Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

  They spoke for a little while longer about the other students before he left to look in on Fionn Sykes. Bish had found out a little about him from Bee, and the papers had profiled all the injured kids. Despite losing part of his left leg from the knee down, his injury was simple compared to Manoshi’s and Lola’s, and he seemed to be healing better than the others. Bish had no idea how the boy was faring mentally, except that, according to Sadia Bagchi, he was pining for his mother.

  Bish knocked at his door. “I’m Bee’s father,” he said. “She sends her best,” he lied.

  “She’s not hurt, then?” Fionn asked.

  “One of the lucky ones.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  He was a plain kid. Quiet, unassuming. Fionn seemed to have an old soul, which would have made him an outcast among the likes of Crombie and Kennington.

  “Well, I won’t keep you,” Bish said. “Just thought I’d say hello.”

  “I haven’t really spoken to anyone in days,” Fionn said. “The nurses and doctors are kind but it’s hard to communicate.”

  Bish figured it was an invitation to stay, so he sat down in the chair beside the bed.

  “Can you tell me about the others, sir?” Fionn asked, a flicker of pain on his face. Bish didn’t know whether it was physical or from the memory of what happened. “I know about Mac and Serge the bus driver. They won’t bring me newspapers or a TV yet, but I know someone died here on the first night. I can’t understand much because they speak so fast, but I saw one of the nurses crying.”

  Bish nodded gently. It seemed an insult to deny the deaths. “Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely,” he said. “And a Spanish girl called Lucia Ortez.”

  Tears sprang to the boy’s eyes and he gave a ragged sigh, composing himself. “They were younger than me, Michael and Astrid. Fifteen I think.”

  “Did you know them well?”

  “No, but I remember that his great-grandfather was buried in the Bayeux War Cemetery. Michael played the last post there on his harmonica. Astrid was getting her braces off when she got back from France. I heard her telling him one day.”

  Fionn Sykes took notice of people in a way that others, including Bee, didn’t. Just five minutes in the boy’s presence, and Bish was already a fan.

  “Lola and Manoshi are just down the corridor, of course,” Bish said.

  “Yes, their mothers have popped their heads in once or twice. And I worked out that if I was here, anyone sitting close to where I was would be too. How bad are they hurt?”

  “Manoshi lost a hand, and her left eardrum has been severely damaged. Lola’s lost an eye and has a broken arm.”

  “Lola and Manoshi were like those two guys in the Muppets. A running commentary on everything.” Fionn looked guilty. “Everyone thought they were pretty annoying.”

  Is that how Bee felt? Guilty that people she didn’t like or who annoyed her had ended up with such horrific injuries?

  The phone buzzed on the bedside table. The boy reached for it awkwardly and put it down again.

  “It’s the newest iPhone,” he said. “An anonymous donation with a two-hundred-quid credit so I can get to speak to my mum whenever I want.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  Fionn shook his head.

  “Will she be arriving soon?”

  “We’re from Newcastle way.” He grimaced. “We can’t afford this. Private rooms and all.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about hospital fees for the time being, Fionn.”

  “And if my mum was to come, she’d have to find a place to stay near the hospital and that costs money too, and she doesn’t speak a word of French. She’s never traveled outside our village.”

  Bee had never had to worry about where the next fiver was coming from. As a barrister, Rachel earned more than Bish, and they’d lived comfortably.

  “She doesn’t drive,” Fionn mumbled.

  Bish regretted mentioning his mother. The boy was forced to make excuses and it was none of his business. “What do you hope to do with yourself after next year?” he asked to change the subject, although he’d hated that question more than any other at Fionn’s age.

  “It’s between reading history or theology at Cambridge. I’m going for a scholarship.”

  “Theology?”

  The boy seemed amused by Bish’s reaction. “I get all the criticism about religion, you know, Mr. Ortley. But the thing is, you can’t take it away from people and not leave something else of substance. That’s what your generation will be remembered for. Taking so much away and replacing it with so little of worth.”

  Seventeen going on seventy.

  “I don’t want to hit you when you’re down, Fionn,” Bish said, “but I think your generation is going to be known for being the least useful at anything except ticking likes on Facebook.”

  “Cruel words, sir,” Fionn mocked. “Only this morning the nurse let me look at my Facebook page on her iPhone. I was feeling heartened by the hundred and fifty likes for the words ‘Get well soon.’”

  But the mockery was bitter. “My leg’s been blown off and someone writes ‘Get well soon’ as if I’ve just had my tonsils out.”

  Bish was grateful to Fionn for bringing up the elephant in the room. He could see the tears threatening to spill. Bee got vicious if Bish ever caught her crying. Sod off, Dad. I don’t have to share every thought that goes through my head.

  “Sometimes people who care about us say all the wrong things for all the right reasons,” Bish said. “How bad’s the pain?”

  “I get asked that question every half hour by the nurses,” Fionn said. “Can you ask me something else?”

  “Talk to me about the other kids on the bus, then.”

  “I know the chaperones probably said we were a rubbish lot, and all that talk about Violette…” Fionn shrugged.

  Bish thought of the rumors circling around Violette and a number of the boys on the bus. Had Fionn been one of them?

  “Did you fancy her?”

  Fionn was surprised by the question. “Violette only had time for Eddie Conlon. And Crombie, of course.”

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “It wasn’t that. On the first day she made a name for herself when she punched Charlie Crombie. I thought she did it for attention, but it scared people off and I realized that was exactly what she wanted. To be left alone.” Fionn thought about it a moment, his face aflame. “I don’t know how the two of them ended up…”

  Shagging, as Crombie would have put it.

  “I heard her talking to Eddie Conlon about me. ‘I know his type,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet you the dickhead asks who our favorite Doctor is.’” A blush crawled up Fionn’s face again, and reached his ears. It seemed Violette had guessed right.

  “I was obsessed with Tom Baker,” Bish told him. “Much like every other nincompoop in the seventies, I wore the long scarf. It’s pretty obvious who everyone’s favorite Doctor is.”

  Fionn laughed. It transformed the boy.

  “She called me a dickhead as well,” Bish added.

  “In here,” Fionn said, pointing to his heart, “Violette was tough. Revealed nothing. As girls go, she’s probably up there in the category of don’t-even-think-of-it-unless-you’re-insane, like Charlie Crombie.”

  “Do you have someone back home?” Bish asked.

  The boy shrugged, his cheeks and ears instantly red again. “Not really,” he mumbled. “There was a girl from school. We were flirting.”

  Flirting didn’t appear to conjure up great memories for the lad.

  “Tell me about Charlie Crombie.”

  Fionn seemed relieved that the conversation about flirting was over. “He used to be a student at my school. We were both bluecoat scholarship students, but our paths never crossed. I suppose you know of the cheating thing?”

  Bish nodded.

  “I heard him tell Rodney Kennington that he had to repeat a whole history unit at his new school, and that they were going
to accept the trip as one of his assignments.”

  Fionn was pensive a moment.

  “The thing with Crombie is that he was hands down the leader.”

  “Was there a need for one?”

  “Always.”

  “A bullying cheat? That was everyone’s only option?”

  “Yes. If he didn’t establish hierarchy, he’d be at the mercy of the other year elevens. He said he could smell the weakness in their piss from a mile away. The only two who had balls were ‘the alpha bitches’: Violette and—pardon me, sir—your daughter. The rest of us were his minions.”

  Yes indeed. Bee came from a long line of alpha bitches on both sides of the tree.

  “You liked being one of his minions?”

  Fionn laughed. “It was a strange sort of fun. I’m better as a follower, except I was almost wetting my pants half the time Crombie suggested something to the group. It was mostly getting back at the French kids. The French police captain’s daughter is another one you don’t want to cross. Sometimes it got vicious.”

  Fionn looked up at Bish, as if working something out for the first time. “Crombie’s a bit bent, you know. He sees things at a tilt. It’s why Violette made sense to him. Everything about her screamed ‘different’ to the rest of us. Nothing matched. Her accent. Her name. Her face and her hair. She was pretty intense.”

  The young man sighed. “It’s hard not to think of her as anything but the Brackenham bomber’s granddaughter, now that I know that.”

  “And the Eddie thing?”

  “I heard someone say his mother died, not even a year ago. But I don’t know, they seemed to just get each other.”

  “Did you feel that she was hiding something?”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  Was Bee hiding something, apart from her sorrow? “What were you hiding, Fionn?” Bish asked softly instead.

  Another flash of pain in his expression. “The girl I had been hanging out with—we board together at Ashcroft. She came home to Newcastle with me at Easter. My best mate too. It was pretty awful. They hooked up in the end. Came back to school and spread stuff around about my mum. I think I miss being friends with him more than the idea of her, but it was a bad term and I thought the holidays would be even worse, knowing they were together. So the tour made sense.”

  Fionn seemed embarrassed by his disclosure. “If you tell me that my time will come at university, sir, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  Bish laughed. “I was a social twat at university, so I’d never lull you into a false sense of security.”

  Fionn grew pensive again. “He’s a smart one, that Crombie. Don’t know why he cheated on that exam. He didn’t have to, you know.”

  Quiet souls like Fionn Sykes noticed the not-so-obvious. Did the truth of what led up to the bombing belong to a hidden part of this boy’s memory?

  Bish would have loved to know what Fionn had observed of Bee, but talking about her seemed a betrayal.

  A nurse came in to check the boy’s blood pressure and Bish thought it was a good time to leave.

  “Mr. Ortley,” Fionn called out when he was at the door.

  Bish waited, but Fionn didn’t speak again until the nurse had left.

  “I think it would be easy for people to hate Violette because she belongs to that family, but regardless, she didn’t hand out sexual favors on the bus. I think it’s wrong that they’re saying things about her that aren’t true. It’s just wrong.”

  Elliot rang him when he was on the M20 heading home. “Every time I turn on my TV or open a paper, there you are.”

  “What is it you want, Elliot?”

  “Layla Bayat. She’s a connection to the Sarrafs and could have information about Violette and Eddie. Grazier wants us to speak to her.”

  “Good luck with that, Elliot, but you and me aren’t an ‘us.’”

  “We are if the home secretary says we are.”

  11

  Ms. Bayat?”

  Layla looks up to see two men standing at the door of her office.

  “Can I help you?” she asks, feeling far from helpful because whoever these men are, they should have been announced. Her office may be a shoe box next to the toilets, reflecting her status in the firm, but all she wants is for people to do their job and respect the importance of the four suffocating walls around her, thank you very much.

  One of the assistants appears behind the men, looking almost apologetic. Almost.

  “George Elliot and Bish Ortley.” Jemima gives a couldn’t-give-a-shit-who’s-who wave between the two. Layla’s last encounter with a George Eliot was in high school, having failed an English literature exam after expressing the view that Middlemarch could have been written in five hundred pages rather than the eight hundred plus. So the hostility she feels towards these two, turning up at 10 a.m. without an appointment, is limitless. But one look at them tells her they aren’t here for Silvey and Grayson business.

  “Can you bring me the file on the Carrington-King case?” Layla asks Jemima all the same. Because unknown men in suits means trouble, and Layla needs the office spy to reassure the partners that these men are part of everyday business.

  Chances are Jemima will tell Layla to get it herself. On the younger girl’s first day two years ago, Layla told her she wouldn’t be there long. Jemima misunderstood, complained, and Layla was called in to explain herself to one of the partners and to Vera, the head of the admin girls. Layla couldn’t admit that she had meant Jemima would outgrow her typing and filing duties, because Vera was a world-class bitch and would make sure that Layla never got a document typed again. The pity is that Layla liked Jemima instantly. A working-class Hounslow girl, smart and thorough. It was hard shaking a council estate address when you were working in the city, regardless of your job, or your race. But Jemima decided that Layla wasn’t the ally she wanted. The antagonism festered, even though Jemima was the only girl Layla gave work to. Everyone else was lazy and thought they were above it. Rumor had it that Jemima would be in charge of the admin girls one day. Nothing wrong with that. But if Jemima had taken the time to listen, Layla would have told her to get herself a law degree.

  After Jemima leaves the room, the two men seat themselves. Gut instinct tells Layla they’re government. Gut instinct has been talking to her since the bombing outside Calais made the front page four days ago.

  “Carrington-King?” the shorter of the two asks, perhaps the Elliot one. Skinny, pale, with a perpetual “Who, me?” look on his face, as if he’s in the midst of doing or saying something wrong.

  “Two people getting a divorce who don’t concern you,” she says flatly.

  Jemima returns with the file as well as a quizzical look that can only mean she’s been questioned by one of the partners.

  “Will you close the door on your way out?” Layla says. Jemima leaves and Layla studies the men. “What is it you want?”

  There is hesitation, until the other one, a shaggy-dog type with a healthy head of golden-brown hair spliced with gray, stands, sifts through his pocket, hands over a messy business card. Chief Inspector Bish Ortley of the Bethnal Green police station. Now she’s confused. Calais is a long way from Bethnal Green.

  “Have you been in touch with Jamal Sarraf lately?”

  But not that far away.

  “Last I heard Jamal Sarraf lived somewhere in France.” She’s pissed off. The men sitting at her desk know she’s pissed off. She presumes both of them have come across many pissed-off women in their lives.

  “We’re here out of concern for Sarraf’s niece,” Ortley says.

  So he’s playing good cop, but there’s something about him. A festering below the surface. The bloodshot eyes and sad teddy bear look. This man comes with a story.

  “You desperately care about her, do you?” she asks. “From what I’ve been reading, no one seemed to care about Violette’s reputation when it was smeared from France to the rest of the world this week.”

  Ortley gets twitchy at thi
s.

  “We think you may know where she and the boy are,” he says.

  “And why would you think that?”

  “Well, let’s start with the fact that you lived next door to Violette’s mother and uncle for almost eighteen years,” Elliot says.

  “I’d like you to leave.”

  “Layla,” Ortley says. “Can I call you that? All we need to know is whether Violette has made contact with you. Whether she and the boy are okay.”

  Layla points. “There’s the door.”

  Elliot leans forward. “We may visit your sister next, Layla,” he says. “And from what I know about the family Jocelyn married into, the Shahbazis have built wealth and a good name in a reputable way. If there’s something they hate most in the world, it’s people breathing the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’ in the same sentence.”

  “Then do me a favor, wanker,” Layla says. “Try really hard to avoid breathing ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’ in the same sentence. You’ll get the hang of it sooner or later.”

  This guy, unlike his partner, seems oblivious to the fact that he irritates people.

  “My brother-in-law’s family are well aware of who our neighbors were,” she says.

  “But do they know you’d been in a relationship with Jamal Sarraf since you were sixteen?” Elliot asks. “I’m willing to wager that it didn’t end there. Some acquaintances of your brother-in-law’s may not like the fact that over the years you’ve crossed the Channel to fuck a terrorist.”

  He looks pleased with himself. Ortley seems uncomfortable, his attention on the furnishings.

  The Sarrafs have no more family living in the UK. So each time there’s a bombing, the media call on Layla, because of the Brackenham connection. Once or twice it was Layla’s sister Jocelyn they went to, since she’d been Noor’s best friend. But most people know not to approach Ali Shahbazi’s wife and kids. Ali has the power and money to sue anyone who hassles his family. These clowns in her office know that too, which is why they’ve come here first and not to Jocelyn’s home.

  “So what are you thinking, Layla?” Elliot asks.