“Stop calling her that,” she said, irritated.
“What the hell am I supposed to call her? She won’t let me use her first name. You won’t let me use her last.”
She ignored his question and pointed once more to the file. “It’s all in there. The week of the bombing, she handed in her PhD. I don’t know too many people who have the time to make a bomb, complete a doctoral thesis in molecular biology, and hold down a full-time job when they live with their extended family and have to take their mother to chemo as well as bring up a child.”
She looked at him, waiting for a reaction.
“Listening,” he muttered.
This time she smiled. “The single flimsy piece of evidence they had was the dynamite on the soles of her shoes. In her letter she claims that her husband, Etienne, had spoken to experts who confirmed the high probability of explosives being on the shoes of anyone living with the bomber. Anyone who walked into that flat. That was the key evidence at the time of her arrest, Bish!”
“And the fact that she’d threatened the manager of the supermarket the week before,” Bish reminded her. “‘Your time will come,’ she was heard to say. And the fact that she wouldn’t let the police into the house without a search warrant, and when they returned with one it was obvious someone in that house had burnt evidence. And the fact that they found residue from the bomb in the boot of her car.”
Rachel was shaking her head. “All circumstantial. It should have gone to trial, that’s all I’m saying.” She had a look in her eyes that Bish recognized, and he took a childish pleasure in knowing that David Maynard wouldn’t. Maynard had never seen her hungry for a legal case.
Bish relented and took the file.
He walked her down to the tube station, knowing Maynard would be waiting for her at Ashford, and it made him melancholy. His hand almost tempted to take hers. It seemed the natural thing to do, and because Rachel was more evolved than Bish, she took his. The next time he saw her, she’d likely have had the baby. How strange it would sound to hear Bee speak about a brother who wasn’t Stevie. Who wasn’t theirs.
He stood with her on the platform in silence until the tube came.
“Would it seem odd to say that I want you to have a place in this kid’s life?” she asked.
Bish could hardly be a player in his own life, let alone another man’s child’s. He pressed a kiss to her brow. “Text me when you get home,” he said.
Robert Houghton’s file on Noor LeBrac contradicted the one provided by Grazier, so Bish set down the identifiable truths. Fact: the Brackenham Four spent twenty-eight days of incarceration at Paddington Green police station, in underground cells built especially for terror suspects. Fact: they were imprisoned separately, in twelve-foot-square cells with no windows. Fact: the new post–September 11 terrorism laws allowed the government to hold them without a hearing or trial for as long as Downing Street wanted. Fact: they were then transferred to prisons in four different counties and didn’t see one another again until six months later, when Noor LeBrac confessed. Fact: Noor LeBrac’s confession came one day after Etienne LeBrac’s suicide.
As Rachel had pointed out, Noor’s letter wasn’t written by someone who was about to confess. It told the story of the family’s last days together in Brackenham. Written in a way that Bish found strangely haunting, it wasn’t so much a letter outlining a case as a plea for help. Well into the night, something niggled at him, and he searched his own notes on the Boulogne bombing. Searched Facebook pages, interviews, notes on phone conversations with parents and students. He googled the date of the confession. Found nothing. Went back to the letter Noor had sent to Rachel’s chambers thirteen years ago. Who was Owen Walden in all this? Bish found something online about Walden delivering a paper in Nova Scotia in 2005 on fibroids in the womb during pregnancy. A strange sort of alarm bell went off in Bish’s head as he scrolled to the end of the PDF for a brief biography and realized that St. Therese’s Hospital, where Walden had been head of obstetrics, was four miles away from Foston Hall Prison, in Derbyshire, where LeBrac had been transferred after Paddington Green. Bish started his search again, sifting through every single document he had in his possession. And there it was. On that faithful handwritten list of student names from the day of the bombing.
Eddie Conlon had been born on the same day Noor LeBrac confessed.
His hunches didn’t really come out of the blue. They brewed and festered and kept Bish awake for yet another hour. Until he called Layla Bayat’s number.
“What did Violette say to Eddie that day in Boulogne?” he asked.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“What’s the connection between Noor LeBrac and Eddie Conlon?”
There was silence, but he knew she was still there.