“I spoke to her three weeks ago when she supposedly left for her Duke of Edinburgh camp.”
“Did she take part in Duke of Ed before this year?” he asked.
“Yes. She was going for her Silver Award so that next year she can be part of a residential project in Nepal and get her Gold Award. Etienne had been involved with the Duke of Ed Award when he was at school, and she’s determined to do anything her father did.”
Bish heard pride in her voice.
“It was a short conversation,” LeBrac said. “I have a two-quid phone card that doesn’t go far with international calls. Violette told me it would be the last time I’d speak to her for a couple of weeks. That I believed. The hikes are in deep bushland. They have to rough it. She said, ‘I love you, Mummy. We’ll talk when I’m back.’”
It gave Bish a sinking feeling to realize that Noor LeBrac spoke to her daughter on the other side of the world, from behind bars, more often than he spoke to Bee.
“Nothing strange about the conversation?” he asked. “You didn’t sense her lying?”
He waited. On her face, yet another expression. One he couldn’t read. Or perhaps he didn’t want to, because it would require empathy from him, and he didn’t want to give her any.
“There was something?” he prompted.
She nodded finally. “Months before, Violette told me she’d remembered an important detail from the last time she saw her father. She was only four and a half when he died, so her memory of that day has always been sketchy.”
Bish hoped Violette hadn’t seen her father jump.
“She recalled that Etienne was wearing his watch.”
Bish was confused. “Is that important right now?”
“When you lose someone, Chief Inspector Ortley, everything about the day they died is important. Especially the lies.”
Her stare bore into him and he looked back down at his notes before she could do some damage with it. Because Bish felt it was in her power to damage him. That she could seek out the thin parts of his skin. He felt his throat go dry.
“The watch comes with an extraordinary story. One you don’t deserve to hear, so I’ll skip that part. What you need to know is that when Etienne’s parents flew across the world to identify his body, there was no watch. Violette remembering it being there makes all the difference in the world.”
Bish put his pen down because this watch business was bollocks and had nothing to do with bombs going off outside Calais or with Violette’s disappearance.
“Keep writing,” she ordered, pointing to his notebook.
“Why? Do you seriously think Violette came all this way to find a watch?” Bish felt the frustration of the past week. “Noor, you’re wasting my time.”
“Please refrain from using my name,” she said with a quietness soaked in ice. “You speak it with such contempt.”
Because it was contempt he felt.
“I’m not the one who allowed an idiot to lock Violette up and then let her run off,” she said. “When I think of my child—”
“You should have thought of your child in 2002.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.
“You’ve been dying to say that ever since you walked into this place, haven’t you?” She looked at him in bitter disbelief, then leaned closer across the table. “No, I think you’ve been dying to say it even before that. Back when you took my daughter away from me. The first time.”
Her stare was a bullet now. It went right through to his bones.
“Oh I remember you,” she said, her voice wavering slightly. “I remember the disgust in your eyes when you came into the cell and cast judgment on my family. As if you believed my child was safer with you than with the people who loved her.”
He was finished here for the day. He moved to collect his notebook and pen but LeBrac grabbed them and began to scribble furiously.
Wordlessly, he removed the notebook from her hands, not wanting her privy to its content.
“Then commit this to your tiny brain,” she said, hurling the pen against the wall. “Etienne wearing his watch in death could have been the tragedy of a man taking his life. Etienne’s body without it could be the tragedy of a man murdered for his watch.”
Bish had been a constable working behind the desk when Brackenham happened and they brought in the Sarraf family. The station had gone into lockdown because the crowd outside was baying for blood. His boss came to find him later that afternoon. “You’ve got a kid her age, haven’t you, Bish? You’re going to have to go in there and take the little girl.” When he went to remove Violette LeBrac from her mother’s arms, Jamal Sarraf cried. Her great-uncle Joseph Sarraf sat with his head in his hands. Her grandmother wailed. But Noor LeBrac was chillingly calm, all smiles, though a look of despair beyond reckoning was in her eyes.