Driving a bus of explosives through a convent school in France seemed so simple compared to dealing with Violette LeBrac Zidane.
“Where’s Eddie? And the others?” He wanted a response that didn’t involve a felony.
Violette and Bee seemed to have taken a vow of silence.
“They’re injured,” he said. “They can’t be out of the hospital.”
“It’s not as if they’re still on the critical list,” Bee scoffed. “They’re off drips and eating solids and bored to death.”
“Look,” Violette said, “it was only supposed to be Fionn, but Lola and Manoshi caught on and decided they were coming along or it would be hashtag we-know-where-Fionn’s-gone.”
Bee shook her head in disgust. “Whose stupid idea was it to put those two together again?”
It was Bish’s turn to stay silent.
“And the thing with Fionn is his mother,” Violette said. “He needs to see her.”
“We thought we’d kill two birds with one stone.”
He stared from one to the other. He didn’t like all this bird death with little promise of success.
“We’ll be back down south by nine tonight,” Bee said. “Win-win.”
“And all you have to do is tell anyone who rings that they can trust you,” Violette said.
“Noor’s not going to like your plan, Violette.”
“Noor?” she said, hostility suddenly in her voice. “We’re on first-name terms, are we?”
“Yes, we’ve bonded over your being the star of social media and CCTV for the past couple of weeks, Violette.”
Her eyes narrowed even more.
“How’s Eddie taking everything?” he asked, reminding himself that he was the adult here.
“Did you see the graffiti on the news?” she asked. “Someone wrote Eddie Bin Lardin leaves hear on his cottage wall. Can’t even spell. Frickin’ dumb people give me the shits.”
“Same,” Bee said.
Bish nodded. Same.
“So where are they?” he asked as Bee put money on the table and stood up. “How the hell did you get Fionn into a car?”
Sighing from his companions, as if Bish were an idiot for asking too many questions.
A long car horn sounded loudly from the road.
“In that,” Violette said.
“What?” he asked.
“We got him out of hospital in that.” She was pointing to the Salvation Army twelve-seater with wheelchair access that had just pulled up. Lola, Manoshi, Fionn, and Eddie waved ecstatically from the back seats.
Bish stumbled to his feet. Bee and Violette followed him to the van.
Charlie Crombie poked his head out of the driver’s window. “He’s not driving.”
That was how Bish found himself riding shotgun to Charlie Crombie on the road to Yorkshire with a carload of kids who should have been in school or in hospital. The upside was that Lola’s and Manoshi’s fathers finally found something to unite them: their desire to have Bish arrested on a string of charges. Katherine and Sadia were only slightly more forgiving.
“Have you lost your mind, Bish?” Katherine had asked when Lola passed him her phone. “Ian’s called the police. You do know that?”
“They are sick children,” Sadia said. He could tell he was on speakerphone.
“I think they’re sick of being sick children,” he said. “And they were heading north regardless of whether I came with them or not. Would you rather I’d let them go on their own?”
“I’m calling your mother,” Sadia said.
Bish rang Grazier and waited for the swear fest to end before he spoke. “You’re a heart attack waiting to happen, Grazier.” Now he was reduced to channeling Sarraf.
“Turn the bus around and bring them back,” Grazier ordered.
“I don’t have access to the keys. Charlie won’t relinquish them for the time being.” Charlie shot him a look that said he was never going to relinquish them. “I’ll have the kids back at the hospital tonight,” Bish said. “Meanwhile, keep the media away from this. Call off whatever police Ian Parker’s got on board. No roadblocks. No car chase.”
“I’m up for a car chase,” Charlie said.
Grazier swore again. “Where are you heading?”
Bish didn’t quite lie, just left out some of the truth. “Fionn needs to see his mother. I’ll ring you when we get there.”
“No, you’ll see me when you get there,” Grazier said. “And judging by the phone call I just had from Ian Parker, you’ll be seeing them as well.”
When Bish hung up, his phone rang immediately. Twice. Elliot. Rachel. He ignored them both.
“Can you please turn that off?” Crombie said. “It’s annoying me.”
“Chief Inspector Ortley, is it true you were involved in what happened at Marianne Attal’s school?” Manoshi asked.
Bish turned back to face the rest of the kids. Perhaps it was time to own his hero role.
“Someone tweeted that you broke a man’s arm and ran over a statue of a saint,” Lola said.
Or perhaps not.
“Chief Inspector Ortley, is it true you thought there was a point one percent chance that Bee was pregnant?” Lola asked.
“Why only point one?” Violette said. “Being a lesbian doesn’t mean someone’s nicked off with her uterus, Chief Inspector Ortley.”
“I might want kids one day,” Bee said. “Sperm’s all I need.”
“You can have mine if it’s okay with my missus,” Charlie said.
“Eyes on the road,” Bish ordered. He looked at Violette. “Is that what you aspire to? Being Charlie’s missus?”
“Quite sure.” Violette seemed proud to own the title. “He’s going to be my first ex-husband.”
“Cheeky bitch.” Charlie was grinning.
By the time they passed through Cambridge, Bish was ordered to swap seats with Bee and found himself forced to sit next to Violette.
“I need to say something to you, Chief Inspector Ortley, that you’re not going to like hearing,” she said, not wasting any time.
There were screeches of laughter from behind them. He turned to see Eddie Conlon imitating someone, doing pelvic thrusts in his seat, entertaining the girls.
“If this is about your mother—”
She held up a hand to warn him against further mention of her mother.
“It’s about Bee. She thinks that she wasn’t enough to keep you all together…and that her brother would have been. She thinks she wasn’t worth it.”
He winced, glancing at Violette. She nodded in confirmation. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, she sighed.
“Sorry,” she said, and he heard the regret in her voice. “I’ll swap with Eddie. He’s really good at lifting moods.”
“Stay,” he said. “Tell me one of your stories.”
A hint of a smile crept across her face.
“How about the one where my parents fell in love in Cambridge?”
When they reached Sheffield, Bish suggested they stop for sandwiches.
“Sandwiches?” Charlie said. “That’s what they serve these three every day in hospital. Have a bit of imagination.”
Imagination was McDonald’s. It didn’t have a drive-through, so Bee and Charlie went to get the food because, according to Eddie, “they aren’t ex–suspected terrorists or missing any body parts, so they won’t stand out in a crowd.”
Bee and Charlie came back soon enough with bags of food and serious expressions.
“We’re all over the news,” Charlie said.
Lola and Manoshi were caught between the drama of being all over the news and the excitement of eating chicken nuggets and french fries. Bish fiddled with the radio scan and found a news station.
“Chief Inspector Bish Ortley is a person of interest in the disappearance of three young patients who were injured in the August Boulogne bombing.”
“A bit dramatic,” Bish said, and everyone agreed.
“Ortley was suspended
from the force last month after assaulting a fellow officer with a firearm.”
He felt their eyes on him. So much for Grazier keeping the media out of it.
“Should we be scared?” Charlie said, sounding anything but.
“Did he deserve it?” Bee asked.
“No one deserves to be threatened with a gun, Bee.”
“Bullshit,” Violette said. “I’d threaten a pedophile with a gun. I’d actually shoot him in the dick.”
After tapping away at the minivan’s GPS, Charlie started up the car. Bish turned his phone back on and regretted it the moment he saw the eleven text messages and twenty missed calls.
“Nothing you can do until we get to Malham, so I’d switch it to silent if I were you,” Charlie said.
Bish did as he was told.
In the rearview mirror he could see Violette whispering to Fionn, a vicious little expression around her mouth. Fionn seemed uncomfortable, and Bish had a feeling that she was forcing him into something he didn’t want to do.
Charlie saw him looking and checked his own mirror. “She doesn’t judge, you know,” he said in a low voice. “She just says, ‘Move on, Charlie. Don’t let shit define you.’” He took a moment to contemplate. “I suppose a cheating scam seems nothing compared to stuff that’s happened in her life.”
Bish was surprised that he had brought that up. He dared to ask, “If it was a scam, what happened to the others?”
Charlie went into shutdown and Bish regretted asking. He looked in the rearview mirror again. There was a lot of whispering going on in the back now.
“Doesn’t matter,” Charlie said at last. “I cheated. And no, I didn’t hand myself in. I got caught. So don’t search for anything decent about the situation. The only thing I didn’t do was rat on the others.”
“Fionn says you’re smart, Charlie. So why?”
Charlie shrugged. Bish was getting a clearer picture of what a Charlie shrug meant. Shame.
“My mother wears a collar. My father wears a uniform that means nothing to the lot I went to school with. It’s not like The Vicar of Dibley, you know. Most of the time it’s a council flat next to a church. At Ashcroft you either had to make a name for yourself or be invisible. You couldn’t be in between.”
“How does Fionn fit into the school, then?”
“He was one of the invisible ones. Didn’t even know he went to my old school until he told me on the night before the bomb went off. I thought he looked familiar.”
Charlie took his eyes off the road to look briefly at Bish. “I was supposed to move that suitcase for Lola. Me. Not Sykes. But Sykes did it. It should have been me. Sykes is fucking decent and he didn’t deserve that to happen to him.”
“And you did, Charlie? You really think anyone deserves it?”
“You don’t know how it feels,” Charlie said dismissively.
“Did Bee tell you about her brother’s death?”
Charlie seemed surprised. “Yeah. He got caught in a rip and drowned. She said you don’t talk about it.”
“I wasn’t there that day,” Bish said. “Her mum and I were having a bit of time apart and she went to Portsmouth with Stevie and I took Bee to a race meet up north. Over the years everyone’s said the same thing to me. Coast guards, police, even Bee’s mum. That even if I’d been there I wouldn’t have been able to save him. It was a killer rip.” Bish swallowed hard. “But a man did go in to save Stevie. Some random guy on the beach. And he died out there too. That’s what I can’t forgive myself for. Another man died trying to save my son.”
After a moment he said, “So I sort of do know how you feel, Charlie. Just don’t let it take you to dark places, because it’s a bugger to dig yourself out of that pit.”
Ten minutes later, Bish knew something was wrong. There hadn’t been talk in the back for some time, and when he checked the mirror Fionn looked shattered.
“Pull over, Charlie.”
When the minibus was parked by the side of the road, Bish unbuckled his seat belt and turned around. “Fionn, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” He was scrubbing tears from his eyes.
“Whatever Violette wants you to do, forget about it,” Bish said, eyeing her with a warning.
“What did I do?” she asked.
“I’m just angry, okay?” Fionn said. “I’m allowed to be angry.”
“’Course you are,” Bish said.
“And I can’t even fucking walk away when I’m angry!” Fionn shouted.
Bish looked at the younger girls in the back seats, worried that Fionn’s mood would frighten them. But they only looked sad.
“I told them about the other bus,” Bee said. “How the bomb was meant for the French kids and not us.”
“I love the way I get the blame for making him cry,” Violette said.
“I thought you were hassling him before,” Bish admitted guiltily.
“I’m just trying to convince him to go to his school dance with a hot girl so his dumb bitch ex–best friend’s girlfriend will see what she’s missing.”
“‘Dumb bitch’ is a terrible term, Violette,” Bish said, discreetly pointing to the impressionable three in the back seats.
“She broke his heart. If I ever meet her, I’ll punch her in the face.”
Fierce Violette was back.
“There was this magician kid on the French bus,” Fionn said. “Every time we were at the same campsite he’d do these tricks.”
“Patric,” Lola reminded everyone.
“He’d be dead if the bomb had been on his bus,” Fionn said. “He sat four seats from the front. So would Marianne. So would that girl with all those plaits. So would at least the next five rows. Because their bus was packed and ours wasn’t. I keep wondering why this happened to me, and now I know why and I’m angry, because I can’t regret it. Because if I do, all those kids would be dead. The boy with the magic tricks would be dead.”
Charlie started up the van and put on his indicator. For the next hour they talked about Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely and Mac and Serge Sagur and Lucia Ortez, whom they had never met but whose name they’d never forget. Bish had seen his first dead body at the age of twenty-five, six months into the job. These kids had experienced it far too young.
Fuck it, he was going to have to speak to David Maynard about getting all the kids of the tour together again. It was what the principal extraordinaire was good at.
His phone beeped with a text from Saffron telling him to look at Sadia and Katherine’s blog. “Who’s got Internet access?” he asked.
Everyone. Couldn’t manage to grab a spare set of clothes or shoes but they all had their technology.
“You two at the back: look up your mums’ blog,” he ordered them. Lola had it on her favorites page so was first to find it.
“Your dad wrote a piece, Eddie,” Manoshi said.
A surprised Eddie reached over and took the iPad. Bish watched him study the screen.
“Eddie? Are you okay?”
Eddie nodded.
“What does it say?” Fionn asked.
Eddie swallowed and started reading what was written.
“My eldest son Jimmy was killed in the Brackenham bombing when he was eighteen. It was how my wife Anna came to meet Noor LeBrac. A need to understand why our boy had died. My wife’s relationship with Noor introduced us to our second son who means everything to me…”
Eddie started crying and Violette leaned over and gently took the iPad out of his hands and continued to read. When she cried, Bee took over and by the end everyone had read it aloud and Bish felt like crying himself.
53
An air of tranquility had hit the bus by the time they reached Yorkshire. Bish welcomed the sensory overload of the landscape. Perhaps days without alcohol had opened him up to everything. Drystone walls lined with flowers, the fluorescent fields of rapeseed. It was functional beauty. Cottages advertised free-range eggs, black-faced sheep dotted the hillsides, farmers collected silage for
the winter. A cyclist or two and seasoned walkers with sticks signaled that the cove was close by. Violette was alone in finding it too picture-perfect. Her farm in Coleambally, she said, was a different sort of beauty. More savage. Bish heard the homesickness in her voice. He didn’t want to think of Eddie and Violette separated. He didn’t want to think of any of these kids being apart. He wished he could drive them around the countryside for the rest of their lives, keeping them all safe and less lonely.
Ten miles out of Malham, Bish knew he had to let Grazier in on where they were. He was hoping they had at least a forty-minute head start. That Violette would get the chance to complete the journey she had begun all those weeks ago. So he took a chance and sent a text, and then sat back and enjoyed the rest of the drive.
They arrived in Malham just after 2 p.m. After parking in the village, they secured Fionn in the wheelchair and set off to the cove, a mile down the road. Violette led them, glancing back more than once at the sound of voices in the distance.
Bee nudged Bish and pointed to Violette, a silent order to catch up.
“She won’t want me walking alongside her, Bee.”
“She insisted you come along. We wouldn’t have done this with you if not for her.” She poked him in the side. “Go.”
Bish did as he was told but figured his daughter had got it wrong. Violette wasn’t interested in talking and at times he felt as if she were quickening her step to shake him off. Until she suddenly said, “I thought they were friends of my father’s who followed us up here that day. That’s what I told my grandparents and they wrote it all down.”
“Why did you think they were friends?” he asked.
“Because one of them said, ‘I know you.’”
They came to the foot of the cove, staring up at the vertical face of the cliff. It wasn’t merely the height that filled Bish with awe, but what seemed its impenetrability; a reminder of human frailty weighed up against the might of Mother Nature. Beside him, the kids were staring up at the ancient stone with reverence. No selfies here. Bish saw tears in Fionn’s eyes for the second time today. Reality didn’t hit you lying in a hospital bed. It was here that the kid truly realized that things would never be the same.