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 into 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 half 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 favors 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 veranda, 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 Violette? 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 than 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 had 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 fistfights with other girls, did she act suspicious?” 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 canceled. 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 veranda. 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.”
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 them earlier to Lucy. The only thing that could be said to give away her Arab blood was her once dark hair, now streaked with silver. The rest was all English rose, as his father loved to say. But when Bish and Rachel had kids, it was his grandfather’s coloring and features that were prominent. Rachel was a redhead, Bish’s coloring 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 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,” he 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 willfully 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 tire 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 recognized “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 fam
ily have a UK lawyer?”
The look she sent him was contemptuous. “My uncle’s not allowed to step 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.”
3
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.