Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (4 page)

‘Romantically linked?’ Saffron asked.

Bish hoped not, seeing Eddie was thirteen and Violette seventeen.

‘I don’t believe so. Mr G thinks they hit it off because they looked the same sort of foreign, but Mac reckons . . . reckoned it was grief. Said he could pick it. Eddie lost his mum to cancer last year.’

And Violette, Bish thought, had lost her father young and grown up without a mother. That was enough common ground.

‘What do you mean by same sort of foreign?’ he asked.

‘Eddie looks Mediterranean or Middle Eastern,’ Lucy said.

‘Was my granddaughter drawn to them?’ Saffron said. ‘Doesn’t she look the same sort of foreign?’

Lucy thought about it a moment, as if it had never occurred to her.

‘Is your wife Middle Eastern, Chief Inspector Ortley?’

‘No, my father was,’ Saffron answered.

‘I’m so sorry, did I offend you by that term?’ Lucy’s tears were welling up again. ‘I’m not one of those people who judge by skin colour, and I sound as if I am.’

‘Nothing to be sorry about, Lucy dear,’ Saffron said, but her tone had cooled slightly.

They headed back towards the recreation hall. The bombsite was now crawling with national and regional police, and a group of useless-looking suits. Attal seemed far from impressed and Bish could understand why. A bunch of officials stomping on evidence was the last thing they needed.

‘The French policeman’s daughter was on one of the other buses,’ Lucy told them. ‘The Pas-de-Calais football tour. They used school-aged junior coaches. Marianne Attal was one of them.’ Lucy leaned towards Bish, as if Attal could hear her at this distance. ‘What I would call a piece of work, strutting around as if she owned France itself.’

They watched as Attal almost came to blows with a photographer trying to take a photo of what lay inside the canvas surrounding the bus.

‘We seem to have done the same route as the French bus, but in reverse.’ Lucy’s phone rang and she cried out, as if it had burnt a hole in her pocket.

‘You’re going to have to pull yourself together, Lucy,’ Saffron said, losing some of her patience with the girl. She took the phone from her and walked away to answer it.

Bish went to retrieve the handwritten list from his pocket but realised it was with Attal. ‘Can you remember any of those taken to the hospital with minor injuries?’ he asked Lucy.

She nodded. ‘Amy Jacobs.’

Bish found the number of the hospital and rang it. He was put on to Amy’s mother, spoke to her briefly, and then asked for one of the embassy staff. A woman named Carmody warmed to him after he gave her a quick but thorough run-down on what was taking place at the campground, and in return she told him they were dealing with ten injured kids. Four seriously. Two had lost limbs and one had lost an eye. Prepare for the worst, she told him, and Bish couldn’t get those words out of his head. He learnt that more embassy staff were on their way from Paris to the campground.

‘SIS will no doubt be there,’ Carmody said. ‘I hope our people arrive first. Intelligence aren’t exactly personable.’

Bish couldn’t imagine Attal escorting British Intelligence around, but figured they’d find their way in. He hung up just as they reached the verandah of the recreation hall, where a cluster of older teenagers stood.

Lucy nudged him. ‘Charlie Crombie,’ she murmured.

‘Is it true what they’re saying about Violette?’ asked a beefy rugby type. A bit of a stupid look on his face. Bish was disappointed that Bee was part of something that had put this Crombie character in charge.

A journalist from Sky News was hovering too close, desperate for any morsel. Someone had no doubt leaked Violette’s Zidane’s identity.

‘You’re worried about her, are you?’ Bish said to the boy. He couldn’t help himself.

‘She was a slag,’ the blockhead said. ‘I wasn’t going to have Crombie’s crumbs.’ He elbowed the boy standing beside him, who didn’t react.

Bish was surprised.
This
was Charlie Crombie? When Bish was at school, thugs had looked like thugs. Not like this scrawny little bastard with ginger hair that needed a good wash. There was something vacant about Crombie’s stare. Insidious. Over the years Bee had hinted that she might not be interested in boys. Ever. Staring at these lads, all Bish could think was,
Thank Christ.

‘That’s an ugly word, Mr Kennington,’ Lucy Gilies said to the first boy, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice. ‘If I ever hear you refer to a girl in such a way again, your parents will be hearing from me.’

‘My parents would be calling her a slag too.’

The others around him laughed nervously. But not Crombie. ‘Is it true what they’re saying about her?’ he demanded. ‘Who she is?’

‘So Violette didn’t tell you anything about herself?’ Bish said.

Crombie shrugged. ‘Why would she? We were just shagging.’

The girl standing beside Crombie shifted to drape herself over him. Charlie had already moved on. Nothing like a rumour of being a terror suspect to kill a relationship.

Gorman stepped out from inside the recreation hall. The man seemed to be in his element. Bish had met his type before. Disasters gave them purpose, and Gorman wasn’t quite finished playing his part in this tragedy.

‘Could you assist me in a matter, Chief Inspector Ortley?’

Charlie Crombie disengaged himself from the girl’s tongue in his ear, his eyes fixed on Bish.

‘You’re Ballyntine-Ortley’s father?’

A rhetorical question. Crombie looked away, muttering. Bish heard the words ‘Useless fucker.’

Gorman’s phone rang and he answered it. ‘The embassy,’ he mouthed, as if Bish had asked. ‘I’ll be a minute.’ He walked back inside.

‘Does anyone know where Violette’s been taken?’ Bish asked the group. She wasn’t at the hospital, according to Carmody, and her disappearance didn’t sit right with him.

‘Ask Gorman,’ Charlie Crombie said. There was a suppressed rage about the kid.

The last thing Bish wanted was another conversation with the chaperone, but he went after him. Inside, the parents made a beeline for Bish. Saffron was there, holding out a tea for him.

‘Are you going to speak to the parents?’ She tucked two digestive biscuits into his hand. ‘They’ll be relieved to know our police are involved.’

‘But our police aren’t involved,’ he said.

‘They don’t need to know that. Just flash your badge. Everyone wants reassurance.’

Bish wasn’t really in a position to flash anything these days. He’d been asked to leave his badge behind a week ago. But his job with the Met hadn’t been out on the streets: he was the man back at the station taking care of the uniforms. He was also the liaison guy with the community, and that was the part he’d miss the most if they didn’t let him return. He knew how to distribute information and answer questions and keep the peace.

He ushered the adults to a small room at the back of the hall used to store gym equipment. He could hear the words ‘police inspector’ whispered among the dozen or so people surrounding him.

‘Is everyone’s child accounted for?’ he asked.

A show of hands and nods. Thankfully no one belonging to Michael Stanley or Julius McEwan had turned up in the past hour.

‘I’m one of the fathers too,’ he said, ‘so I’m not here as the police. I know exactly how you’re all feeling. Frustrated and tired and emotional and all I want to do is take my daughter home.’

‘Where are our embassy people?’ one of the women asked.

‘They’ve been dealing with the injured at the hospital,’ Bish said. ‘Someone will be here soon, though.’

‘The French say they won’t let us go home until the kids have been questioned,’ a man said. ‘Except they haven’t even started yet, have they? We could be here for days.’

This thought caused a ripple of distress among the rest of the parents.

‘They need to do all they can to piece together what happened today, so we have to be patient,’ Bish insisted.

‘My girls are beside themselves,’ the mother of the twins said. ‘One of their friends is listed as unaccountable.’

A few others voiced similar fears. How would they tell their children that the person who’d sat opposite them at dinner for the past seven days could be dead, or badly injured?

‘I just spoke to one of the parents at the hospital,’ Bish said. ‘Reggie Hill and Amy Jacobs will be allowed to go home soon enough. Their injuries are minor. There are four students in a critical condition. Fionn Sykes, Lola Barrett-Parker, Manoshi Bagchi and Astrid Copely. They were all seated at the front of the bus. If there’s any relief in this situation, it’s that the bus wasn’t at full capacity and the vacant seats were closer to the front.’

‘Whose bodies are outside?’ a woman dared to ask.

‘I can’t say for sure.’ Not quite a lie. Bish cleared the hoarseness from his voice. ‘A young Spanish girl was killed at the steps of her bus. The two closest to the destroyed bus are obviously ours. So you’ll have to prepare your children for the worst news.’

‘They need to remove the bodies,’ said a father dressed as if he’d just walked off a golf course. Half these people had been on holidays. They seemed to have got into their cars or onto a flight with nothing more than what they were wearing. ‘It’s wrong for them to still be out there,’ he added.

‘I’m afraid that can’t happen until everyone’s done their job,’ Bish said.

He watched as a number of the women wept. Men wiped tears from their eyes, shaking their heads in disbelief.

‘Can I ask that you don’t take up Ms Gilies’s time for the next couple of hours,’ Bish continued. He kept his tone gentle. ‘There are at least half a dozen parents and guardians still in transit and it’s important she’s free to speak to them if they ring. If there’s any further information, I’ll update you. All I can say is that I’m grateful my daughter’s here and not at the hospital. Or lying outside. The best thing for now is to be with your kids.’

The group seemed less manic at least. There was a murmuring among them and Bish went to walk away.

‘This business with the LeBrac girl,’ one of the fathers said. ‘My son said she was cagey. Strange.’

‘And gave out sexual favours to more than one of the lads,’ a woman said. ‘If she comes from that heinous family ––’

‘I can’t speak of that,’ Bish said firmly, ‘because there’s little I know. But regardless of whose daughter she is, Violette Zidane is unaccounted for, and as much a victim of this tragedy as your children.’

He went in search of Bee, worried that he had neglected her this past hour. She was standing with Saffron on the verandah, watching the forensics team appear and disappear inside the tents.

When Bee saw him she asked the same question Crombie had. ‘Is it true what they’re saying about her? Her grandfather blew up those people and her mum built the bomb?’

He dodged the question. ‘Do you know where Violette is, Bee?’

‘Don’t care. I hope she rots in hell.’

Bish looked carefully at his daughter. She was dressed differently to her usual attire. Bee was an athlete, a casual-clothes sort of girl. Today she was wearing some sort of short tulle skirt, Ugg boots, and a black singlet. He didn’t remember her dark hair having blue strands.

‘She did this to me.’ Bee pointed to a bruise above her eye.

‘A girl did that?’

‘Yes, a girl, Bish.’

So he was back to being Bish. Whenever she used his name she made it sound like a euphemism for idiot. He had liked being Daddy for two minutes. She’d taken to calling him and Rachel by their first names a few years ago. They thought it was a phase. Nothing with Bee was a phase these days except perhaps being surly.

‘Apart from getting into fist fights with other girls, did she act suspiciously?’ he asked.

Bee ignored him, her attention on a group of teenagers being led to one of the parked buses. They were dressed in football gear – the Pas-de-Calais team, Bish guessed. Today would have marked the last day of their tour with a game in Amiens, which had been cancelled. If they were boarding their bus it meant they’d been interviewed and Attal was allowing them to return to their homes.

When the French teenagers disappeared from sight, Bee walked away. Bish glanced at his mother. She understood Bee better than he did lately.

Saffron sighed. ‘Bee and Violette Zidane shared a room the entire tour.’

‘They were friends?’ Bish was shocked.

‘Not according to Bee. All the other girls paired up on the ferry. Bee and Violette were the last two left. They didn’t have a choice. But Bee is fixated about where Violette is, as well as Eddie Conlon.’

‘Well, Eddie can’t be far away. His name’s been ticked off on the list.’

‘Some of the kids whose parents haven’t arrived are camped out closer to the police barricade, waiting,’ Saffron said. ‘He’s probably with them.’

Lucy joined them on the verandah. Bish could see the boy who’d called Violette a slag out near the picnic tables. He was with his parents, being interviewed by Sky News.

‘Charlie Crombie’s friend,’ Bish said to Lucy. ‘Name’s Kennington, is that right?’

‘Rodney Kennington. He imagined himself being in charge for about ten seconds and then Charlie Crombie took over and Rodney seemed satisfied with being his lackey.’

‘You’re not a fan?’

‘I wasn’t really a fan of any of them.’

She looked at him guiltily. Not even his daughter.

‘The only decent year eleven was Fionn Sykes. The type of lad who helped the younger ones and took the time to chat with us shaps rather than argue. He was thinking of reading theology at Cambridge when he finished school.’

She looked away, pained. ‘I asked Charlie if he could help Lola with her overhead luggage this morning. He resisted of course. Claimed people like Lola should learn to take care of themselves. So it was Fionn I asked next, knowing he would do it.’

Bish winced. Lola was on the critical list. The seats around her had been the most impacted. If Fionn Sykes had stayed where he was . . .

‘Part of Fionn’s leg was blown off,’ Saffron said. ‘I spoke to the paramedics.’

‘What about his parents?’ Bish asked.

‘There’s a mother,’ Saffron said. ‘In Newcastle. She doesn’t drive, apparently.’