“Really?”
“No.” Grazier’s tone was blunt. “But someone else is. The acting governor of Holloway contacted us last night. Noor LeBrac has asked for you specifically. She wants to talk. The home secretary would like you to go and see what she knows about these kids, and this bombing. You just seem to be everyone’s favorite father at the moment.”
Bish doubted he was Noor LeBrac’s favorite anything, although he was certain she’d remember him over everyone else from that day her family was arrested.
Grazier handed him a file. “This is what we know about her since she’s been in prison.”
Bish had no choice but to take the file. “Can we call it quits after that?” he asked, staring at Elliot.
“I’m genuinely hurt,” Elliot said. “We’ve been friends all these years.” He turned to Grazier. “He was Ron Weasley to my Harry Potter.”
“Don’t talk to the press, Ortley,” Grazier said. “Don’t talk to any of your colleagues. And whenever you’re talking to the students and parents, remember you’re there as a father.”
“So I’m going undercover as myself?”
Grazier liked the sound of it. He stood and handed Bish a business card that identified him as Samuel Grazier and contained only a mobile number.
“Ring if there are any issues with Holloway. Clearance comes through Elliot or me. No one else.”
7
Holloway Prison was on the Piccadilly line, so at least Bish didn’t have to travel far. He got off at Caledonian Road and waited for the shuttle bus that would take him to one of the country’s most polarizing women. While he waited, Bish flicked through the file. Noor LeBrac had been arrested alongside her mother, brother, and uncle for their part in the Brackenham supermarket bombing. They were referred to as the Brackenham Four. Six months later, LeBrac confessed to having built the bomb, claiming she’d been the only person in her family involved, other than her father, who died in the blast. She was thirty-three at the time, the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Cambridge-educated, having just completed a PhD in molecular biology. Married for twelve years to Etienne LeBrac, an Australian of French and Algerian parentage. He had been visiting his parents in rural New South Wales at the time.
The file included a clipping of a newspaper article dated March 2010. A journalist who had followed the case from the outset reinterviewed LeBrac when there was talk that she would try to get an appeal off the ground. Her first attempt had been in 2005. The journalist commented that jail seemed to have broken her spirit, and LeBrac’s response was quoted at length: “My father filled the boot of my car with explosives, dropped my daughter off at preschool, drove to work, and murdered twenty-three innocent people. My mother died of stomach cancer in a hospice without her family around her. My brother lives in exile, unable to travel. My uncle Joseph, the patriarch of the Sarraf family, has chronic kidney damage from the beatings he received when he was wrongly imprisoned. My husband’s death has been so lied about that people actually believe he left his daughter alone on those dales, in the middle of a brutal Yorkshire winter. And my daughter has nightmares from the fear of not being able to speak to me at nine p.m. her time, ten a.m. London time. All this has broken my spirit. Not jail.”
Rachel had always said that LeBrac was easier to hate because she was young, educated, attractive.
“And Arab,” Bish would remind her.
“How many years does one’s family have to be in this country not to be a foreigner?”
Bish couldn’t answer that. His family had achieved it by wiping out any traces of his grandfather’s culture. All Bish knew about his late grandmother was that Lily Worthington had been a headstrong young woman who joined the army as a nurse at the outbreak of World War II. Her first posting was Alexandria, where she soon fell in love with a young Egyptian interpreter named Bashir. They were married soon afterwards and had two children. Lily died of cancer when Saffron was five and her brother ten years old, which prompted the Worthingtons to retrieve the children from Alexandria and bring them up in England. It was the early 1950s. Bashir Nasrallah had no way of fighting his wife’s wealthy family and could not afford to fly to England to see his children, and so a connection was lost. What Bish’s family history had instilled in him, according to his ex-wife, was an attraction to all things Arab.
“You’ve got a thing for Arab women,” Rachel told him one night in the dying days of their marriage.
“Yes, that’s why I married a redhead from Cornwall.”
“You married a redhead from Cornwall because you wanted to make your father happy,” she said softly. “He told me at our engagement that the family was worried you were going to end up with one of those foreign types.”