Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

  Loud voices were coming down the hall. “The Kenningtons,” Bish explained. Charlie’s parents exchanged a look.

  “Tell the Kennington boy you’re sorry, Charlie,” his father said.

  “Yet I’m not,” Charlie said, feigning pleasantness. “And if he opens his mouth again,” he shouted to everyone within hearing distance, “I’ll cut out his tongue!”

  “Oh, Charlie,” his mother said.

  18

  That evening, Bish received a text from Grazier. It listed Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, BuzzFeed, reddit, and the words “JOIN/FOLLOW” in capitals. Bish couldn’t deny it was the best way to track down Violette and Eddie, but he was irritated at being forced into something he’d deliberately avoided for years—not because he was a Luddite, but because he didn’t care to embrace the art of ticking mediocrity and keep up with the mundane comings and goings of other people’s lives.

  His first Facebook friend request was to his daughter. Bee rang him a moment later.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “You’re friends with Sofi,” he said.

  “You’re a copper. How do you think everyone’s going to feel about posting stuff?”

  “I want to keep in contact with some of the kids from your trip, Bee. And this is faster than going through their parents.”

  “Do you know how creepy you sound? I heard David tell Mum you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  The fact that his ex-wife and her husband discussed Bish in front of his daughter was humiliating. He managed to talk Bee into accepting his request, but it came with a threat that if he did anything to embarrass her he’d be unfriended. He posted on her wall, Thanks Honey Bee, and she posted back, That was your first and last warning.

  He set about studying her list of friends. A handful from her athletics club, her school football team, and about half a dozen from the Normandy tour. The rest were names he didn’t recognize, though he checked those pages just in case. They all seemed legit. The one thing he was certain of was that Eddie and Violette weren’t using their real names on Facebook. He tried every variation of Violette’s name and came up with nothing. There were only a few Eddie or Edward or Ned Conlons, and they all lived a long way from Kent.

  What he did read on Bee’s Facebook wall was that Lola, Manoshi, and Fionn had been transferred from Boulogne to Buckland Hospital, in Dover. It hadn’t made the news yet, so Bish couldn’t help wondering if it was true. It seemed too soon to be moving them around.

  He went to bed that night with three Facebook friends: Bee, his mother, and Jill from the comms team at work, who had 768 friends. He had ended up in bed with her after the Christmas party last year because they were both pissed, so once again he felt a great regression in his life, accepting her invitation to befriend him online.

  Next morning he checked to see if he had gained any friends overnight and found himself bombarded by the Worthington side of the family. Bish had spent a lifetime avoiding them, and now he would be subject to hearing about their tedious lives on a daily basis. By 9 a.m. the transfer of the three injured kids to Buckland had been confirmed, and was being discussed vigorously on morning talk shows in both countries. The French were insulted that the kids had been moved so soon, given the severity of their injuries. The British media commentary was along the lines of “Thank God these kids are safely home on UK soil,” as if France were a distant enemy territory and not a thirty-five-minute drive across a twenty-one-mile channel.

  It was now a week since the bombing, and the mainstream press had exhausted their stories about the five dead and three badly injured and were now after tales of heroism and resilience. Bee had already expressed regret that she had got out of the bus as fast as she could, and Bish didn’t want her actions judged by others. It’d break her.

  He was checking his Facebook page to see if Layla Bayat had accepted his friend request within the past five minutes when Elliot rang.

  “Grazier’s fuming because Ian Parker won’t let us talk to his daughter.”

  Bish didn’t question why he needed to know how Grazier felt. “You work for the government, Elliot. Just go down there and demand to speak to him.” He was concentrating on finding any new friends Bee had accepted overnight. Was Zulu Dawn a pseudonym for Violette despite there being no obvious connection between their names?

  “Making demands is tricky,” Elliot was saying now. “The French already did that. Apparently their investigators were insinuating that Lola Barrett-Parker was the target of the attack.”

  Elliot suddenly had his attention. The daughter of an MP who persisted in expressing his views about foreigners could easily have been a target. Lola was sitting in the front row of the bus that day.

  “Grazier wants you to speak to Parker face-to-face,” Elliot said.

  “I already did that. Wasn’t pleasant. And I thought my job was bringing Violette and Eddie out of the cold?”

  “Yes, by getting the parents to find out what they can from their kids. Ian Parker is a parent. Both your children were on that bus. Common ground.”

  Common ground? It’s what he had with Noor LeBrac. With Ian Parker. With the Kennington bigots. Bish didn’t want that sort of common ground.

  “Lola, Manoshi, and Fionn haven’t been interviewed by British intelligence. Better that you chat with the kids than those goons. Total ignorami when it comes to dealing with kids.”

  “Ignoramuses,” Bish corrected.

  “You’ll make the home secretary very happy if we don’t have to force an interview on Parker and other parents of the injured.”

  “And yet making the home secretary happy is not my number one priority this morning.”

  “Try,” Elliot said, hanging up.

  So Bish spent the next two hours talking to parents, trying to find a way to Ian Parker. There was no number for him on the Calais list and no one seemed to have a connection with him. No one seemed to want it. When Bish rang Greta Jager’s father, he knew he had to question what Grazier’s journalist contact had overheard. They spoke about the injured kids for a while, until Bish found his segue.

  “Paul, is there a chance Greta might have seen something that could help the investigation? On the night before the blast?”

  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.

  “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 knew 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 j
ust foreigners he goes after.” She added briskly, “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Can you teach me how to use Instagram?”

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

  “You need an account,” 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 take the time to despair 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 marveling at his ubiquitous mother. Absent throughout his teenage years, everywhere he turned in his middle age. Saffron had 134 Facebook friends. Katherine Barrett-Parker was the latest.

  After a quick phone call, he went to pick up his mother and drove her down to Dover. Earlier that week she’d traveled 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 had never heard his mother speak of hers. He wanted to ask about them, but feared they involved Stevie’s death. So they spoke of Bee instead.

  “She just holds everything in,” Bish said.

  “Well, she took after you, and you took after my father,” Saffron said.

  His eyes left the road for a moment; he was surprised to hear the comparison. 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?” Bish asked. Carl Worthington 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 had adored my 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 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 Fr
ance,” 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.