Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(111)

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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.