Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(86)

Charlie talked about the cheating episode. They couldn’t see one another in the dark but she knew from his voice that he was crying. Being expelled for drugs would make you cool in years to come, but cheating was different. Everyone hated a cheat. Eddie talked about his mother’s death and how his father didn’t want a bar of him now that she was gone, and Fionn too spoke about his mum. She didn’t leave the house ever, because she was one of those people you read about in the Guinness book of records. At Easter, Fionn finally got the guts to bring friends home to meet her, and the girl he thought he could trust told everyone that Fionn Sykes’s mum was so fat she couldn’t move out of her room. Like Gilbert Grape’s mother. And then there was Marianne. Her dad had shot dead the son of a local crim and was taking it bad, regardless of the fact that the guy was scum in the making. She said it wasn’t like the movies. Police didn’t kill people every day.

Violette said very little. Just that her father was dead and that she lived with her grandparents. Charlie asked where her mum was, and at least she was honest about that: “In jail.” They spoke briefly about the kids on the tour who got on their nerves. They compared bus drivers: both cranky most of the time. Violette told them she’d had words with the driver of the French bus. He was a bit of a stickybeak, she said.

Later, they came across a party on the beach in Arromanches and danced. As if no one they loved had ever died, or killed anyone, or cheated, or shamed them. It was the most uninhibited Bee had ever been. Her arms around Violette and Marianne, laughing up at the stars. Crombie made them promise they’d never tell anyone that he had danced to One Direction. But the very best part was later, lying beside Marianne on the sand. And her kiss. And her fingers and her tongue and the way they shook in each other’s arms and the way they didn’t really speak the same language, but understood exactly what the other was saying.

That was what happened the night before the bomb went off.

Bee’s father and Capitaine Attal and Dupont are staring at her in disbelief.

“‘Stickybeak’?” Dupont asks. “Qu’est-ce que ?a veut dire?”

There’s a discussion about what it means. “Nosy,” Bee explains to her father, because now she has to be a translator for Australian English as well. “He was prying.”

“That’s it? You went for a joyride in a car?” her dad asks, not really caring what “stickybeak” means.

“C’est tout?” the capitaine asks.

“That’s all,” Bee says with a shrug, because in the end it’s all she decides to tell them.

“C’est tout,” Marianne says.

The one good thing to come out of the bombing, Bee thinks, is how everything fades in comparison. She would never have guessed that Marianne’s father and her own could be so relieved to hear that their children are car thieves and not terror suspects.

She stands up and says that if they need more information they can contact her on her mobile. Marianne does the same. They’re both giving their numbers but their fathers are being dicks and shouting above them. Bee can’t hear the last couple of Marianne’s digits over the din the men are making.

“You contact me,” Bish is telling Dupont. “Not my daughter. If you want to speak to anyone, speak to me.”

Capitaine Attal says much the same with a lot of French swearwords thrown in. Dupont ignores them. As if French intelligence doesn’t already have everyone’s phone number.

Back in the car, Bee and her dad put on their seat belts in silence. Then he turns and stares at her, as if he can’t believe what he’s thinking.

“Just ask,” she says.

“Did you give up martial arts for French classes on a Saturday morning?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

She hears a message come through and fumbles for her phone.

Ton père est un idiot. Mxx

Yours is too, she texts back. Bxx

Bee has never been so grateful for idiot fathers.





40



They spent the night at a motel in Calais close to the port. While Bee texted her life away, Bish borrowed her iPad and searched through media from thirteen years ago. If Ahmed Khateb had been living in North London in 2002, someone he knew could have been a victim of the Brackenham bombing. What did Violette mean by calling him a stickybeak? Had Khateb approached her because somehow he had worked out who she was? With a name like Zidane it wouldn’t have been as easy as linking a LeBrac to the bombing, but perhaps a grief-stricken man knew every single detail there was to know about the family whose patriarch had been responsible for Brackenham.

In Bish’s search for names, statements from the injured, death notices, and everything else that was written about back then, he came across the front page of The Guardian, which showed photographs of the twenty-three victims. At one point in his police career, Bish had known the names of them all. Remembered their personal stories. A young mother and her five-year-old son on their way to school. A father of four who worked for the council. An eighteen-year-old lad who was the only child of a couple from Merseyside. Bish stared at the lad’s face. Eternally laughing, without a care in the world. His name caught Bish’s eye. A common name, so he should have put the thought aside, but he couldn’t help a Google search. And at a time when he thought there was no more room for surprises from Noor LeBrac, Bish discovered her biggest one.