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Authors: Melina Marchetta

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (5 page)

BOOK: Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil
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Bish looked again at the Kenningtons, who seemed to be speaking nonstop to the reporter.

‘I think it’s best if someone tells Kennington and his parents not to talk to the press about any of the other students.’

‘It’s too late.’ Lucy grimaced. ‘It’s already hit Twitter. Violette LeBrac Zidane is trending.’

At that moment a young boy emerged from the dining hall next door. Dark eyes, thick curly black hair, olive skin.
The same sort of foreign
. This must be Eddie Conlon. Bish thought he’d stopped comparing every kid out there to Stevie. Saffron’s Egyptian roots had never really been acknowledged by her family. It had been strange to hear her mention it earlier to Lucy. The only thing that could be said to give away her Arab blood was her dark hair. The rest was all English rose, as his father loved to say. But when Bish and Rachel had kids it was his grandfather’s colouring and features that were prominent. Rachel was a redhead, Bish’s colouring nondescript. Bee’s beautiful olive skin and dark eyes were a surprise to them both, but they were prepared for Stevie. ‘Let’s call him Omar,’ Rachel had joked. They spent years explaining to people that they hadn’t adopted him from the Middle East.

Eddie Conlon was fidgeting, not out of nervousness, but from a whole lot of excess energy.

‘Can I talk to her?’ he asked Lucy. ‘Violette, I mean. Because I can get to the bottom of all this with her, I swear I can because it’s not true, everything they’re saying about her and the bomb. It’s all rubbish, if you know what I mean.’

Bish studied him. The way his eyes shifted away when he said Violette’s name. He was hiding something.

‘Tell them, Lucy,’ the boy pleaded. ‘How Violette and me were pretty tight. She’ll talk to me.’

There was an endearing musicality to the way he spoke and moved. Bish hoped this kid hadn’t been unwittingly dragged into a mess of a situation.

‘What’s everyone saying about Violette and the bomb, Eddie?’ Bish asked.

Lucy introduced him. ‘This is Sabina Ballyntine-Ortley’s father, Eddie.’

But Eddie refused to look at Bish. ‘Just stuff,’ he mumbled.

‘Eddie, did you know Violette’s registration letter was a fake?’ Bish watched the kid nervously tap a beat on his thigh. ‘The embassy’s made contact with her grandparents in Australia. They think she’s on a Duke of Edinburgh hike in Tasmania, out of range.’

‘Are they upset?’ he asked quietly.

‘What do you think? She lied to them.’

‘Then I’ll ask her why she lied,’ Eddie said. ‘She’s in there on her own and I can’t get her out and I’m scared she can’t breathe.’

‘In where, Eddie?’ Bish was confused.

Eddie pointed to the dining hall. Lucy began blubbering again. Bish was so close to owning the misogyny accusation and telling her to pull herself together.

‘Mr Gorman said he’d take care of Violette but he didn’t mean take care in a good way,’ said Eddie. ‘He said foreigners stuff things up, like they did with Madeleine McCann.’ Eddie was talking a mile a minute, his fidgeting worse than ever. ‘He’s gone and locked her up, you know. In a cupboard in the kitchen at the back of the dining hall. He said it was for all our good, didn’t he Lucy? But it’s not, and if Mac was here he wouldn’t have let it happen.’

‘Then let’s find Mr Gorman and get her out of there,’ Bish said.

Rage didn’t come to Bish with much of a warning. It came to him only rarely, but when it did there were repercussions. His nickname at boarding school was the Hulk, not because of his size or his ability to fight, but because he was mild-mannered until someone pushed the wrong buttons. It had happened a week ago at work, and it all came down to stupid people. Not uneducated or slow. Just wilfully stupid. Gorman was one of them.

Bish found him outside, hovering around the canvas barrier that concealed the blown-up bus. Gorman was trying to ‘catch a word’ with Attal, who clearly had no time for him. Bish waited for the Frenchman to disappear behind the barrier, not wanting to make anything obvious to the locals.

‘Where the fuck is the key to that cupboard?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.

Gorman looked stunned for a moment but his surprise didn’t last long. ‘I’ve made contact with MI6,’ he said with a sense of self-importance. ‘They’re on the grounds now and they’ll want her in British custody.’

Too long a day. Too long without a drink. Bish grabbed Gorman by the arm and half dragged him to the rear of the dining hall, out of sight of the press and French officials. Gorman tried to pull free, tripping over a piece of tyre rubber, and they both went down with the finesse of the unfit, the middle class and the middle-aged.

Winning the tussle, Bish was able to retrieve a key from Gorman’s pocket, accessible by the string attached to it. A flicker of movement made him look up, to see his daughter staring down at him from the recreation hall window. Beside her were Crombie, Kennington, and a few of the others. Charlie Crombie smirked something into Bee’s ear, but she shrugged him off and moved away from the window.

In the kitchen at the back of the dining room, Bish unlocked the storage cupboard. It was dark and smelt of damp. He felt the wall for a light switch. Nothing there. Finally he found it outside the door and the storeroom was illuminated. Violette LeBrac Zidane sat on the ground before him, in the only space available to sit, her arms wrapped around her legs. Surrounding her were shelves of tinned food, paper plates, stacked chairs. When she looked up he saw a flash of fear, but it was quickly gone. She had what appeared to be a broken nose from old. She’d inherited her mother’s olive skin and dark eyes, which contrasted strangely with the woolly fair hair that covered a scalp of a darker shade. It could have been something that came out of a bottle, but Bish remembered four-year-old Violette with the same dark-rooted fair hair.

He wasn’t sure how long she had been in the cupboard but she was perspiring. Half a minute in there and so was he. She got to her feet, looking past him, and a quick emotion crossed her face.

‘Go away, Eddie,’ she said.

The Australian accent surprised Bish, despite knowing that she had lived there most of her life.

‘I’m staying,’ Eddie said from behind Bish’s shoulder.

‘Go away!’ she ordered.

She might have been small but she was tough. She had struck a taller Bee in the face and come out the winner.

‘It’s Violette, isn’t it?’ Bish said to her. But her stare was still directed beyond him to Eddie. She said something brief to the boy in Arabic. Bish recognised ‘love’ but not much more. He made an effort to commit the rest to memory.

Without another word, Eddie walked away.

‘Do you have legal representation, Violette?’ Bish asked. He knew she’d need it. Regardless of whether she was guilty or not, Violette was seventeen years old and a long way from home.

‘Violette, did you hear me? Does your family have a UK lawyer?’

The look she sent him was contemptuous. ‘My uncle’s not allowed to set foot on UK soil and my mother’s serving a life sentence. How good a lawyer do you think my family has there, dickhead?’

Bish had been called a dickhead before, but never with so much conviction. The comment introduced a slight lisp. Nothing about her seemed predictable. He heard a sound behind him and turned to see a cluster of students and parents at the entrance of the kitchen, staring.

‘When you get interviewed by the French, try not to say a word until someone from your family arrives,’ Bish advised.

She was staring past him at the others. ‘It’s not the French I’m worried about.’

How would Eddie best describe Violette, the two men in suits ask him.

‘She’s very fierce and has no time for rubbish.’ Eddie is lying by omission. That’s what his mum would have said. Because Violette is a whole lot more than fierce. Ferocious, more like it. The fact is that Eddie can hardly find words to describe her.

‘We’re going to shame the devil,’ Violette told him when they first met at the port in Dover.

Eddie can’t say that now because Gorman has brought him to a cabin overlooking the car park, where the men in suits were waiting, and Eddie doesn’t have a clue who they are. At first he’s relieved they’re British. Then he isn’t. So he keeps on lying by omission. Like when they ask if Violette has ever shown any violent tendencies, Eddie mentions her getting into a fight once in a while but leaves out the part where she held a switchblade to Marianne Attal’s neck. The shaps said it was a good thing the French bus wasn’t there at every campsite and that Violette, being one of the older kids, should be setting a good example, and that if she caused an international incident by pulling a knife on the Calais police capitaine’s daughter again, they’d send her back to the UK in a cab and ask her parents to pay for it.

‘Did Violette get on with the other kids on the bus, Eddie?’ a suit asks. ‘Did they like her?’

Not really, he wants to say. He definitely knows that Manoshi from Spitalfields and Lola from Folkestone aren’t exactly fans. Lola and Manoshi bonded on the ferry and plotted to get the best seats at the front of the bus, behind Serge the driver, but Violette got there first.

‘We’re sitting here,’ Violette told him, and that’s how it was for the next six days. Violette was a stickler for getting to the bus first, so Lola and Manoshi had to sit behind them, which Eddie didn’t mind, because he likes the pair. They’re in year seven, like him, and most times they’d say stuff that made him laugh, but Violette doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Especially when she hears Manoshi telling Lola that Violette’s name contains the words ‘vile’ and ‘evil’.

‘Don’t make me have to slap you around, Manoshi,’ Violette warned over her shoulder. But Eddie thought she tolerated Manoshi and Lola better than she did the kids her own age at the back of the bus.

The thing with Violette is that she doesn’t like dumb people, so when an idiot asked if she owned a kangaroo she called him a dickhead of biblical proportions. And if anyone dared say ‘G’day mate’. . . (
Who the fuck says g’day mate but dumb tourists, Eddie?)
When Charlie Crombie made fun of the way she spoke, because Violette’s words sing with a whole lot of esses, Violette smashed him one in the face and later told Eddie that it bored her ‘fucking stupid’ to be mocked about her lisp because lack of originality bored her ‘fucking stupid’. Violette says ‘fuck’ a lot. But she also says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more than anyone he’s ever met in his life. His mother would have liked Violette. Eddie loves her already, which doesn’t mean she isn’t the scariest person he’s ever met, but it’s exciting scary. Like how on the road to Mont Saint-Michel, she nudged Eddie awake and asked if he wanted to see roadkill, and she took out her phone and showed him the photos. Most of them were of kangaroos, fur and guts stuck to the bitumen, as well as other sorts of furry animals.

‘Wombat,’ she told him when he asked, and Eddie was really keen to know why her phone was full of roadkill photos.

‘Evidence that they lived, Eddie.’

Violette said later that she knows how to gut a pig. Humans would be easier.

‘Would you ever kill a human, Violette?’ he asked.

She smiled and it was all twisted. Not in a bad way, just lopsided. Eddie thinks she has one of the best smiles he’s ever seen.

‘To protect my family,’ she said, ‘I’d kill anyone.’

The removal of Violette from the cupboard contributed to an already strained silence in the recreation hall. Right now she was sitting alone on the other side of the hall, directly across from Bish and Bee. One of the parents informed him that Gorman had taken Eddie to be interviewed by embassy staff, which he knew couldn’t be true. Carmody had assured Bish that he would be their first point of call. If Gorman had made it his business to keep Violette a secret, chances were that he was right when he said the British Secret Intelligence Service was somewhere on the campground. Bish decided he would give Gorman another five minutes to return the boy before searching them out.

Saffron came back from visiting the Spanish camp and settled herself between Bish and Bee.

‘They’re beyond distraught,’ she said, her eyes moist.

Bee reached over to take her grandmother’s hand, perhaps not as switched off as Bish presumed. He filled his mother in on Violette.

BOOK: Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil
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