Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (17 page)

There was silence on the other end.

‘The kids are my priority, Paul. You know that.’

‘That I do,’ Paul said. ‘But just say it’s not connected. What she saw, I mean.’

‘Then there’s nothing to worry about. But for now, every detail of the night before is important.’

‘Can you promise you won’t bring her into the investigation, Bish?’

‘I’m not part of the investigation. As far as this case goes, I’m just another father who wants to know who’s behind this thing. I can’t promise something I can’t deliver, but I will promise that if Greta has to be questioned again, I’ll be there with you all.’

Bish waited, then at last heard a sigh.

‘She says that on that night, she saw a security car being pushed out of the grounds. The engine wasn’t on. Or the lights. She knew it was security because of the shape at the top of the car.’

‘Get her to write down everything she saw. Tell her not to leave anything out. I’ll pass it on and we’ll keep her name out of it until we have no choice.’

‘We just don’t want whoever’s responsible for the bomb knowing Greta saw anything. We’re really worried about her. How’s your daughter holding up?’

Bish heard a break in the man’s voice. He couldn’t hang up now, so he chatted a while longer. He then sent a text to Grazier detailing the conversation, and one to Attal as well, even though Bish knew he wasn’t on the case anymore. Then Naomi Hill returned his missed call. Reggie’s mother had met Parker at the Boulogne hospital on that first day, before Reggie was discharged.

‘Are you joking, Bish?’ she said when he asked if she’d had further contact with Ian Parker. ‘Have you read what he says about young black people? It’s not just migrants he goes after.’ She added briskly, ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. Can you tell me what photobombing means? And how to use Instagram?’

Naomi worked for an entertainment magazine, so he figured she’d know. It was an icebreaker.

‘You need an account for Instagram,’ she said. ‘All your photos go public unless you set your account to private. Then only the people who follow you will be able to see them.’

So he had to continue begging people to be his friends online.

‘Do you think I could follow Reggie’s account?’ he asked.

Within an hour he had access to ten Instagram accounts. He pitied French Intelligence, who had to go through eight busloads of teenage photography. Under any other circumstances Bish would have taken the time to despair at the priorities of the young. Seven days in Normandy and hardly any landscapes or monuments. Who went to Mont Saint-Michel and took selfies in the gift shop?

It was at lunchtime, when he was back on Facebook, that a gift was presented to him. Bish couldn’t help marvelling at his ubiquitous mother. Absent throughout his teenage years, everywhere he turned in his middle age. Saffron had a hundred and thirty-four Facebook friends. Katherine Barrett-Parker was the latest.

After a quick phone call he went to pick up his mother and drive her down to Dover. Earlier that week she’d travelled to Boulogne to visit the injured kids, and had met both Katherine Barrett-Parker and Sadia Bagchi.

‘You could have told me you were going,’ he said. ‘I would have taken you.’

‘I find that the best way to battle the demons, darling, is to get into a car and drive for hours.’

Bish understood demons. He wanted to ask about hers, but feared they involved Stevie’s death. So they spoke of Bee instead.

‘She just holds everything in,’ Bish said.

‘Well, she takes after you, and you take after my father,’ Saffron said.

He was surprised to hear the comparison, and took his eyes off the road for a moment. There was a wistful smile on his mother’s face. Bish was always fascinated by the snippets of information about her earlier life.

‘I still can’t understand how the Worthingtons got away with taking you from him.’

‘The same way most people get away with the wrong thing,’ she said. ‘Wealth. After our mother died, Aunt Margaret had us flown back to Kent for the holidays and we were never returned.’

‘Imagine being up against Great-Aunt Margaret in her prime,’ Bish said.

Saffron went quiet and Bish thought the conversation was over. He wanted to know more about their stolen history, and was relieved when she continued.

‘We hated our English names. Our parents named us Khalid and Safeyah. We may have looked like foreigners in Egypt, but we
felt
like strangers here. No one ever speaks of it but I know it killed my brother in the end.’

‘So you don’t think it was an accident?’ he asked. Carl Worthington had died before Bish was born. His uncle had been a big drinker, and one night his car went off a Cornwall road and into the sea.

‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘He was old enough to remember more than I ever could. Carl adored our parents and spoke of them often, reminding me of how happy we had been in Alexandria. A simple life, but Bashir Nasrallah was not a simple man. Just one of few words.’

‘And you never saw him again?’

‘No. I think my father tried once or twice to see us, but I can’t imagine Aunt Margaret making it easy for him. He remarried years later. That much she chose to share with us.’

Bish heard bitterness in her voice, but sadness in her sigh.

‘I went a bit silly after my brother died,’ she said. ‘Aunt Margaret told me often enough that my reputation was in tatters. I met your father and then you happened, when I was just about Bee’s age. I told him I was pregnant and he could have walked away, but he didn’t, so we fudged the dates and got married. No one dared talk about it.’

She turned to look at Bish. ‘I promised your father I wouldn’t do anything to affect his prospects with the Foreign Office. I owed him, in a way, and the expat lifestyle suited us. I think we made each other as happy as we possibly could.’

Made each other as happy as they possibly could? A marriage like that could be read in so many different ways.

‘Saffron’s not such a bad name,’ he said.

‘It’s damn ridiculous,’ she said with a laugh. ‘So twee. It sounds worse as I get older. Thank God Bee and Stevie had the sense to call me Sofi.’

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 when 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.

‘Darling,’ 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 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 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 transplants, but the costs were astronomical.

‘Perhaps a cup of tea,’ Bish suggested to all three.

Manoshi’s mother shook her head but Saffron would have none of it.

‘Let’s go, Sadia,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re going to be no help to your daughter if you’re dead on your feet. ‘You too, Katherine.’

Bish peered into Manoshi’s room. She was lying on her side facing the window. He was about to walk out when he noticed the same pathetic cluster of flowers in a glass on her bedside table. Much like those in Lola’s room – not from a florist, or placed there by a nurse. A nurse would have put them in a vase.

He walked around to the other side of her bed and saw that she was awake. ‘Manoshi, who gave you these flowers?’ he asked.

She looked at them vacantly and managed a shrug. ‘While I was sleeping.’

Fionn Sykes was on his new iPhone when Bish poked his head round the door. And there were the flowers. When he casually asked about them, the boy mumbled. ‘One of the nurses, I think.’

Bish knew he was lying.

‘Fionn, have Violette and Eddie come to visit?’

‘Violette Zidane? Here?’ Fionn tried to sound shocked but there would be no BAFTA for him.

‘What did she say, Fionn? Where is she heading?’

Fionn closed his eyes. ‘Can you tell the nurse I’m in pain?’

Whether he was lying or not, Bish left him and went for the nurse.

‘Are you sitting down?’ Bish asked Grazier on his mobile. He was standing outside the cafeteria, watching through the glass doors as Saffron and the other two women drank tea. Katherine and Sadia were talking with an animation he could only attribute to Saffron, given their flat moods earlier.

‘Just spit it out, Ortley.’

‘Violette and Eddie have managed to cross the Channel.’

Silence, and then: ‘All right, I’m sitting down now. How?’

How indeed. Channel security had been heightened since the bombing. ‘Have no idea, but I’m almost sure they’ve done the rounds at Buckland Hospital.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Do you want me to get hospital security to check their CCTV?’ Bish asked.

‘No, I’ll get Elliot onto it,’ Grazier muttered. ‘The French aren’t going to be happy if they let those kids slip through their fingers. They’re not having much luck with suspects either.’

‘Did you find out anything about the driver of the French bus?’

‘Some of our people are talking with the CNI in Spain, and one or two of their kids claim they saw the driver of the French bus arguing with the driver of the English bus.’

‘Could that make Serge Sagur the target?’

‘Theories?’

‘Well, they both drove a big enough vehicle, so what if they had a people-smuggling business on the side?’