Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(16)

The officer was sympathetic.

“She’s in shock,” Saffron said quietly, placing an arm around Bee and leading her away.

“Is it as bad as they say?” the officer asked Bish.

He nodded, collecting Bee’s documents.

“Lucky you’re driving your daughter home, then,” the man said, his voice low enough for Bee not to hear.

From Dover to Ashford, Bish tried conversation with Bee. Saffron had insisted on taking the backseat, and he could see she was fighting sleep.

“Were you close with any of them?” he asked Bee quietly. “The kids who were taken to hospital?”

She shrugged. “Fionn Sykes wasn’t exactly the most social person in the world. He spent most of the time on his own. He was a bird-watcher.”

Glancing across, Bish caught a flash of pain in her expression.

“Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely had a crush on each other. The day before…yesterday, everyone was making fun of them because they were caught kissing. Two geeks in love, we called it. Lola Barrett-Parker and Manoshi Bagchi took a photo of them. They took photos of everything. Lola was the biggest pain in the arse and Manoshi was a show-off cynic. Thirteen going on forty.”

“Do you think Violette LeBrac and Eddie Conlon bonded because they seemed to have the same cultural background?”

“Her name’s Violette Zidane,” Bee corrected. “She’s Australian and he’s from Kent. I wouldn’t exactly call that the same culture.”

“You know what he means, Honey Bee,” Saffron said from the backseat.

“Eddie’s mum died about a year ago, so they must have bonded over lost mothers,” Bee said. Her tone was callous, but there was something else in it too. “Violette thought she was too above it all to tell anyone anything.”

“Why didn’t the other kids like her?”

“What makes you think they didn’t?”

“No one seemed to be concerned about her being locked in a cupboard, Bee.”

“We didn’t know, okay?” she shouted. “We didn’t know.”

She turned to stare out the window. Bish caught Saffron’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“She played with people,” Bee said after a while. “And that accent. It was hideous. It was like watching a really bad episode of Neighbours.”

“And Eddie?”

“I think he had a big crush on her. During the day they were always together. Sometimes he was withdrawn. Other times he was really funny. He’d break out in song and he did a really good pelvic thrust version of ‘Moves like Jagger.’ He was totally obsessed with music.” Bee was pensive for a moment. “They were both kind of uninhibited. This one time we were at a town fair just outside Saint-Malo and there was a platform for dancing, but it was empty. Until them. They danced like no one else existed in the world. They did most things like that. Most times.” There was a strange quality to Bee’s storytelling. A wistfulness, perhaps? “On the bus, she’d be teaching him Arabic. The kids at the back used to make fun of it, but she didn’t care.”

“It’s a hard language to learn,” Saffron said.

Had she tried? Bish wondered. Once, as a teenager, he’d been intrigued enough to borrow Arabic language books and tapes from the library and study them in his dorm room. Until his father was notified by the headmaster.

“It’s not really who we are, Bish. Your mother’s more English than the Queen. No more Arabic study now, promise?”

And Bish had promised, although he wondered why his more-English-than-the-Queen mother had named him Bashir, and why the earliest memory he had was of her calling him habibi. But he chose not to pursue it. Stephen Ortley had worked hard for the foreign office. He was respected and loyal to his country and he expected his wife and son to be the same. Bish had honored that part of the deal. He didn’t know what his mother had honored. She had been a no-show for part of his teenage years, even during those times when his parents were living not half an hour’s drive from where he was boarding. When Bish was home for school holidays, he could see that she did her best to be the mother he remembered from when he was a child, but by the time he was fifteen he had switched off. Saffron’s saving grace in his adult life was that she was a good grandmother. Her grief following Stevie’s death almost broke her.

“There’s no way Violette did it, you know,” Bee said.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I asked her myself after you got her out of that cupboard, and she said if she truly wanted to blow someone up, she’d have put the bomb under Crombie’s seat.”

Bish flinched. He hoped for Violette’s sake that she hadn’t said this to anyone else.





6



Bish had been home for less than a day when Elliot rang again.

“Get yourself to Kingly Court, Ortley. A colleague would like to have a word.”

He’d already downed his second Scotch of the morning. Wasn’t in the mood to stay focused. The previous evening he’d left an exhausted Saffron and Bee with Rachel and Maynard and driven home alone. Bish had always refused to break bread with David Maynard in the home he once owned. And here was Elliot trying to involve him in something he didn’t want to be involved in. It was boarding school all over again, except now the home secretary was involved.