Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(10)

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 family 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.

“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.”