Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(55)

“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.”

“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.