Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (45 page)

‘Sorry.’ He heard the regret in her voice. ‘I’ll swap with Eddie. He’s really good at lifting moods.’

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Tell me one of your stories.’

A hint of a smile crept across her face.

‘How about the one where my parents fell in love in Cambridge?’

When they reached Sheffield, Bish suggested they stop for sandwiches.

‘Sandwiches?’ Charlie said. ‘That’s what they serve these three every day in hospital. Have a bit of imagination.’

Imagination was McDonald’s. It didn’t have a drive-through, so Bee and Charlie went to get the food, because, according to Eddie, ‘They aren’t ex-suspected terrorists or missing any body parts, so they won’t stand out in a crowd.’

Bee and Charlie came back soon enough with bags of food and serious expressions.

‘We’re all over the news,’ Charlie said.

Lola and Manoshi were caught between the drama of being all over the news and the excitement of eating chicken nuggets and French fries. Bish fiddled with the radio scan and found a news station.

‘Chief Inspector Bish Ortley is a person of interest in the disappearance of three young patients who were injured in the August Boulogne bombing.’

‘A bit dramatic,’ Bish said, and everyone agreed.

‘Ortley was suspended from the force last month after assaulting a fellow officer with a firearm.’

He felt their eyes on him. So much for Grazier keeping the media out of it.

‘Should we be scared?’ Charlie said, sounding anything but.

‘Did he deserve it?’ Bee asked.

‘No one deserves to be threatened with a gun, Bee.’

‘Bullshit,’ Violette said. ‘I’d threaten a paedophile with a gun. I’d actually shoot him in the dick.’

After tapping away at the minivan’s GPS, Charlie started the engine. Bish turned his phone back on and regretted it the moment he saw the eleven text messages and twenty missed calls.

‘Nothing you can do until we get to Malham, so I’d switch it to silent if I were you,’ Charlie said.

Bish did as he was told.

In the rearview mirror he could see Violette whispering to Fionn, a vicious little expression around her mouth. Fionn seemed uncomfortable, and Bish had a feeling that she was forcing him into something he didn’t want to do.

Charlie saw him looking and checked his own mirror. ‘She doesn’t judge, you know,’ he said in a low voice. ‘She just says, “Move on, don’t let shit define you.” ’ He took a moment to contemplate. ‘I suppose a cheating scam seems nothing compared to the stuff that’s happened in her life.’

Bish was surprised that Charlie had brought that up. He dared to ask, ‘If it was a scam, what happened to the others?’

Charlie went into shutdown and Bish regretted asking. He looked in the rearview mirror again. There was a lot of whispering going on in the back now.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Charlie said at last. ‘I cheated. And no, I didn’t hand myself in, I got caught. So don’t search for anything decent about the situation. The only thing I didn’t do was rat on the others.’

‘Fionn says you’re smart, Charlie. So why?’

Charlie shrugged. Bish was getting a clearer picture of what a Charlie shrug meant. Shame.

‘It’s not like
The Vicar of Dibley
with my parents, you know. Most of the time it’s a council flat next to a church. At Ashcroft you either had to make a name for yourself or be invisible. You couldn’t be in-between.’

‘How does Fionn fit into the school then?’

‘He was one of the invisible ones. Didn’t even know he went to that school until he told me the night before the bomb went off. I thought he looked familiar.’

Charlie took his eyes off the road to look briefly at Bish. ‘
I
was supposed to move that suitcase for Lola. Not Sykes. But Sykes did it. It should have been me. Sykes is fucking decent and he didn’t deserve that to happen to him.’

‘And you did, Charlie? You really think anyone deserves that?’

‘You don’t know how it feels,’ Charlie said dismissively.

‘Did Bee tell you about her brother’s death?’

Charlie seemed surprised. ‘Yeah. He got caught in a rip and drowned. She said you don’t talk about it.’

‘I wasn’t there that day,’ Bish said. ‘Her mum and I were having a bit of time apart and she went to Portsmouth with Stevie and I took Bee to a race meet up north. Over the years everyone’s said the same thing to me. Coastguards, police, even Bee’s mum. That even if I’d been there I wouldn’t have been able to save him. It was a killer rip.’ Bish swallowed hard. ‘But a man did go in to save Stevie. Some random guy on the beach. And he died out there too. That’s what I can’t forgive myself for. Another man died trying to save my son.’

After a moment he said, ‘So I sort of do know how you feel, Charlie. Just don’t let it take you to dark places, because it’s a bugger to dig yourself out of that pit.’

Ten minutes later, Bish knew something was wrong. There hadn’t been talk in the back for some time and when he checked the mirror Fionn looked shattered.

‘Pull over, Charlie.’

When the van was parked by the side of the road, Bish unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around. ‘Fionn, are you okay?’

‘I’m fine.’ He was scrubbing tears from his eyes.

‘Whatever Violette wants you to do, forget about it,’ Bish said, eyeing her with a warning.

‘What did I do?’ she asked.

‘I’m just angry, okay,’ Fionn said. ‘I’m allowed to be angry.’

‘Course you are,’ Bish said.

‘And I can’t even fucking walk away when I’m angry!’ Fionn shouted.

Bish looked at the younger girls in the backseat, worried that Fionn’s mood would frighten them. But they only looked sad.

‘I told them about the other bus,’ Bee said. ‘How the bomb was meant for the French kids and not us.’

‘I love the way I get the blame for making him cry,’ Violette said.

‘I thought you were hassling him before,’ Bish admitted.

‘I’m just trying to convince him to go to his school dance with a hot girl so his dumb-bitch ex-best friend’s girlfriend will see what she’s missing.’

‘Dumb bitch is a terrible term, Violette,’ Bish said, discreetly pointing to the impressionable three at the back.

‘She broke his heart. If I ever meet her, I’ll punch her in the face.’

Fierce Violette was back.

‘There was this magician kid on the French bus,’ Fionn said. ‘Every time we were at the same campsite he’d do these tricks.’

‘Patric,’ Lola reminded everyone.

‘He’d be dead if the bomb had been on his bus,’ Fionn said. ‘He sat four seats from the front. So would Marianne. So would that girl with all those plaits. So would at least the next five rows. Because their bus was packed and ours wasn’t. I kept wondering why this happened to me, and now I know why and I’m angry, because I can’t regret it any more. Because if I do, all those kids would be dead. The boy with the magic tricks would be dead.’

Charlie started up the van and put on his indicator. For the next hour they talked about Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely and Mac and Serge Sagur and Lucia Ortez, whom they had never met but whose name they’d never forget. Bish had seen his first dead body at the age of twenty-five, six months into the job. These kids had experienced it far too young.

Fuck it, he was going to have to speak to David Maynard about getting all the kids of the tour together again. It was the sort of thing the principal extraordinaire was good at.

His phone beeped with a text from Saffron telling him to look at Sadia and Katherine’s blog. ‘Who’s got internet access?’ he asked.

Everyone. They hadn’t managed to grab a spare set of clothes or shoes but they all had their technology.

‘You two look up your mums’ blog,’ he ordered Lola and Manoshi. Lola had it on her favourites page so was first to find it.

‘Your dad wrote a piece, Eddie,’ she said.

A surprised Eddie reached over and took the iPad. Bish watched him study the screen.

‘Eddie? Are you okay?’

Eddie nodded.

‘What does it say?’ Fionn asked.

Eddie swallowed and started reading. ‘“My eldest son Jimmy was killed in the Brackenham bombing when he was eighteen. It was how my wife Anna came to meet Noor LeBrac. A need to understand why our boy had died. My wife’s relationship with Noor introduced us to our second son who means everything to me . . .” ’

Eddie started crying and Violette leaned over and gently took the iPad out of his hands and continued to read. When she cried, Bee took over, and by the end everyone had read it aloud and Bish felt like crying himself.

An air of tranquillity had hit the bus by the time they reached Yorkshire. Bish welcomed the sensory overload of the landscape. Perhaps days without alcohol had opened him up to everything. Drystone walls lined with flowers, the fluorescent fields of rapeseed. It was functional beauty. Cottages advertised free-range eggs, black-faced sheep dotted the hillsides, farmers collected silage for the winter. A cyclist or two and seasoned walkers with sticks signalled that the cove was close by. Violette was alone in finding it too picture-perfect. Her farm in Coleambally, she said, was a different sort of beauty. More savage.

Bish heard the homesickness in her voice. But he didn’t want to think of Eddie and Violette being separated. He didn’t want to think of any of these kids being apart – he wished he could drive them around the countryside for the rest of their lives, keeping them all safe and less lonely.

Ten miles out of Malham, Bish knew he had to let Grazier in on where they were. He was hoping they had at least a forty-minute head start and that Violette would get the chance to complete the journey she had begun all those weeks ago. So he took a chance and sent a text, and then sat back and enjoyed the rest of the drive.

They arrived in Malham just before two. After parking in the village, they secured Fionn in the wheelchair and set off to the cove, a mile down the road. Violette led them, glancing back more than once at the sound of voices in the distance.

Bee nudged Bish and pointed to Violette, a silent order to catch up.

‘She won’t want me walking alongside her, Bee.’

‘She insisted you come along. We wouldn’t have done this with you if not for her.’ She poked him in the side. ‘Go.’

Bish did as he was told but figured his daughter had got it wrong. Violette wasn’t interested in talking and at times he felt as if she were quickening her step to shake him off. Until she suddenly said, ‘I thought they were friends of my father’s who followed us up here that day. That’s what I told my grandparents and they wrote it all down.’

‘Why did you think they were friends?’ he asked.

‘Because one of them said, “I know you.” ’

They came to the foot of the cove, staring up at the vertical face of the cliff. It wasn’t merely the height that filled Bish with awe, but its seeming impenetrability – a reminder of human frailty against the might of nature. Beside him, the kids were staring up at the ancient stone with reverence. No selfies here. Bish saw tears in Fionn’s eyes for the second time that day. It was here that the kid truly realised things would never be the same. The greatest nature lover among them could go no further.

‘I’ll take Violette and Eddie,’ Bish said. ‘The rest of you stay.’

‘I’m coming too,’ Bee said.

Charlie looked in the direction of the village. ‘People were staring back there. I bet they’ve called the cops.’

Bish pointed to Manoshi and Lola. ‘Don’t let those two out of your sight.’

It was a sombre journey up the steps, Violette ahead once more as they took it in single file. On the limestone platform above the cove, the wind made their cheeks smart and their eyes water. But regardless, the view of the area was breathtaking, the rock formations stunning: clints and grykes as far as the eye could see, their strange hues in communion with the grey storm clouds that hung low and threatened to spill.

Violette turned to them and Bish saw she was crying, holding her arms around her body. ‘He hid me,’ she sobbed. ‘They always say I was left walking on my own, but that’s not true! He hid me between the fissures big enough to fit me. It was to protect me. Not leave me behind. My dad wouldn’t have left me behind.’

And Bish thought it strange that seventeen-year-old girls who had sex with idiot boys could still cry like babies for their fathers.

‘I believe you, Violette.’

Eddie wasn’t coping well with Violette’s reaction and was now crying himself. His sobbing seemed to come from the gut, a mixture of pain and grief. ‘I miss my mum,’ he said over and over. And that got Bee started, and all Bish could do was hold onto the three sobbing kids and hide his own overwhelming anguish. All those years ago, a man had tried to protect his child on this rock. Etienne LeBrac hadn’t come here to die. He’d come to be reminded of beauty in an ugly year. If Bish were still a religious man, he would have sworn the dead were with them in this ancient place. The beautiful dead. And he felt that the three in his arms sensed it too.

They heard a whistle and looked down to see Charlie waving, and pointing towards the village. A horde was approaching. They didn’t look like daytrippers. Reporters, Bish thought.