but Bish was unimpressed with all of them. “Can I see you in private?” he asked the acting governor.
Cook dismissed the others and Bish waited until the door had closed behind them. “Gray’s lying. He let this happen and you’re protecting him. You’ve done Noor LeBrac a favor and that’s not going to look good for you.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she snapped. “Gray is merely backing his two officers. He wasn’t there when Lelouche came through with the kids. Farrington is less experienced and Lorna doesn’t even handle visits. It’s mayhem here in the mornings.”
Bish wasn’t buying any of it. “You’re lying too, for Noor LeBrac.”
“I don’t give a damn about Noor LeBrac! As far as I’ve heard, there’s no love lost between her and Gray either. She’s complained about him in the past and he’s been known to use a choice word or two about her. I can assure you no one’s done anyone a favor here, Chief Inspector Ortley. It was a mistake for us not to have interviewed Bilal Lelouche and those kids, but that’s all it was—a mistake. Not a conspiracy.”
Bish didn’t believe for a moment that the guards hadn’t bothered to question the teenage visitors. Whatever else they were, Holloway’s guards had never struck him as incompetent. “I want to see her,” he said.
“No.” Now Eleanor Cook’s voice was cool. “A visit hasn’t been sanctioned by the Home Office, so you’ll have to organize it like everyone else. You’re not calling on a neighbor for afternoon tea, Chief Inspector. There’s a number you can call to get a visitor’s pass.”
“Well, how about you let it slide that there’s no paperwork sanctioned by the Home Office, and I won’t mention the fact that your guards think that all people of Middle Eastern appearance look the same, and have let two at-risk teenagers walk out of your prison?”
Noor was waiting for him. He could tell the difference in her instantly, after having seen her children. A hint of happiness still lingered.
“Where are they?” he asked, his voice even.
She didn’t respond.
“I made it possible for you to see your brother. I brought him here so he could find your kids!”
“What is it you want?” she asked. “Gratitude?”
Yes he did. The realization hit him in the gut and made him feel like a pathetic needy kid. He was furious at being left out. Left behind. A boy in the playground crying, “I thought you were both my friends.”
“Do you want me on my knees?” she asked. “Are you like those arsehole screws from the last place I was in who wouldn’t give me my daughter’s letters unless I gave them something in return?”
He felt as if she’d slapped him. “Damn you for saying that.”
“As if you care what I think of you.”
“Why can’t you fucking trust me?” he shouted.
“Because you think I’m a monster!” she shouted back.
And regardless of his anger, all Bish wanted was not to ruin the beauty of her day with the son and daughter she hadn’t seen for thirteen years.
There was silence between them, until he sat down opposite her.
“I know who the Conlons are,” he said quietly. “I know about their son. James Edward Conlon. Eighteen years old. He’d been in London for a couple of months, working on a construction site around the corner from Brackenham Street.”
Bish had spent the previous night trying to fathom the mentality of the people on both sides of the Brackenham tragedy. “Why would you give Eddie to people who could so easily have hated him?”
She held his eyes but he couldn’t read hers.
“Some people get hate mail in jail,” she finally said. “Some get proposals. I got Anna Conlon. Hers were the only letters the authorities passed on to me before I confessed. Maybe they didn’t want to deny a woman who had lost her son in the bombing. She needed to understand why her boy died. I had no answer, and she didn’t deserve my theories or whatnot. She wanted her boy back and I couldn’t give her that. Perhaps it was something in my reply that made her write again, that led her to believe I had nothing to do with Brackenham.”
She bit her lip to stop it from trembling.
“And we just continued writing to each other. Apart from Etienne, Anna was my only link to the outside world. Mostly, she wrote about her boy. ‘Our Jimmy,’ they called him. I wrote about Etienne and Violette and Jamal and my mother. By the time I gave birth to Eddie, I felt as if I knew Jimmy Conlon, as if I’d grown up alongside him. When you make a decision not to give your baby to family, you make damn sure about the people you hand him over to.”
“So why not your husband’s parents, since they were taking Violette?”
A flash of pain crossed her face. “My mother-in-law had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She was only in her fifties so it was a bit of a surprise. That’s why Etienne was in Australia without us when Brackenham happened. To help his father on the farm. So the idea of giving her a baby to care for seemed cruel. But worse than that was what happened to Violette after Etienne died. His parents flew to England to take Violette along with Etienne’s body back home with them. Violette had been placed in foster care for a couple of nights, and a whole lot of well-meaning people had collected clothing for this poor destitute child whose father had left her freezing on the dales. Except some base repulsive subhuman laced a cardigan with acid and it burnt her little arms. And I knew then that there was no way to protect my children from other people’s rage and insanity except to give them the gift of anonymity. The Conlons had just moved away from Merseyside because they couldn’t handle the memories, or the scrutiny. Who better to give my son to than a couple who had raised a beautiful lad like Jimmy Conlon? It’s why we decided on Eddie. Edouard, for my grandfather, and Edward, for Anna’s father.
“He was born twelve hours after his father died,” she went on. “I was allowed to keep him for forty-eight hours and in that time I gave him a history of our lives. It’s what Etienne had done with Violette the day she was born.”
She looked at Bish. “Samuel Grazier was the middleman. I still haven’t quite worked out whether I hate his guts or appreciate what he did. The Conlons met him when their Jimmy died in the bombing. It was his job to make sure the victims’ families were kept up to date on everything. Getting bodies returned. Arrests. That sort of thing. He got close to the Conlons. It was Grazier who made the exchange of letters between Anna and me possible. He made the adoption happen. He took Eddie out of my arms.”
She didn’t speak for a moment. Bish couldn’t help thinking what a pair he and Grazier were. Removing children from their mother.
“I had one stipulation,” she said, finding her voice again. “It was that neither Eddie nor the public could know who his birth family were. Anna agreed, but it didn’t stop her visiting me once a month. She brought picture books and a tape recorder and I’d spend hours reading the books into the tape, which she’d play back to our son. Eddie may have thought it was a stranger reading those books at the time, but the first thing he said to me today was, ‘I know your voice.’”
She was fighting back tears now.
“An
na continued to visit me right up to a few months before her death. It was a deep friendship that I will never forget. My fear now is that John Conlon is a man of few words and that darling boy seems to be the exact opposite. I can’t bear the idea of Eddie living in silence when he was so used to talking all the time with his mother. It’s what wakes me at the witching hour.”
The witching hour. How well he knew it.
To Bish, these people’s stories made sense of a cruel world. The story of Etienne LeBrac’s watch. Or the story of two sons.
“What else do you think of?” he asked. “At your witching hour.”
She seemed almost to welcome the question. “All the things I miss. Holding my daughter. All the talks we could have had when she came home from school. I miss my mother’s belly laugh, and the way my little brother would drop to his knees when he scored a goal. I miss talking to my best friend for hours on the phone, and I miss not having seen her four children grow up. I miss my husband’s lazy smile and I miss the sex and I miss wearing high-heeled shoes and beautiful things, and I miss using my brain and I miss the pride people used to feel in me…” Her shoulders slumped with a fatigue that was doubtless etched in her bones. It made Bish want to reach out. Hold her. Tell her he understood.
Instead he removed the image of Ahmed Khateb from his notebook. “Can you look at this photo again?” he asked. “He lived in North London in 2002. Could he be a threat to Violette?”
She stared at the photo. Shook her head. “I don’t know this man.”
There seemed nothing else to say, but he didn’t want to leave.
“How did the kids seem to you?” Bish asked.
“They’re tired.” He heard her voice crack. “I told her…to take Eddie home, where he belongs. But she’s a bit of a mess, my Violette is. Deep down she needs to feel convinced that Etienne didn’t desert her on that rock. That’s what happens when they stick you in a cupboard, lock you up. You start to believe all the lies and you don’t know what the truth is anymore. You don’t know who you are.”
“I can only help Violette if I know where she is,” he said. “If she’s working out how to get to Malham Cove, where could she be staying now? Would she be with Lelouche?”
“She wouldn’t tell me where she was staying. But it wasn’t with Bilal.” Noor took Bish’s pen and wrote down an address in his notebook. “He has a restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush. If Khateb was living in these parts in 2002, Bilal may have known him. He might also be able to tell you where Violette is, but I’m presuming she’s long gone from him.”
As he was walking to the door, she said, “When Eddie was sitting before me, Etienne’s spirit was dancing there between us. I felt it. Here.” She pressed a fist to her chest. “Make peace with your ex-wife’s life, Chief Inspector. Because her son will have some of your boy’s essence and it could bring you joy. How could it not?”
Officer Lorna Vasquez was at the desk when Bish asked for his belongings. “Looking forward to getting back to the mail room?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine her finding satisfaction working alongside Gray and Farrington.
She retrieved a form for him to sign. “Strange place to be, the mail room,” she finally said. “All that private business between people. All the lies and the promises. All the hate mail. All the marriage proposals.”
He signed and she handed him his phone. “But every month a letter arrives from Violette. Boy, can that kid write a letter. The kind any mother would want to receive. About the farm, the sunshine, the dog, the horse, the grandmother and grandfather, the crying, the hope. I know every lad she’s ever had a crush on, every kid who’s called her names. I know every confession she’s made to her mother, and every promise. Nothing delusional about that kid. I tell you what, Chief Inspector Ortley: if a girl like that looks you in the eye and hopes you won’t recognize who she is, you give her everything she wants. Because she deserves it.”
Gray chose that moment to appear. “What’s going on?” he asked, picking up the mood between them.
Lorna Vasquez was staring at Bish, defiantly.
He pocketed his phone. “Nothing,” he said. “My work here’s done.”
43
That night he paid a visit to Algiers Street Food on Uxbridge Road. He was politely advised that all they could offer him was a seat at the bar, where he was most welcome to order food. He ordered a tasting plate, ignored the wine list, and then ordered more of what he’d tasted. Bish recognized Bilal Lelouche from the CCTV at Holloway. He was dividing his time between chatting with guests and checking up on his staff, but Bish felt the man’s attention on him the entire time, and when he’d finished his meal it was Lelouche who came to remove the plates and cutlery.
“May I?” he asked, pointing to the stool beside Bish when everything was clear before him.
“Of course.” He extended a hand. “Bish Ortley.”
“Bilal Lelouche.”
They talked about food and business for a while, even though they both knew that Bish wasn’t here for the hospitality.
“What you did was illegal, Mr. Lelouche,” Bish said at last.
“And what was it that I did, Chief Inspector Ortley?”
“Passing off Noor LeBrac’s daughter and Eddie Conlon as your own children.”
“Well, you do not have proof of that.”
“Do you know where Violette and Eddie are?” Bish asked. “I’m not here to bring any harm to them.”
Bilal Lelouche shook his head. “Both Jamal and Noor have asked me to keep an eye on her. But Violette is a very determined young lady. They stayed one night. I haven’t seen her since we left…since this morning.”
“But she’s in contact?”
“I sense you’re angry, Chief Inspector Ortley.”
“Then you’ve read me wrong. Maybe I’m disappointed Violette didn’t come to me. Because I would have done anything to get her and Eddie in to visit Noor.”
Lelouche eyed him. “You make it seem as if it’s personal.”
“Doesn’t everything feel personal when you get to our age, Mr. Lelouche?” The other man’s smile suggested that he couldn’t help but agree. Bish took the photo of Khateb from his pocket. “Do you recognize this man? His name’s Ahmed Khateb.” Briefly he explained the connection to Violette.
Lelouche studied the photograph. “He does not seem familiar. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
Bish pocketed the photo and removed his wallet to pay.
“You haven’t tasted our date and honey pastries, Chief Inspector Ortley.”
Bish looked at him. Bilal Lelouche had a story to tell, and these days Bish couldn’t resist one.
A waiter was beckoned and instructions given.
“How is it you know the Sarrafs?” Bish asked when they were alone again.
“The LeBracs,” Lelouche corrected. “Etienne came across my food at the souk close to where he lived. They had moved in with his wife’s family when she took up her studies again. The next week he brought Noor to my stall and told her it was the way he wanted her to cook.”
Lelouche couldn’t help being amused at the idea of anyone telling Noor how to do anything.
“It was an ongoing joke between them. Etienne would say his wife could do everything in the world better than everyone else. Except cooking. That was his job. He was always with a smile. A laugh. I knew I could trust him, so I told him about my past, why it was impossible for me to ever return to my country, and about my Amina, who was pregnant with our second child, and about Amina’s parents, who lived with us. Mine had died in Algiers. We had been lucky to get a temporary visa. When it expired we stayed, scared all the time that we would be found out. But better to take that chance than return.”
The coffee and pastries arrived. When the waiter had gone, Lelouche continued. “One day, Etienne and Noor came to my stall to tell me she was going to work on making things right for my family. Noor…she was difficult to understand. Not her language, but in here.” He pointed to his heart. “
How do you say it? Aloof. But she told me she had filled out immigration and government papers for the Sarrafs all her life. She would be convincing with ours. So she and Etienne spent the next month interviewing us, writing down everything about our life in Algiers and our life in London. At first we were frightened to reveal so much that would place our entire family in danger, or trouble, both here and in Algeria. But it didn’t take long to trust the LeBracs.”
He smiled sadly. “Months later, when they came to arrest Noor, she wouldn’t let them in without a warrant. The police believed she used that time to burn evidence of buying material for the explosives, but what she actually burnt were the notes she took about us. Evidence that could have been used to tear my family apart. You see, regardless of how strong our chances were of staying here, we were planning to break the law. Noor had put in an application for Amina and me, but she believed Amina’s parents’ application would fail. So we decided that if we succeeded, my wife’s parents would live here with us illegally and no one would ever discover it.”
Bish put up a hand. “Be careful what you tell me here, Mr. Lelouche.”
“Amina’s parents are both dead now, so they can’t be taken from us. My five children got to be held in their grandparents’ arms. That has meant everything to my wife. To me. My own mother and father never had that chance.” Bilal fell silent a moment, and then said, “Noor owed us nothing, yet what she did for us has counted for everything in our lives. So every year after Ramadan I take my children to see her in jail. I tell them that this life we live would not have been possible without Noor and Etienne LeBrac.”
Bilal looked around the room. “They even worked on the papers that made this restaurant happen. It’s a good life, Chief Inspector. All because of two generous people.” Bish saw a resolute look in the other man’s eyes. “So when Etienne and Noor’s children come to me for help, who am I to turn them away?”