Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(4)

“And the other one?” Bish asked, remembering a young woman he had met briefly at the port in Dover. “Lucy?”

“Basket case.”

There had been three “shaps,” as the kids liked to call them, on the tour. Two were teachers—Russell Gorman and Julius McEwan—earning extra money over the summer break. The other was a university student wanting to sharpen up her French language skills. Bee had put her name down weeks ago for the eight-day trip through Normandy, paying the deposit herself. Neither Rachel nor Bish knew about it until the deadline for the final balance. Bish had a feeling she just wanted to get away from her friends. They were all fake, she’d complained lately. He’d noticed a change in his daughter since her return from a junior athletics meet in Gothenburg earlier that year. Perhaps it was the introduction to a foreign culture, and the diversity. Bee was never short of an entourage at home, but she wasn’t quite meshing with any of them one-on-one.

Saffron finally angled Bee away from the grisly view and back to the bedroll. Close by, a boy of about fifteen sat slumped with his head on his knees. Bish crouched beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. The boy looked up.

“I didn’t get to ring my mum,” he said, fighting the tears. He was holding a sheet of paper torn out of a wire-bound notebook. It had a list of names and dates of birth written in a neat hand. Some had phone numbers written alongside. Since Bee was identified as Sabina Ballyntine-Ortley, Bish figured the details had been copied from the passports. On the back of the sheet was a sketch of seating placements. Bish took it from the boy, relieved at someone’s initiative to be practical under such circumstances.

“What’s your name?” he asked the boy.

“Matty.”

“Who wrote this, Matty?”

The boy shrugged.

“Who has your passport?” he prompted.

“Lucy. The shap. She was in charge of holding the passports since Dover.”

Lucy the chaperone wasn’t as switched off as Bee thought if she’d taken the time to record these details.

“Most of our phones are out there,” Matty said, pointing in the direction of the bomb site. “Someone had theirs on them and they passed it around so we could ring home, but it ran out of credit halfway down the list. Gorman won’t let us use his phone because he’s waiting for a call from the embassy.”

Bish retrieved his phone. “What’s your mum’s number?”

When the boy had finished speaking to his mother, Bish’s phone did the rounds. From the handwritten list, he worked out that if a kid had contacted home he was to tick his or her name. Those who had been taken to hospital were marked with an H. There were seven names marked “Unaccountable.”

He saw a tick next to Eddie Conlon’s name. Bee had seemed concerned about him and would be relieved to hear he’d contacted a parent. Bish noticed the date of birth beside his name: Eddie had turned thirteen in February. When Bee had mentioned Eddie, Bish got a sense they were the same age, not four years apart.

“Chief Inspector Ortley.”

Russell Gorman, the teacher from Strood, was coming towards him. There was a fevered look in his eyes.

“The locals think they’ve got total control.”

“Well, Calais and Boulogne do belong to them,” Bish reminded him. “Who have you been dealing with here?”

“A local. Capitaine Attal. I’ve been letting him think he’s in charge until someone arrived,” Gorman said.

Bish was about to correct him. He wasn’t here to investigate. The Metropolitan Police didn’t send their officers to France to investigate a bombing. But a cry at the entrance made him turn, and he saw a couple embracing a pair of identical twins who looked about Bee’s age.

“I know who did it,” Gorman said. “Bad blood,” he added.

“What are you saying?” Bish asked.

“We’ll talk in a moment,” the chaperone whispered, before hurrying to introduce himself to the newly arrived parents.

Bish went back to the handwritten sheet. He didn’t want to look further down the page. Didn’t want to see a phone number penciled beside an unaccountable because then he’d feel obliged to ring a parent. But he did look, committing the names to memory. And there on the list he saw one he couldn’t easily forget. It seemed unfathomable. It stunned him, but he dared not let himself think it was anything more than sheer coincidence.

Violette LeBrac Zidane.





2



The moment Bish stepped outside, it was easy to see who was in charge: Capitaine Olivier Attal. The French police captain looked like a prizefighter. Ugly as one. A nose broken too many times to count, from the looks of things. A bear of a man in both shape and facial hair. Attal had insisted that all the anglais stay until he’d interviewed everyone who’d been on board the bus, even if it took all night.

More parents had arrived from across the Channel, at first hysterical, then relieved, and then guilty at their relief. The rumor was that Julius McEwan was dead. He was a history teacher at a school in Dover and the chaperone the kids most relied on. They seemed indifferent to their youngest shap, Lucy Gilies, a twentysomething reading history at Cambridge. Bee claimed Lucy was prone to hysterics and had to be sedated after the bomb went off, which made Bish question whether she’d written the list of names after all. That had left the kids at the mercy of their least favorite shap, Gorman, who’d earned the nickname Vermin. Since the blast, he’d spent most of his time on the phone with the embassy, and this was known because all he seemed to say was, “I’m on the phone with the embassy.”