Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

by Melina Marchetta

  “About what?”

  Bish didn’t want to have theories. He had got used to the numbness since being forced to take leave.

  “About why someone would want to blow up British kids in Calais,” Grazier said bluntly.

  On the table before them, Bish caught the squinting distrust in Violette LeBrac Zidane’s eye.

  “Well, I don’t believe it was Al Qaeda or ISIS. I don’t think it was some French fanatic angry with the UK over what’s happening to refugees in Calais either.”

  These were some of the theories floating around.

  “It was targeted,” Bish said, “and I think Violette Zidane could have been the target. She spent six days sitting in one of the seats that were most impacted.”

  “But on the seventh day she wasn’t on the bus and it blew up,” Grazier said.

  “I’m not exactly buying that Violette bombed the bus because Lola Barrett-Parker took her seat the day before, and I don’t believe that she’d be able to make a bomb just because she was coming first in chemistry.” According to the panel on the morning show, that fact had been posted on a Facebook page titled “Who Went to School with the French Bomber?”

  “Her mother was incriminated all those years ago partly because she got honors in chemistry,” Grazier said.

  “Noor LeBrac had time to make the bomb,” said Bish. “And she was convicted because she confessed. Violette was traveling on a full itinerary with a large group.”

  “And she shared a room with your daughter,” Elliot said. “Not exactly the freedom to build a bomb. Although you and I did in first form.”

  Elliot held up his left index finger, minus the tip. Bish remembered the event vividly.

  “We’d really like to know where Violette was on the night before the bombing, Chief Inspector Ortley,” Grazier said. “Can your daughter shed light on that?”

  “Why not ask Crombie?” Bish asked.

  “According to Charlie Crombie, Violette wasn’t with him. According to Crombie’s roommate, Crombie wasn’t in his room.”

  “So apparently half the tour bus was missing from their beds that night.”

  “Not quite half, Ortley,” Grazier said, looking him in the eye. “Five, in actual fact.”

  Bish didn’t like where this was going, and he was now down to “Ortley,” which meant the niceties were over.

  “Aren’t you going to ask who the others without an alibi are?” Grazier asked.

  Bish leaned forward in his seat. They were going to drag Bee into this. Now he was seething, blinding-headache-in-this-damn-sunshine and all. Elliot poured a glass of water and handed it to him.

  “Sit back, Ortley. You’re scaring the boss.”

  Grazier didn’t seem the sort to be scared by anyone or anything.

  “Your only suspects are teenagers missing from their cabins?” Bish asked.

  “I don’t recall saying Violette or the kids were suspects,” Grazier said. “I simply want to know where they were the night before the bomb. Could you find that out for me, Chief Inspector Ortley, you being one of the fathers?”

  Bish bit his tongue. He didn’t want to admit the next fact out loud. Not in front of Elliot.

  “I’m probably not the right person to be playing chief inspector right now.”

  “We’re not Scotland Yard,” Grazier said. “We don’t give a rat’s arse what your suspension was about. All I’m saying is that we’d be happy for you to go out there and continue being who you were in France.”

  Bish presumed “No thanks” wasn’t an option. Grazier was eyeing him with that look he had. Elliot was wolfing down his eggs and bacon, one arm protectively around his plate. The boarding school fear that someone was going to steal your food.

  “You and I share a few theories,” Grazier said. “If Violette does have a target on her back, it just got a bit bigger, thanks to the media and that moron who locked her in a cupboard. Those kids are running from us. We’d better find them alive.”

  “Then what’s stopping you?”

  “The parents we’ve spoken to are pissed off at the embassy staff for taking their time getting to the campsite. They believe that Downing Street should have sent someone as soon as it happened. They’re not exactly being chatty with anyone who works for the government. Most of them claim that the only person who did anything was Chief Inspector Bish Ortley. We want you talking to those families. One of the kids on that tour might have a clue to where Violette and Eddie are heading.”

  “So I came here this morning for you to give me permission to be everyone’s friend?”

  “No, Ortley, you’re here because I was dying to meet you,” Grazier said.

  “Really?”

  “No.” Grazier’s tone was blunt. “But someone else is. The acting governor of Holloway contacted us last night. Noor LeBrac has asked for you specifically. She wants to talk. The home secretary would like you to go and see what she knows about these kids, and this bombing. You just seem to be everyone’s favorite father at the moment.”

  Bish doubted he was Noor LeBrac’s favorite anything, although he was certain she’d remember him over everyone else from that day her family was arrested.

  Grazier handed him a file. “This is what we know about her since she’s been in prison.”

  Bish had no choice but to take the file. “Can we call it quits after that?” he asked, staring at Elliot.

  “I’m genuinely hurt,” Elliot said. “We’ve been friends all these years.” He turned to Grazier. “He was Ron Weasley to my Harry Potter.”

  “Don’t talk to the press, Ortley,” Grazier said. “Don’t talk to any of your colleagues. And whenever you’re talking to the students and parents, remember you’re there as a father.”

  “So I’m going undercover as myself?”

  Grazier liked the sound of it. He stood and handed Bish a business card that identified him as Samuel Grazier and contained only a mobile number.

  “Ring if there are any issues with Holloway. Clearance comes through Elliot or me. No one else.”

  7

  Holloway Prison was on the Piccadilly line, so at least Bish didn’t have to travel far. He got off at Caledonian Road and waited for the shuttle bus that would take him to one of the country’s most polarizing women. While he waited, Bish flicked through the file. Noor LeBrac had been arrested alongside her mother, brother, and uncle for their part in the Brackenham supermarket bombing. They were referred to as the Brackenham Four. Six months later, LeBrac confessed to having built the bomb, claiming she’d been the only person in her family involved, other than her father, who died in the blast. She was thirty-three at the time, the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Cambridge-educated, having just completed a PhD in molecular biology. Married for twelve years to Etienne LeBrac, an Australian of French and Algerian parentage. He had been visiting his parents in rural New South Wales at the time.

  The file included a clipping of a newspaper article dated March 2010. A journalist who had followed the case from the outset reinterviewed LeBrac when there was talk that she would try to get an appeal off the ground. Her first attempt had been in 2005. The journalist commented that jail seemed to have broken her spirit, and LeBrac’s response was quoted at length: “My father filled the boot of my car with explosives, dropped my daughter off at preschool, drove to work, and murdered twenty-three innocent people. My mother died of stomach cancer in a hospice without her family around her. My brother lives in exile, unable to travel. My uncle Joseph, the patriarch of the Sarraf family, has chronic kidney damage from the beatings he received when he was wrongly imprisoned. My husband’s death has been so lied about that people actually believe he left his daughter alone on those dales, in the middle of a brutal Yorkshire winter. And my daughter has nightmares from the fear of not being able to speak to me at nine p.m. her time, ten a.m. London time. All this has broken my spirit. Not jail.”

  Rachel had always said that LeBrac was easier to hate because she was young, educated, attract
ive.

  “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 II. Her first posting was Alexandria, where she soon 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 Nasrallah 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 realized 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 identified himself at the Holloway Visitors’ Center, which was run by a children’s charity organization. A woman whose name tag identified her as Allison asked Bish if it was his first time visiting and if he required an information package. She told him that most of his possessions, including his phone, were to be placed in a locker; the only articles he could take with him were his ID, his locker key, and his visiting form. 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 a 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 facade the moment she stood. Bish hadn’t realized 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 the outside of 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.

  8

  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 disconnectedly.

  His mother rang in the evening. Bish felt a tinge of guilt that he hadn’t rung to check up 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 favorite 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 at least 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 10 and 10:30 a.m. In Coleambally, Australia. The next-most-dialed 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 war-torn countries. It h
ad resulted in Calais becoming the place for them to get across the Channel any way they could. An eleven-mile fence and a twenty-one-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 odor, 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-fueled 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 hope. 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.