Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(25)

But the mockery was bitter. “My leg’s been blown off and someone writes ‘Get well soon’ as if I’ve just had my tonsils out.”

Bish was grateful to Fionn for bringing up the elephant in the room. He could see the tears threatening to spill. Bee got vicious if Bish ever caught her crying. Sod off, Dad. I don’t have to share every thought that goes through my head.

“Sometimes people who care about us say all the wrong things for all the right reasons,” Bish said. “How bad’s the pain?”

“I get asked that question every half hour by the nurses,” Fionn said. “Can you ask me something else?”

“Talk to me about the other kids on the bus, then.”

“I know the chaperones probably said we were a rubbish lot, and all that talk about Violette…” Fionn shrugged.

Bish thought of the rumors circling around Violette and a number of the boys on the bus. Had Fionn been one of them?

“Did you fancy her?”

Fionn was surprised by the question. “Violette only had time for Eddie Conlon. And Crombie, of course.”

“You didn’t like her?”

“It wasn’t that. On the first day she made a name for herself when she punched Charlie Crombie. I thought she did it for attention, but it scared people off and I realized that was exactly what she wanted. To be left alone.” Fionn thought about it a moment, his face aflame. “I don’t know how the two of them ended up…”

Shagging, as Crombie would have put it.

“I heard her talking to Eddie Conlon about me. ‘I know his type,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet you the dickhead asks who our favorite Doctor is.’” A blush crawled up Fionn’s face again, and reached his ears. It seemed Violette had guessed right.

“I was obsessed with Tom Baker,” Bish told him. “Much like every other nincompoop in the seventies, I wore the long scarf. It’s pretty obvious who everyone’s favorite Doctor is.”

Fionn laughed. It transformed the boy.

“She called me a dickhead as well,” Bish added.

“In here,” Fionn said, pointing to his heart, “Violette was tough. Revealed nothing. As girls go, she’s probably up there in the category of don’t-even-think-of-it-unless-you’re-insane, like Charlie Crombie.”

“Do you have someone back home?” Bish asked.

The boy shrugged, his cheeks and ears instantly red again. “Not really,” he mumbled. “There was a girl from school. We were flirting.”

Flirting didn’t appear to conjure up great memories for the lad.

“Tell me about Charlie Crombie.”

Fionn seemed relieved that the conversation about flirting was over. “He used to be a student at my school. We were both bluecoat scholarship students, but our paths never crossed. I suppose you know of the cheating thing?”

Bish nodded.

“I heard him tell Rodney Kennington that he had to repeat a whole history unit at his new school, and that they were going to accept the trip as one of his assignments.”

Fionn was pensive a moment.

“The thing with Crombie is that he was hands down the leader.”

“Was there a need for one?”

“Always.”

“A bullying cheat? That was everyone’s only option?”

“Yes. If he didn’t establish hierarchy, he’d be at the mercy of the other year elevens. He said he could smell the weakness in their piss from a mile away. The only two who had balls were ‘the alpha bitches’: Violette and—pardon me, sir—your daughter. The rest of us were his minions.”

Yes indeed. Bee came from a long line of alpha bitches on both sides of the tree.

“You liked being one of his minions?”

Fionn laughed. “It was a strange sort of fun. I’m better as a follower, except I was almost wetting my pants half the time Crombie suggested something to the group. It was mostly getting back at the French kids. The French police captain’s daughter is another one you don’t want to cross. Sometimes it got vicious.”

Fionn looked up at Bish, as if working something out for the first time. “Crombie’s a bit bent, you know. He sees things at a tilt. It’s why Violette made sense to him. Everything about her screamed ‘different’ to the rest of us. Nothing matched. Her accent. Her name. Her face and her hair. She was pretty intense.”

The young man sighed. “It’s hard not to think of her as anything but the Brackenham bomber’s granddaughter, now that I know that.”

“And the Eddie thing?”

“I heard someone say his mother died, not even a year ago. But I don’t know, they seemed to just get each other.”

“Did you feel that she was hiding something?”

“Weren’t we all?”

Was Bee hiding something, apart from her sorrow? “What were you hiding, Fionn?” Bish asked softly instead.

Another flash of pain in his expression. “The girl I had been hanging out with—we board together at Ashcroft. She came home to Newcastle with me at Easter. My best mate too. It was pretty awful. They hooked up in the end. Came back to school and spread stuff around about my mum. I think I miss being friends with him more than the idea of her, but it was a bad term and I thought the holidays would be even worse, knowing they were together. So the tour made sense.”