She held his eyes but he couldn’t read hers.
“Some people get hate mail in jail,” she finally said. “Some get proposals. I got Anna Conlon. Hers were the only letters the authorities passed on to me before I confessed. Maybe they didn’t want to deny a woman who had lost her son in the bombing. She needed to understand why her boy died. I had no answer, and she didn’t deserve my theories or whatnot. She wanted her boy back and I couldn’t give her that. Perhaps it was something in my reply that made her write again, that led her to believe I had nothing to do with Brackenham.”
She bit her lip to stop it from trembling.
“And we just continued writing to each other. Apart from Etienne, Anna was my only link to the outside world. Mostly, she wrote about her boy. ‘Our Jimmy,’ they called him. I wrote about Etienne and Violette and Jamal and my mother. By the time I gave birth to Eddie, I felt as if I knew Jimmy Conlon, as if I’d grown up alongside him. When you make a decision not to give your baby to family, you make damn sure about the people you hand him over to.”
“So why not your husband’s parents, since they were taking Violette?”
A flash of pain crossed her face. “My mother-in-law had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She was only in her fifties so it was a bit of a surprise. That’s why Etienne was in Australia without us when Brackenham happened. To help his father on the farm. So the idea of giving her a baby to care for seemed cruel. But worse than that was what happened to Violette after Etienne died. His parents flew to England to take Violette along with Etienne’s body back home with them. Violette had been placed in foster care for a couple of nights, and a whole lot of well-meaning people had collected clothing for this poor destitute child whose father had left her freezing on the dales. Except some base repulsive subhuman laced a cardigan with acid and it burnt her little arms. And I knew then that there was no way to protect my children from other people’s rage and insanity except to give them the gift of anonymity. The Conlons had just moved away from Merseyside because they couldn’t handle the memories, or the scrutiny. Who better to give my son to than a couple who had raised a beautiful lad like Jimmy Conlon? It’s why we decided on Eddie. Edouard, for my grandfather, and Edward, for Anna’s father.
“He was born twelve hours after his father died,” she went on. “I was allowed to keep him for forty-eight hours and in that time I gave him a history of our lives. It’s what Etienne had done with Violette the day she was born.”
She looked at Bish. “Samuel Grazier was the middleman. I still haven’t quite worked out whether I hate his guts or appreciate what he did. The Conlons met him when their Jimmy died in the bombing. It was his job to make sure the victims’ families were kept up to date on everything. Getting bodies returned. Arrests. That sort of thing. He got close to the Conlons. It was Grazier who made the exchange of letters between Anna and me possible. He made the adoption happen. He took Eddie out of my arms.”
She didn’t speak for a moment. Bish couldn’t help thinking what a pair he and Grazier were. Removing children from their mother.
“I had one stipulation,” she said, finding her voice again. “It was that neither Eddie nor the public could know who his birth family were. Anna agreed, but it didn’t stop her visiting me once a month. She brought picture books and a tape recorder and I’d spend hours reading the books into the tape, which she’d play back to our son. Eddie may have thought it was a stranger reading those books at the time, but the first thing he said to me today was, ‘I know your voice.’”
She was fighting back tears now.
“Anna continued to visit me right up to a few months before her death. It was a deep friendship that I will never forget. My fear now is that John Conlon is a man of few words and that darling boy seems to be the exact opposite. I can’t bear the idea of Eddie living in silence when he was so used to talking all the time with his mother. It’s what wakes me at the witching hour.”
The witching hour. How well he knew it.
To Bish, these people’s stories made sense of a cruel world. The story of Etienne LeBrac’s watch. Or the story of two sons.
“What else do you think of?” he asked. “At your witching hour.”