“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 humor. Especially when she hears Manoshi tell 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 to 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 bores her “fucking stupid” to be mocked about her lisp because lack of originality bores 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 actually 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.”
4
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.
“Just say she is responsible,” his mother said quietly.
“I’m not making assumptions based on who her mother and grandfather are.”
What worried Bish more was that other parents and students had started talking to the press. It was going to be the Brackenham hysteria all over again.
His phone rang. A blocked number.
“Ortley?”
“Can’t talk now, Elliot. We’ll speak later,” he said before hanging up.
“Elliot?” Saffron asked, overhearing. “George from school?”
“Yes, the same one you forced me to hang out with in first form.”
“If that’s the way you want to remember it, Bish.”
“‘Poor, poor George. Socially inept. He needs friends.’ Your words, not mine.”
“Yes, well, if you thought I was a useless mother, his parents were a thousand times worse,” Saffron said. “I don’t think the Elliots even knew when the school holidays were, or that they had a son to retrieve.”
Bish looked at her. Had he actually told her she was a useless mother when he was a teenager? She had a sad smile on her face. Yes, he must have. His relationship with Saffron was even more complicated than the one with Rachel. He had a mishmash of childhood memories when it came to his mother. A contradictory mix of her absence and her love. She had put him into boarding school when his father was posted overseas. He was ten, and until then his mother had been his whole world. Once he was at university, it was the memory of her absence that dominated, and he rarely came home. When he married, things changed. Rachel loved his parents and, despite her workload, put in all the effort when it came to phone calls and catch-ups. But in the two years since his divorce, Bish hadn’t had Rachel as a buffer.
“Elliot’s in charge of making sure British Rail runs on time,” Bish said. “Tells me every year that if I want to move on to something different he can fix it for me.”
“Darling, you’ve been late all your life. What a catastrophe if the whole grid was in your hands.”
“How did you come to bump into him last week?” Bish asked.
She looked confused. “I haven’t seen George for ten years. Since your father’s funeral.”
Bish stared at her. Elliot had claimed to know about Bee’s trip from Saffron. Before he could question her further, two men walked into the hall. Definitely Brits, and Bish would have bet his life they were MI6. Their eyes scanned the room until they found who they were looking for.
Violette. No surprises there.
The pair made their way between the bedrolls. The tension in the hall seemed to heighten.
His phone rang again. Another blocked number. Without thinking, Bish answered it.
“I need you to listen to me, Ortley.”
“How did you know where my daughter was, Elliot?”
“Not important at the moment. You have to do everything in your power to make sure no one removes two of those kids from the campground. Then we want you to drive them back to London and we’ll take it from there.”
This sort of conversation with Elliot seemed ludicrous. Bish felt as if they were playacting in first form, back when they both wanted to be spies.
“It would really make the home secretary happy.”
Elliot worked for the Home Office? Since when?
“Are you there, Ortley? Can you commit these names to memory?”
Two pairs of legs standing before Violette blocked Bish’s view of her. Everyone else in the hall was looking either at the men or at Bish, as if they expected him to do something. Violette was one of a handful of students who had no parent or guardian sitting beside them. One chaperone had locked her in a cupboard, another was lying in the fetal position in a corner, and the third was dead. Someone had to be responsible for her.
“Violette Zidane and Eddie Conlon,” Bish said, knowing exactly which two names Elliot would give him.
Bish heard a sigh and then Elliot was speaking to someone, his voice muffled.
One of the men beckoned Violette with a hand gesture. The utter silence of it all was chilling. And then a slight movement from Violette. Her head leaning to the left of the legs so she could make eye contact with Bish. There was no call for help. No accusation. But the action called for an answer to a question. Are you just going to sit there?
Bish hung up and got to his feet. He walked across the room, feeling every pair of eyes on him.
“Problem here?” Bish asked the two men.
The taller of them held up a hand and pointed to where Bish had come from. A wordless order to sit back down.
“We’ll be speaking to everyone soon enough,” the man said without looking at Bish. “So let’s wait our turn.”
“How about we stick to legalities?” Bish said. “She’s a minor. She doesn’t get questioned without a
chaperone or guardian present.”
The man beckoned Gorman, who was only too eager to be that chaperone.
“If you come anywhere near me, Mr. Gorman,” Violette said softly, “I’m going to tell everyone you tried to feel me up in the cupboard.”
“I did no such thing,” Gorman spluttered in outrage. He glanced around to see if anyone had heard.
Violette shrugged. “Your call.”
Bish managed to get two names out of the men: Braithwaite and Post. A humorless pair who weren’t impressed to be playing second fiddle to a desk inspector and a regional French police force. But they refused to show ID, and Bish trusted coppers more than he trusted men with no identification. So he returned to where his mother and Bee sat.
“Can you go and tell Attal what’s going on here?” he said to Saffron. He sensed that Violette was no safer with a faceless British intelligence than she was with the French.
He followed the three out of the recreation hall and into the dining hall kitchen, where he sat beside Violette. Braithwaite was the tall one, and he perched on the corner of the table, close enough for intimidation. He seemed to have been assigned the role of bad cop. Post sat opposite them, ready to record every word in a notebook.
“ID?” Bish asked them again, taking out his passport and placing it on the table.
Both men ignored him. The only passport they were interested in was the one Braithwaite was studying.
“Violette, you’re the sole student on the bus who forged registration papers to come on this tour,” he began.
“Where’s Eddie?”
“Answer my question, Violette.”
“You didn’t exactly ask me one,” she said, her tone blunt.
Braithwaite studied her coldly and then glanced back at her passport.
“You’ve had a name change, I see. Not keen on everyone knowing you’re a LeBrac?”
Bish thought back thirteen years to when Louis Sarraf’s only grandchild had been put into the custody of her paternal grandparents, who lived in Australia. She was four years old. No doubt she’d been given her grandmother’s family name because the Sarraf and LeBrac legacy was too potentially dangerous for an innocent child.
“I’ll always be a LeBrac,” she said. “Can we get this over and done with?”
“You and Eddie Conlon were the only two who weren’t on the bus when it blew up.”
Violette was nodding. Bish knew she wasn’t agreeing, but processing.
“You look nervous,” Braithwaite said.
“Because it’s circumstantial evidence and it suggests that Eddie and I had something to do with the bomb,” she said. “And my mother and uncle and grandmother and great-uncle were arrested on circumstantial evidence in 2002.”
She looked at Braithwaite. “So wouldn’t you be nervous if you were me?”
“Violette, if I were you I’d be pissing my pants right now.”
“I already did. In that cupboard,” she said, pointing.
Bish felt his phone buzzing in his pocket.
“Can we talk about where you sat on the bus every day, Violette?” Post asked from across the table. He had a harelip scar that made him look angry.
“Front seat, left-hand side,” she said.
Where the bomb was planted, Bish thought, although it seemed to have its most deadly effect on the right-hand side.
“Until yesterday,” Post reminded her. “When Lola Barrett-Parker finally convinced poor Mr. McEwan to let her and Manoshi Bagchi sit where you and Eddie Conlon sat every other day.”
“You weren’t happy with Lola taking your seat, were you?” Braithwaite said.
Violette had a look of bitter amusement on her face. “Yeah, so last night I went back to my cabin and started building myself a bomb to put under Lola’s seat, because where I come from that’s what you do when a thirteen-year-old steals your seat on a school excursion.”
Post opened a folder and Braithwaite removed a photograph, leaning over and placing it in front of Violette. It had been taken outside the police barricade where the uniforms were keeping the press at bay. It was a crowded scene. Reporters, and desperate local parents arriving. This morning they wouldn’t have known it was the British bus that had been blown up. They were all jostling for space, begging to be let in, every parent’s worst fear in their expressions. In the midst of the panic was a man in his early thirties, of Middle Eastern appearance, wearing a beanie. Dark eyes, dark short-cropped beard.
“Is that your uncle, Violette?” Braithwaite asked. “Is that Jamal Sarraf?”
The shrug again.
“I haven’t seen my uncle since I was four years old.”
“You Skype with Jamal Sarraf every couple of days, except for the past fortnight,” Braithwaite said.
“If only they’d give my mother a laptop,” she said, feigning regret. “Then the three of us could be Skyping each other twenty-four/seven and planning bombings all over the world.”
“You think it’s funny, Violette? Do you find these photographs funny as well?”
Braithwaite scattered them before her. Images of the kids taken to hospital. Missing limbs. A girl with half her face wrapped in bandages. Another connected to a life-support machine with burns to most of her body. Bish reached over to shut the folder. Violette pushed his hand out of the way and then scraped her chair back. Braithwaite and Post were on their feet in an instant, but she only placed one foot on the table and indicated the toes of her trainers.
“That’s Manoshi Bagchi’s blood. She came flying through the window and landed at my feet, and I’m kind of sure she was missing a body part. I don’t need to see your photographs. I saw the real thing this morning.”
Her eyes lingered on the photograph of Jamal Sarraf. “And the reason my uncle was out here is probably the same reason this woman and this man and this man were,” she said, pointing. “Because somehow he found out I was here and was desperate to know if I was alive.”
“You came all the way across the world and didn’t tell your uncle, who lives not even half an hour’s drive from here. Why?”
“That’s my business.”
Post sat back down and took over the questioning. “Tell us where you were last night, Violette.”
“Don’t answer it, Violette,” Bish said.
“Do you want us to ask Eddie, Violette?” Post said, ignoring Bish. “We can interview him again. Take him away. Or maybe head down to La Forge Salle de Boxe on Rue Delacroix. Haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your uncle Jimmy. But was always impressed with the skill he had with the ball.”
Violette’s hand clenched. “I was with Charlie Crombie,” she finally answered. “He’ll vouch for me.”
Braithwaite gave a small laugh. “Charlie’s got a new interest, Violette. Some of the other students have seen him snogging the girl from Worthing. She’s all pale and pretty. The type of girl he can bring home to the Reverend Crombie.”
“I don’t think our Charlie likes dirty little girls like you, Violette,” Post added.
Bish had had enough. He stood up. “This interview is over,” he told the men. “Let’s go, Violette.”
“Charlie knows all about your family, Violette,” Post said. “He knows you ended up in a prison cell with them that day. Did you know that your family were heard laughing in that cell? Do you want to know what the headlines were the next day, Violette? ‘The Sarraf family share a joke while Brackenham buries its dead.’”
Bish held out a hand to her, but she seemed fixed in her seat, staring at Post.
They heard the heavy footsteps first and then the angry French voices. Attal burst into the room with two of his officers. A fiery exchange took place in French between Attal’s men and the British intelligence duo. Bish imagined it centered on who was going to take Violette away for questioning. That’s when he noticed her tears. Remembered them from another time, thirteen years ago.
“She stays here until proper legal representation arrives,” Bish said.
; Braithwaite looked at him. “You’re not in charge here.”
“Why don’t we ask the home secretary who’s in charge here?” Bish said, removing his phone from his pocket and pressing Elliot’s number. “She might want to have a word with the foreign minister. Isn’t that who you answer to?”
Bish put the phone on speaker, praying that Elliot wasn’t the delusional bastard he had been at school. Finally he had everyone’s attention. Post reached over for Bish’s passport, which remained on the table.
“Strange name for a Brit,” he said, showing Braithwaite. “We’ll be seeing you again, Bashir Ortley.” He threw the passport down before casually walking out. Bish hung up. Saffron was at the door, concern in her expression.
Attal rattled off something, fast and furious.
“He wants her for interviewing,” Saffron translated.
“Tell him the anglais want to take their children home,” Bish said. “Starting now. And when someone arrives for Violette, he can ask her whatever he wants.”
Evening came with more than half the students having been interviewed and allowed to go home. Those left were given a family cabin each. Two staff members from the British embassy finally arrived from Paris, but their stay was short-lived.
“Can you take over here?” one of them asked Bish. “We’re going to need Russell Gorman to come with us. The Stanley parents have arrived.”
Bish spent the rest of the evening talking to parents in the other cabins. Twenty-five years in the police force had taught him that people wanted communication. It made them feel safe, and listened to.
Later, he stepped out for some fresh air and found himself walking back towards the bomb site. Attal’s team had left but the capitaine remained, along with the bodies of Julius McEwan, Michael Stanley, and the Spanish girl. Bish guessed the Frenchman was waiting for the coroner, who would come only once all the evidence was collected and labeled. Attal’s people had been meticulous all day, and Bish couldn’t fault their procedures.