Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(40)

Saffron reintroduced him to Katherine Barrett-Parker outside her daughter’s room, before going to see the registrar, who was an old friend. Lola’s mother was slightly warmer than she had been the first time, mostly because Saffron was a good press agent.

“She’s recovering quicker than we thought she would,” Katherine said, a little defensively. “This business about my husband insisting she be transferred to England has got out of hand. We’re not racists, and we’re not ignorant. Boulogne was merely impractical. We did it as much for the other two kids as for Lola.”

“Is your husband around?” Bish asked.

“He was here this morning, but had work to attend to.”

“Would you let Ian know that if he’d like to talk, one father to another, I’d welcome it?” Bish held out his card, hoping he wasn’t laying it on too thick.

“Your mother told me about your loss,” Katherine said. “Well, she was speaking of her own loss, I suppose…”

Bish didn’t want to use Stevie’s death as a means to get Ian Parker talking. He looked away and was about to pocket his card, but Katherine took it.

“Can I speak with Lola, Katherine?” he asked.

“Ian won’t—”

“She may be able to shed light on where the two missing kids are,” he said. “It’d be heartbreaking if we lost them too.”

He could see she was torn.

“Please don’t tell her about the deaths,” she said, relenting. “It’s been tricky, but the language barrier in France made it easier to keep the truth from her.”

“You’re going to have to tell her sooner rather than later,” he said. “With the funerals approaching, she’s bound to overhear someone speaking about them.”

He was grateful that she turned to open the door of her daughter’s room and led him in. Lola was all big ears and patches of hair on a half-shaved head. Her face was still bruised, although Bish could imagine what she was like before the bombing. Her one eye was bright, alert, and inquisitive, and she actually looked better than he expected.

“Poppet,” Katherine said, propping Lola up in the bed, “this is Chief Inspector Ortley. He’s the father of one of the girls on the tour.”

“Sabina Ballyntine-Ortley’s dad,” Lola confirmed to herself with a nod. “Did she get hurt too?”

He shook his head.

“Manoshi Bagchi did,” Lola informed him, as if he didn’t know. “She can’t hear on her left side and she lost her hand, and Fionn Sykes’s leg was blown off.”

All this had just become news to Lola and she seemed at once horrified and fascinated by the carnage. And then she was sobbing. Bish concentrated on the motley bunch of flowers in the glass by her bedside.

“Manoshi and Fionn will be fine—I told you that,” Katherine said, fussing. “And once the police in France find the other two, we’ll be able to get to the bottom of all this.”

“Who are the other two?” Lola asked, the tears suddenly gone. “Were some left behind?”

Katherine caught Bish’s eye over her daughter’s bed. He figured it was her way of telling him to talk about the runaways.

“Violette Zidane and Eddie Conlon.” Bish sat down on the chair beside the bed, watching her reaction. He didn’t want to say anything that might cause an anxiety attack. “They weren’t injured, Lola, but they’re still in France, and once they’ve been…returned, they’ll be able to help answer a lot of questions.”

She made a confused face. “If they’re together, they’re not in France,” she said, as if she had never heard anything so silly. “Violette’s here.”

“Poppet, they’re in France,” Katherine said.

“No, Violette came to visit while I was sleeping.”

Katherine gave her a look. “You said you didn’t wake up once, Lola. You couldn’t have seen her.”

Lola, apparently, was a storyteller. By the looks of things, a storyteller who believed her own fibs.

“Was Violette a friend, Lola?” Bish prodded, unnerved by the intensity of her one eye.

“Not really. Eddie was.”

“He’ll be home soon,” Bish said. He sounded as though he was telling a once-upon-a-time story to a five-year-old. One that certainly wasn’t going to end with a happily-ever-after.

“Violette was here,” Lola insisted. “See?” She held up her cast and Bish peered at it. The cast was clean except for the words Wake up Lollapalooza.

“It’s a concert in America,” Lola explained. “I used to think she was calling me Lola the Loser, because that’s what the girls at school call me, but when I showed the nurse this morning he told me about Lollapalooza.”

Bish heard the sharp intake of breath from Katherine. He could only stare at the cast. A nurse entered to check Lola’s vitals, and Bish led her mother outside.

“You’re sure it wasn’t there before she fell asleep?” he asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” she said, horrified. “I have to ring Ian.”

Bish wished there was some way of getting her to hold off on telling her husband. Ian Parker would go ballistic at the thought of Violette being anywhere near his daughter. He could see Saffron and Sadia Bagchi standing outside Manoshi’s room, and he led Katherine towards them before she could reach for her phone. Sadia was weeping. The talk in the nurses’ station was that Manoshi was the greatest concern of the three. Not because of her physical injuries, but because of her state of mind. Who could blame the kid? A week ago she had woken up to a half-silent world. The doctors were talking cochlear implants, but the costs were astronomical.