“LeBrac,” he said when she didn’t respond.
“I think Noor and I are on first-name terms,” she said. “We’re besties. Like this.” She twisted two fingers together and managed to look both surprised and angry at herself. “Don’t ask me why, Bish, because you know. Bee’s involved with this business whether we like it or not, so let’s not put our heads in the sand. David says—”
Bish put up a hand. “Can we leave out what he says? Just this one time.” It seemed to him that whenever David Maynard spoke, his words were quoted and spun into pure gold. David Maynard’s take on education. David Maynard’s views on youth. David Maynard was the most quoted wife stealer in England.
“Okay, I won’t go into what David says, although he did say hello.”
Sod off, David.
“Noor LeBrac made mention of something and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.” Rachel was searching through the file with one hand and sipping her tea with the other. “She told me that all those years ago, she’d given a doctor a letter to send to me.”
“To you?”
“She was looking for a human rights lawyer. This doctor apparently recommended me.”
“You never mentioned Noor LeBrac contacting you back then,” he said. When they were married he had always known what she was working on, just as she knew what was going on in his world.
“Well, she did, but too much was happening and I must have forgotten to tell you,” she said. “It was two weeks before Stevie was born. I passed on all my cases to Robert Houghton and forgot about it. Forgot about her.”
She removed a letter from an envelope with writing on it, still pristine. Bish couldn’t believe she had spent the day traveling from Ashford to Holloway to her chambers and then here to the Docklands.
“She was guilty, Rach. She confessed.”
“This letter is logical, smart, and convincing,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“And on that basis you believe what, that she’s innocent?” he asked with disbelief. “Rachel, she has a copious amount of degrees from Cambridge. You’d hope for the sake of British education that she does know how to string a sentence together.”
“It’s unbelievable to me that the person who wrote this letter then confessed the very next day.”
She pushed the file towards him. Another volume on the subject of Noor LeBrac to sift through.
“I’m not investigating Noor LeBrac’s case,” he said firmly. “I’m trying to work out where those kids are.”
Rachel glanced over his shoulder towards the pantry. Her way of hinting that her sweet tooth was about to make her narky if she didn’t get a fix.
“I’ve only got Scotch Finger shortbread,” he confessed.
“Buttered, please.”
“It’ll go straight to your arse.”
“Fuck, you’re cruel for saying that to a pregnant woman.”
He couldn’t help smiling and went searching through the pantry for the biscuits.
“Robert Houghton jumped ship a couple of months later for the corporate world,” Rachel said, “and that was that. But what he collected before he left is interesting.”
“Rach—”
“I can’t do this now, for obvious reasons. But there’s something here, Bish. Please don’t ignore it. If not for me, then do it for Bee. Because whenever she’s locked in her room with that iPad, I think she’s looking for those kids. I think she’s worried rotten that something’s going to happen to them, and I think the only way to get Violette LeBrac off the streets is to sort out why she’s on the run. I honestly don’t believe it’s because she’s scared of an arrest.”
Bish thought of the message Violette sent her mother.
“LeBrac received a postcard from her. A cryptic message about telling the truth and shaming the devil.”
Rachel was nodding. Bish could tell she had already thought this through.
“What if this kid’s trying to prove her mother’s innocence?” she said.
He finally sat down and she seemed to take that as a sign that he was ready to listen. Perhaps he was.
“I’ve done a bit of research of my own,” she went on, indicating the top left-hand corner of the envelope, where the doctor’s name and personal address appeared on a gold-colored sticker. “I searched everywhere for this Dr. Owen Walden. It’s not such a common name, and the only one I could find was out at St. Therese’s. When I rang they told me he retired five years ago and now runs a B and B in Rye.”
Bish went to speak but she stopped him.
“Bish, just read what’s in this file,” she said, “and you’ll see that the arrest of the Sarraf family would never have stood up at trial. Whoever was in charge at the time found a way to get around one. They were desperate to keep the public happy. Elections were won on the back of those arrests. It would have been humiliating for Blair’s people to admit they got it wrong.”
“Do we have to blame everything on Blair?”
“No. Just the war on terror, and Iraq, and having his head stuck up Bush’s arse.”
“Rachel, let me repeat yet again: LeBrac confessed.”