Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (9 page)

Rachel had always said LeBrac was easier to hate because she was young, educated, attractive.

‘And Arab,’ Bish would remind her.

‘How many years does one’s family have to be in this country not to be a foreigner?’

Bish couldn’t answer that. His family had achieved it by wiping out any traces of his grandfather’s culture. All Bish knew about his late grandmother was that Lily Worthington had been a headstrong young woman who joined the army as a nurse at the outbreak of World War Two. Her first posting was Alexandria, where she fell in love with a young Egyptian interpreter named Bashir. They were married soon afterwards and had two children. Lily died of cancer when Saffron was five and her brother ten years old, which prompted the Worthingtons to retrieve the children from Alexandria and bring them up in England. It was the early 1950s. Bashir Nassrallah had no way of fighting his wife’s wealthy family and could not afford to fly to England to see his children, and so a connection was lost. What Bish’s family history had instilled in him, according to his ex-wife, was an attraction to all things Arab.

‘You’ve got a thing for Arab women,’ Rachel told him one night in the dying days of their marriage.

‘Yes, that’s why I married a redhead from Cornwall.’

‘You married a redhead from Cornwall because you wanted to make your father happy,’ she said softly. ‘He told me at our engagement that the family was worried you were going to end up with one of those foreign types.’

‘I married a redhead from Cornwall because I was in love with her.’

And he had been. Rachel was bolshie and gorgeous and he made her laugh. But he realised early on in his marriage that she was more what he wanted than what he needed. Then the kids happened and they were both in love with being Bee and Stevie’s parents. Their son’s death forced them to acknowledge that wasn’t enough.

‘When Arab women are brilliantly smart, you’re threatened by them,’ she said, ‘and when they’re beautiful, you love them. And when they’re both, you’re antagonistic towards them.’

‘And you have the facts to back this up?’

‘Fact: when they’re beautiful you love them – Yasmin Le Bon.’

‘Well, her family’s Iranian, so not exactly Arab. Any more of these facts?’

‘Fact: when they’re beautiful and smart you despise them – Noor LeBrac. In your eyes she was guilty from the day they arrested her.’

‘She confessed to building a bomb that blew up twenty-three people, Rachel.’

‘She didn’t confess for six
months
. Noor LeBrac got to you from the very day she was arrested. What did she do to you that was so unforgettable?’

It was more what he had done.

He presented himself at the Holloway Visitors’ Centre, which was run by a children’s charity organisation, to a woman whose name tag identified her as Allison. When he explained that he didn’t have a visiting form and had been sent by the Home Office, a few phone calls were made. Instead of directing him to the visits hall, she took Bish to another checkpoint deeper within the prison. Two guards sat in an office behind a serving window.

‘Next time, he sees LeBrac in the visits hall like everyone else,’ the older guard told Allison.

‘Next time, he sees LeBrac wherever the acting governor says he sees her,’ she said.

Bish was asked to follow the older guard, the aptly named Officer Gray. He was led to a small interview room and buzzed in.

‘Knock on the door when you’re finished,’ Gray ordered. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes.’

Inside, Noor LeBrac was seated at a table, dressed in tracksuit pants, a T-shirt and cardigan. Her dark stare followed Bish the moment he entered the room and he dared not look away. He sat down and found himself trying not to focus on the freckle on her lower lip. If he were to set up any sort of dialogue, he couldn’t come across as distracted. Or hostile.

She was still striking, despite her face being drawn and thin. Her dark hair was in a thick loose plait. There was a coarseness to it, unlike the sleekness on the day of her arrest. The LeBracs had been an attractive couple and back then Bish could tell she was a little vain about her appearance. Now he couldn’t help but think how small and helpless she was, this monster who had built a bomb. But the fragility was revealed to be a façade the moment she stood. Bish hadn’t realised she was holding the tabloid until she threw it down in front of him. Violette’s photo was plastered over the front page. It had been taken at the campsite, from outside the dining hall looking in. Bish had managed to get himself photographed standing behind her.

‘I just wanted to look into the face of the man who locked my daughter in a cupboard and called her a whore to the world,’ she said.

Her voice was clipped and polished, and jail had done nothing to soften her arrogance.

Noor LeBrac walked to the door and knocked twice in a way that seemed to suggest she was in charge. She was buzzed out and taken away.

After his short stint as the connection between Noor LeBrac and the British government, Bish spent the rest of the day returning calls from parents he had met at the campsite. Their questions were mostly the same. How were the injured kids? Had he found out any more about who was responsible? Was his daughter having nightmares, as their kids were? Very few had come from the same town, so there was no place to meet and talk. Social media was all they had; their grieving was done online, collectively but disconnected.

His mother rang in the evening. Bish felt a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t rung to check on her.

‘How was Bee when you left her?’ he asked.

‘Back to angry and withdrawn. She went for a run this morning, before they dropped me home. Rachel made David go with her.’

Just what Bish wanted to hear.

‘Any news about the missing kids?’ she asked.

‘Afraid not.’ He looked down at the front page of the newspaper sitting before him. Two images: an unsmiling Violette placed beside a joyful Astrid Copely. No context, just a headline:
EVIL HAS TAKEN OUR GIRL
. No guesses who Evil was.

‘I’m praying nothing’s happened to them,’ Saffron said.

Later, restless and desperate not to have a drink, Bish scoured the news online.
The Guardian
,
Al Jazeera
, the
New York Times
. The Australian media hadn’t made up their mind how they felt yet. At the moment they were identifying Violette as ‘the British-born French-Arab LeBrac, who went by the name Zidane, which belonged to her Algerian grandmother’. Bish couldn’t think of how many more hyphens and details they could use to distance themselves from the world’s least favourite teenager. That was another point being argued on social media. What country did Violette LeBrac Zidane belong to? On Twitter, @princec2 was the most eloquent. ‘She’s Australian, you fuckers.’

When Bish had exhausted the media outlets he found himself studying the file Grazier had given him. Noor LeBrac’s life was as productive as prison allowed her to be, but her contact with the outside world was limited. She hadn’t attempted an appeal for six years now. Grazier had included phone records of the past year. Until a fortnight ago, LeBrac had rung the same number every day between ten and ten thirty am. In Coleambally Australia. The next most dialled number was in Calais, once a week. Her daughter. Her brother. Every day. Every week.

Perhaps it was because Bish had nothing better to do, or because searching for Violette’s whereabouts gave him some purpose, but whatever the reason, he found himself crossing the Channel again first thing the following morning. If Noor LeBrac spoke to her brother every week, then he must know something.

Calais seemed like another world today. Three days ago Bish had just wanted to get to Bee. Now he noticed the reality. Migrants lined the road alongside the port, because Downing Street had promised generous benefits to those displaced from wartorn countries. It had resulted in Calais becoming the place for them to get across the Channel any way they could. An eleven-mile fence and a 21-mile stretch of water stood in their way, and for all its promises, the UK was dragging its feet dealing with the intake. Even if someone succeeded in getting over the Ring of Steel, as it was called, from there they’d have to be desperate enough to attach themselves under a lorry, or better still, get into a refrigerated vehicle where the heat sensors at customs wouldn’t detect their presence. Those lucky enough to get through the tunnel were met by sniffer dogs at customs on the other side, which still counted as French soil. Once caught, it was straight back across to Calais, only to try again the next day.

The extreme right wing maintained that those who wanted to get into the UK were economic refugees, taking advantage of handouts. But who, Bish wondered, would live like this and take such chances if not out of necessity and desperation? With no assistance from the French government, these people were surviving on the goodwill of a small group of retirees who handed out food and clothing. Bish didn’t know what the solution was, but it wasn’t this.

The boxing gym on Rue Delacroix was yet another world. The smell was a cocktail of blood and spit and body odour and the stillness of the air was stifling. Bish felt like a foreigner and it had little to do with language or culture. Young men, some of them in their teens, pounding into boxing bags, or each other. It was a room pulsing with testosterone-fuelled energy and the sense that there was nothing else for these men. They eyed Bish suspiciously as he made a sweep of the place, searching. For years the only photos out there of Jamal Sarraf were from his days with the football club. Man United’s great British Arab hopeful. The photos showed a handsome kid with a wide grin and laughing eyes. He was popular. He was a good look for the club.

‘Is Jamal Sarraf here?’ Bish asked a young man carrying a bucket and picking up towels. The lad pointed to the ring closest to them, where two men were fighting it out. One was Senegalese, judging from the T-shirt he was wearing. His opponent was lean and muscular, with a short-cropped beard and a quick right hook. Being a man of soft bulk himself, courtesy of a diet of liquid lunches, Bish couldn’t help holding a hand to his gut and vowing he would soon begin a regimen of more vegetables, more protein and fewer excuses. He’d been happy enough to leave exercise to the young because he believed it was futile, and then Daniel Craig had come along as Bond and ruined it for any man growing old disgracefully.

The bout finished and the two men touched gloves. As the older man stepped from the ring, Bish approached.

‘Jamal Sarraf? Bish Ortley.’

Sarraf didn’t respond but the look in his eyes said there’d be no handshaking between them.

‘I’m the father of one of Violette’s friends,’ Bish continued. ‘And my daughter’s desperate to know that your niece and the boy are safe.’

The man standing before Bish seemed a world away from the promising footballer he had been as a teenager. Back then, Jimmy Sarraf was the star of the England Under 17 team and sought after by a number of the big clubs. When Man United signed him up to their junior team, the headlines read
LITTLE BIG MAN
and Sky News did a feel-good piece on him. ‘He’s a cheeky bugger, that one,’ Sarraf’s childhood coach in Shepherd’s Bush had said. When seventeen-year-old Jimmy was first interviewed on TV and asked what he’d do when he made it in the big league, tears welled up in his eyes. ‘Buy me mum and sister a house each, as big as that mansion Posh and Becks have out in Hertfordshire.’ Bish recalled the boy talking nonstop and at a speed beyond reckoning in that interview.

After the bombing, people wanted blood. Live blood. They wanted someone to hate, someone still breathing, and they got it when London police raided the Sarraf council flat and found evidence to suggest that Louis Sarraf had not acted alone. Jamal and his Uncle Joseph had been caught on camera in the courtyard with Louis, arguing emphatically, all three agitated. The younger Sarraf had looked relieved when his father and uncle shook hands. He had embraced his father. To the authorities it was a deadly handshake, and it took longer than it should have to release Jamal and his uncle, even after his sister confessed.

‘Can we sit down somewhere and talk?’ Bish asked Sarraf, aware of the stares from the rest of the men.

Sarraf retrieved a newspaper from a nearby bench and threw it at Bish, who didn’t need to be fluent in French to understand it. The familiar photo of him standing behind Violette. Good to see that the British and French were united in something.

Jamal Sarraf walked out of the gym and into a back alley and he followed.

‘Is it true you’ve spoken to her?’ Bish asked, and suddenly he felt a grip around his throat and found himself shoved against the steel fence. He saw rage in the man’s eyes, glimpsed a clenched fist.

‘I don’t sit down and talk to cunts who lock my niece up in a storage cupboard.’

Sarraf’s face was menacingly close. Bish held up a hand of warning. Not that he believed it would be powerful enough to stop Sarraf, after seeing what he could do to a younger, fitter man in the ring.

‘I
removed
Violette from that cupboard,’ he said. ‘She’d tell you that herself if you asked her.’