Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (35 page)

But her father and the capitaine and Marie and Dupont don’t need to know that. It’s enough that Marianne knows exactly what Bee is thinking and why she chose to be on a summer tour that began and ended close to Marianne’s hometown. Bee did her research when she got home from Gothenburg. Found an interview with the Pas de Calais junior sportswoman of the year. Marianne Attal was going to be a junior coach on the Calais junior football tour in August.

‘Bee?’ her father prods gently.

She looks up and finds everyone staring. Waiting.

‘Ils veulent savoir ce que Violette a dit à propos du chauffeur de bus,’
Marianne says when Bee doesn’t respond.

Two weeks of nothing and now this! Hasn’t she heard of Facebook? Instagram? Snapchat? Anything? Does she really have to make them witnesses to what Violette said about the French driver, just to get Bee across the Channel again?

She tries to work out what to tell them and what not to tell them. There’s the fact that things started with a fight between the Calais football tour and Bee’s bus on their first night at the campground. The kids Marianne was chaperoning had egged Bee’s bus. Charlie Crombie smashed a security camera so they could retaliate, writing the English national anthem all over the French bus. Rodney Kennington said it was a sure-fire way of letting on that they did it, but Crombie convinced them that the shaps were too stupid to go for the obvious suspects. Which was true because the Germans were blamed. They were on a summer tour of cathedral architecture and had been heard taunting the French and the English about the last World Cup victory.

Any which way, the shaps had said thank God the French were going in the opposite direction. But then they were all at the same camping ground again in Bayeux, halfway through their tour. Gorman thought it a good idea to organise a World Cup match between France and England. Having never travelled beyond these two countries, he believed they constituted the world. The French won that game. Blood was shed, mostly Crombie’s, and there was a rumble of sorts, and at one point, Marianne straddled Bee and they just stared at each other for so long. Violette went to kick Marianne off, but she grabbed Violette’s boot, which ended up in Bee’s face, which is how she got a black eye. Violette and Marianne had a
C’est de sa faute à elle
argument, and then the shaps put an end to it. For days, all Bee could think of was the straddle. And how perhaps the next time she saw Marianne, they would exchange phone numbers.

On the last night, at the campsite outside Calais, the French were back. And so were the Germans, who’d spent their entire trip with a curfew in place for the graffiti. The seniors of all three factions ended up in the car park, shoving one another, calling one another names. Pretty pathetic. Someone threw a can, but that was as violent as it got. And suddenly, there was Marianne grabbing Bee’s arm, pulling her away, and once out of earshot saying something about it being personal, about her being the reason Bee was in Calais in the first place. Bee’s greatest fear wasn’t that everyone would find out, it was that every time the capitaine’s daughter beckoned, Bee would come running. That she’d be one of
those
girls.

And then the lights in the car park came on and everyone split, but Marianne wouldn’t let her go and Violette wouldn’t leave without Bee, and Eddie wouldn’t leave without Violette. Charlie Crombie was there too, so the five of them hid under the stilts of one of the cabins until the shaps were gone. Then, instead of walking back to her cabin, Marianne told them she knew how to hot-wire a car and they could head down to the coast for the night.

That was how they came to be pushing the security guard’s car through the woodlands surrounding the camping ground and finding Fionn Sykes, who was out searching for night herons. And then the six of them were in the car, heading nowhere in particular.

It was the longest night of Bee’s life. The best night of her life. They talked about everything. It’s why sometimes she thinks she hates Violette, because Bee trusted them with all the stuff that keeps her awake at night. Stevie’s death. Her parents’ divorce, her father’s drinking. How petrified she is that one day there’ll be a phone call saying he’s done himself in, because he’s headed for the edge. And how she had sex with a boy over Christmas at a party, just to prove to her friends she wasn’t a lesbian. She cried when she said that. She had come out to Violette days before, but this was different. She knew there would be no turning back.

Charlie talked about the cheating episode. They couldn’t see one another in the dark but she knew from his voice that he was crying. Being expelled for drugs would make you cool in years to come, but cheating was different. Everyone hated a cheat. Eddie talked about his mother’s death and how his father didn’t want a bar of him now that she was gone, and Fionn also spoke about his mum. She didn’t leave the house ever, because she was one of those people you read about in the Guinness book of records. At Easter Fionn finally got the guts to bring friends home to meet her, and the girl he thought he could trust told everyone that his mum was so fat she couldn’t move out of her room. Like Gilbert Grape’s mother.

And then there was Marianne. Her dad had shot dead the son of a local crim and was taking it bad, regardless of the fact that the guy was scum in the making. She said it wasn’t like the movies; police didn’t kill people every day.

Violette said very little. Just that her father was dead and she lived with her grandparents. Charlie asked where her mother was, and at least she was honest about that. ‘In jail.’ They spoke briefly about the kids on the tour who got on their nerves. They compared bus drivers: both cranky most of the time. Violette told them she’d had words with the driver of the French bus. He was a bit of a stickybeak, she said.

Later, they came across a party on the beach in Arromanches and danced. As if no one they loved had ever died, or killed anyone, or cheated, or shamed them. It was the most uninhibited Bee had ever been. Her arms around Violette and Marianne, laughing up at the stars. Crombie made them all promise they’d never tell anyone that he had danced to One Direction. But the very best part was later, lying beside Marianne on the sand. And her kiss. And her fingers and her tongue and the way they shook in each other’s arms and the way they didn’t really speak the same language but understood exactly what the other was saying.

That was what happened the night before the bomb went off.

Bee’s father and Capitaine Attal and Dupont are staring at her in disbelief.

‘Stickybeak?’ Dupont asks.
‘Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?’

There’s a discussion about what it means. ‘Nosy,’ Bee explains to her father, because now she has to be a translator for Australian English as well. ‘He was prying.’

‘That’s it? You went for a joyride in a car?’ her dad asks, not really caring what stickybeak means.

‘C’est tout?
’ the capitaine asks.

‘That’s all,’ Bee says with a shrug, because in the end it’s all she decides to tell them.

‘
C’est tout
,’ Marianne says.

The one good thing to come out of the bombing, Bee thinks, is how everything fades in comparison. She would never have guessed that Marianne’s father and her own could be so relieved to hear that their children are car thieves and not terror suspects.

She stands up and says that if they need more information they can contact her on her mobile. Marianne does the same. They’re both giving their numbers but their fathers are being dicks and shouting above them. Bee can’t hear the last couple of Marianne’s digits over the din the men are making.

‘You contact me,’ Bish is telling Dupont. ‘Not my daughter. If you want to speak to anyone, speak to me.’

Capitaine Attal says much the same with a lot of French swear words thrown in. Dupont ignores them. As if French Intelligence don’t already have everyone’s phone number.

Back in the car, Bee and her dad put on their seatbelts in silence. Then he turns and stares at her, as if he can’t believe what he’s thinking.

‘Just ask,’ she says.

‘Did you give up martial arts for French classes on a Saturday morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

She hears a message come through and fumbles for her phone.

Ton père est un idiot. Mxx

Yours is too,
she texts back.
Bxx

Bee has never been so grateful for idiot fathers.

They spent the night at a motel in Calais, close to the port. While Bee texted her life away, Bish borrowed her iPad and searched through media from thirteen years ago. If Ahmed Khateb had been living in North London in 2002, someone he knew could have been a victim of the Brackenham bombing. What did Violette mean by calling him a stickybeak? Had Khateb approached her because he’d worked out who she was? It wouldn’t have been easy linking a Zidane to the bombing, but perhaps a grief-stricken man knew every single detail there was to know about the family whose patriarch had been responsible for Brackenham.

He searched for names, statements from the injured, death notices, and anything else written about the bombing back then, and came across a front page of
The Guardian
showing photographs of the twenty-three victims. At one point in his police career, Bish had known the names of them all. Remembered their personal stories. A young mother and her five-year-old son on their way to school. A father of four who worked for the council. An eighteen-year-old lad who was the only child of a couple from Merseyside. Bish stared at the lad’s face. Eternally laughing, without a care in the world. His name caught Bish’s eye. A common name, so he should have put the thought aside, but he couldn’t help a Google search. And at a time when he thought there was no more room for surprises from Noor LeBrac, Bish discovered her biggest one.

When Eddie’s mum died his dad had stopped doing things around the house, like cooking and cleaning and getting the mail from the post office. Then he stopped getting out of bed.

That was how Eddie came across the letters. He ignored personal mail to his mum and just concentrated on counting out the money in the tin that paid for the bills. But this letter came from Holloway prison, and Eddie had never known anyone to get mail from someone in prison, so he opened it. It was from a woman named Noor. Most of it was about the babies born in the wing where she worked, but the last few sentences read:

It’s the anniversary of Etienne’s death, and Eddie’s birth, and the day I knew I’d never see Violette again. The worst time of the year for me. The pain never lessens. In actual fact it grows, and one day I’m frightened that it will consume me. Please write when you can, Anna. I worry that I haven’t heard from you.

Love, Noor

He had always known his parents weren’t his from birth. People only had to look at them to work it out, so Eddie worked it out straight away. This Noor lady must be his birth mum. So he tore up the letter, because as long as Eddie lived he would never want another mum.

But he couldn’t forget the names. Noor. Violette. Etienne. No surname, but when he googled those names together he learnt everything. Who had done the Brackenham bombing and why. He’d already known that ‘our Jimmy’ had died in a bombing, and for days and days and days Eddie was sick inside and couldn’t look his da in the eye.

Eddie went searching for other letters his mother had been sent by Noor. Not all of them were from Holloway. The other mother had been in a few prisons in the early days. And the more Eddie read, the more curious he was. Not about Noor or Etienne, but about Violette. He had a sister. A full-blooded sister. She was seventeen years old and she lived in Australia. On a farm. The other mother spoke to her every day.

Eddie found out everything about Violette through those letters. Like the fact that she seemed tough but was ‘seeing someone’ because of the nightmares. And she had been homeschooled since year seven because the kids in her class found out who her grandfather was and wrote awful things on her locker. The other mother said she was desperate for an appeal on her case because she needed to be home with Violette. But that didn’t seem to happen.