The thing the two mothers couldn’t control was the deep connection between all their children. Jocelyn and Noor adored each other, not once allowing their mothers’ rivalry to get in the way of their friendship. When their younger siblings were born within the same month, the girls believed it cemented something special. They were doting older sisters, Jocelyn the maternal, Noor the more practical.
But what turned out to be even less controllable was the bond between Jimmy and Layla. They were raised mostly by their semi-mad mothers and adoring older sisters, and not a day went by that they didn’t see each other. Until Jimmy went up north to meet with football scouts and tour with the England Under-17s team. Three months later, when Layla stood on the platform at Euston Station watching her best friend get off the train, she hadn’t expected the strange rush of weirdness. All their lives, Jimmy had looked younger than her, but now there was such confidence in his walk. And that look on his face. Despite his newfound maturity, he still managed to blurt out, “Fuck, you’re hot,” in a way that had them both flushed and refusing to look at each other the rest of the way home. From that day on, everyone knew that Jimmy and Layla were forever.
When Jimmy was finally released after the Brackenham bombing, Layla was waiting for him outside Belmarsh Prison. He didn’t walk towards her with a swagger and he didn’t have that “Fuck, you’re hot” look on his face. She should have turned and walked away then, because he wasn’t the Jimmy she’d known all her life. But after he traveled with his uncle to Alexandria and they wouldn’t let him back into England, Layla made the trip across the Channel every weekend.
“My shrink says that you and I probably romanticize who we were when we were kids,” she told him on the last night they were together, in the shoe closet he called home down by the Calais port. The sex was rough, and Layla hadn’t signed up for rough. “Most people romanticize the first person they sleep with. She says we do because we’ve never coped with the reality of who we are now.”
“Why the fuck do you need a shrink, Layla?”
He’d lose it over anything those days.
“You need to speak to someone, Jimmy,” she said, getting out of bed.
“And tell them what?” he shouted, suddenly standing over her. “That I spent my eighteenth birthday in jail and got fucked up the arse? You think talking to a shrink’s going to make it all go away?”
Back home, she went off the rails for a while. Got herself a reputation with the local boys. Everyone knew she’d been with Jamal Sarraf after he got out of prison. By the time she was nineteen she felt as though she had lived a lifetime.
“Shame on you, Layla,” her sister said one day while they were sitting in the park, watching her niece play. “For wasting your brain. Noor’s stuck in that prison wasting hers, but she doesn’t have a choice. You’ve got all the choices in the world.”
So Layla applied for university, and life with the Sarrafs and LeBracs was forgotten. A boyfriend or two, but nothing serious enough to get in the way of her work. She was ambitious and she wanted the junior partnership, and she worked hard for it.
And now a second bomb has gone off in their lives, and Layla has a feeling that everything is already heading downhill fast.
12
Outside on Fetter Lane, Bish walked ahead of Elliot. Surrounding him were buildings housing state-of-the-art courtrooms that reeked of multimillion-dollar cases. London had outgrown him. It was for people with a burning desire. People like Layla Bayat and those young ambitious faces that had surrounded him in the lift, talking apps and tweets. He felt a little man in a big city and it frightened him to the core. Had he reached an age at which he no longer had access to the riches of the greater world? At his work in the Met, at least there was a place for authority. Seniority. Until his suspension, there was respect for a man who’d worked hard for longer than some of them had been alive. Bish had no idea who he was without his work, and nothing reminded him of that more than standing amid the city’s high achievers.
Elliot was at his heels, further confirmation of the regression of Bish’s life. Six years sharing a dorm weren’t enough? What gods had Bish angered to have him and Elliot sharing space more than three decades later?
“Much appreciated if you’d give me a heads-up on when you’re going to threaten people,” Bish said.
“You’ve spent too much time behind a desk, Ortley. You’re getting soft.”
“I wasn’t the one identified with a little dick,” Bish said.
“And I’m not the one whose wife ran off with the school principal.”
Bish began counting to ten in his head to stop himself from responding. Before he got there, Elliot’s phone rang and he answered it wordlessly. There was a bit of nodding, a few “Yeps.” Then Elliot said, “Well, the thing is, my phone’s running out of juice and you can’t send it to him because the idiot doesn’t have a smartphone.”
Bish refused to feel held back by the Nokia brick he carried. He knew plenty of dumb people with smartphones.