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, 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 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.