‘As if you care what I think of you.’

‘Why can’t you fucking trust me?’ he shouted.

‘Because you think I’m a monster!’ she shouted back.

And regardless of his anger, all Bish wanted was not to ruin the beauty of her day with the son and daughter she hadn’t seen for thirteen years.

‘I know who the Conlons are,’ he said, sitting down. ‘I know about their son. James Edward Conlon. Eighteen years old. He’d been in London for a couple of months, working on a construction site around the corner from Brackenham Street.’ Bish had spent the previous night trying to fathom the mentality of the people on both sides of the Brackenham tragedy. ‘Why would you give Eddie to people who could so easily have hated him?’

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?’

She looked away. ‘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 and 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. I had to give them anonymity. The Conlons had 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 the name Eddie. Edouard, for my grandfather, and Edward for Anna’s father.