Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (14 page)

‘It’s not her,’ he said immediately, because he knew it was all she wanted to hear. Her legs buckled and Bish’s hand snaked out to grab her. He sat her back down on the chair and gently pushed her head between her legs, then waited in silence as she regained her breath.

‘Where could she be, Noor?’ he asked firmly.

She didn’t respond. When she had recovered she sat up. ‘Did you see my brother?’

He nodded and she said, ‘Tell me what you know.’

Would sharing information with Noor LeBrac invite her trust and lead to some revelation about Violette in return? Could it be that easy? He told her that a pressure-cooker bomb had been placed in a backpack in the overheard compartment, killing three kids and two adults. There were two amputees and one victim who’d lost an eye. And there were others, like his daughter, who walked away without a scratch.

The fragile woman from moments before was gone. One unimpressed look said it all. No, Bish. It wasn’t going to be that easy.

‘Most of that’s been reported by the media,’ she said, her voice clipped and precise. ‘Tell me something they don’t know.’

The private school accent irritated him.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said.

It was cat-and-mouse and Bish preferred to be neither. ‘I need a motive,’ he said.

‘For my daughter blowing up a bus?’ The fury in her expression was instantaneous.

‘No. For Violette lying about being on this side of the world. Why now?’

She studied him silently. It was unnerving, but he held the stare.

‘Noor, I crossed the Channel today to ID the body of a young girl and I prayed to a God I’m not sure I believe in anymore that it wasn’t Violette.’

After a long silence she slid her hand into a pocket and retrieved a postcard, placing it on the table between them.

‘It’s from Violette.’

The message was brief.
I’m going to shame the devil.

Was it a threat of some sort? He picked up the postcard and took in the details. Posted in Calais the day after the bombing. ‘The guards let you have this?’ he asked.

‘They didn’t suspect it was from her. They probably thought it was some nutter, so yes, they let me have it. They’re considerate in that way,’ she said dryly.

‘How do you know it’s from Violette?’

‘She studied
Henry IV
this year. “O while you live. Tell truth and shame the devil,”’ Noor quoted. ‘She borrowed the line.’

‘What truth is she referring to?’

The hostility was back in her eyes as she studied him. As if he was supposed to know the truth according to the LeBracs and Sarrafs.

‘Can I take this?’ he asked.

LeBrac snatched it out of his hands and tucked it back into her pocket.

‘All I have to do is tell your guard about it,’ Bish said. ‘So why don’t you put us all out of our misery and hand it over now.’

‘Because it could be the last thing my daughter writes to me, so if anyone wants it they’ll have to fight me for it.’

He tossed up whether to give her more information. He figured she’d taken a chance by showing him the postcard. ‘Violette’s not on her own,’ he said. ‘She’s travelling with one of the kids from the tour.’

LeBrac’s lip curled in disgust. ‘Who? The one who smeared her reputation?’

‘Crombie’s not important,’ Bish said.

‘If my daughter had sex with him, he’s important,’ she said flatly.

‘You didn’t have sex with insipid idiots at her age?’

‘I’ve had consensual sex with one man in my life and Etienne LeBrac was anything but insipid.’

Consensual sex. It turned Bish’s stomach to think what she meant by that, regardless of what Noor LeBrac had done.

‘The thing is, she hasn’t run off with Crombie. It’s a bit stranger than that.’

She eyed him cautiously. ‘In what way?’

‘The boy she’s with is only thirteen,’ he told her.

The flash of pain that crossed her face made him susceptible to empathy again and he didn’t want to feel that for her. It also meant she knew something.

‘Tell me about the boy,’ she said in a low voice.

‘I can’t,’ he said patiently. ‘He’s a child. His privacy is protected. All the students and parents connected to the tour have signed documents stating they won’t reveal his name.’

She looked around the room. ‘Are we being monitored?’

Bish actually had no idea. ‘Not by me. Are your visits usually recorded?’

‘I rarely have official visits,’ she said.

‘So let’s presume that the people who sent me to interview you trust that I’ll tell them everything and haven’t felt the need to record us,’ he said.

She shifted a little closer to him. ‘Then answer me a yes or no,’ she said, and something in her eyes begged him, so Bish nodded.

‘Is his name Eddie Conlon?’

After getting nothing more from Noor LeBrac, Bish stopped by the off-licence on the way home. He had learnt the art of not always going to the same place. Didn’t want to see the look in the eye of the same someone behind the counter. He’d become a master disguiser of it all. In the end he didn’t know who he was disguising it from. And by the time he finished the bottle of Scotch that night, he didn’t care.

He stayed in bed late the next morning to sleep off his hangover. His dreams were a mishmash of drowned bodies. In one, the body in the French morgue belonged to his son. In another Stevie was weeping, asking, ‘Who’s the girl in the Channel?’ It was Noor LeBrac who comforted his boy, while Bish could only watch, just as he had from behind the mirrored prison wall. In his dream she stared at him smugly. ‘I’m taking your child the way you took mine,’ she said.

When he woke his face was wet with tears. He opened another bottle of Scotch, downed a glass, then one more. He found his phone and deleted every message from Grazier and Elliot. Then drank straight from the bottle.

Later in the day, in the muffled crowded blur of his head, he heard footsteps downstairs. He tried to get out of bed but his hand caught the glass on his bedside table and sent it shattering to the ground.

‘Bish?’ Rachel was outside his room. He managed to get up and attempted to put on some clothes, despite the fact that they’d been married for sixteen years and she’d seen it all.

She knocked again and opened the door just as he pulled on a pair of trousers.

‘I’ve been ringing for ages,’ she said. ‘I found the spare key.’

He saw the look on her face as she took in the room. It was a look of pity, and it shamed him.

‘Sorry. I’ve had this bug since I got back,’ he lied.

‘I’ll be downstairs making you a cup of coffee.’

The coffee sobering-up myth irritated him but he figured she made the offer to give her something to do. He showered quickly, his head hammering with the familiarity of too little food and too much Scotch.

She was cleaning up when he came downstairs. A week’s worth of plates and rubbish.

‘I’ll do it,’ he muttered, because his overly pregnant ex-wife cleaning up after him was enough to make him feel like a bastard. ‘Did you drive here?’

‘No, I had to go into the city today. David will be here soon to pick me up.’

Great.

‘Don’t let our daughter see you like this,’ she said quietly. ‘She might seem as if she doesn’t give a shit, but she’s flirting with depression right now and it’s scaring us.’

Bish hated it when Rachel referred to ‘us’.

‘She’s staying with your mother at the moment. Says we’ve suffocated her since she returned from France.’

He could hear the hurt in her voice.

‘She’s being a bitch about the baby. Acts as if I’ve put on fifteen kilos eating Cornish pastries.’

He sipped the coffee. Pretended he wanted to be sipping it. Did a lot of pretending while he watched Rachel, all round-bellied, ready to pop out a son for David Maynard any moment now. Not Bish’s son. Theirs was lying cold in a grave.

Regardless, he wanted nothing more for her than peace. The year before Stevie died she had finally got silk, and she had a great reputation as a human rights barrister. But after his death she became estranged from her world. All she wanted to do was talk about Stevie, and not many people stayed the distance for that. Except for Saffron and the one man Rachel claimed allowed her to grieve in the way she needed to: Stevie’s school principal.

Bish had reacted in the opposite way. He relied on silence. He became a workaholic, falling into bed every night from exhaustion. After Rachel had told him about her affair with Maynard, they called it quits, because she was in love with another man. Perhaps if they’d been younger when everything fell apart, they’d have made a mess handling the divorce, but neither could bear the idea of their daughter’s life being any more miserable. So he let Rachel stay in the house in Ashford and he moved up to London. Bee claimed the Docklands was a soulless place, especially on weekends, when it seemed as if there was no one left in the world to talk to. But it suited Bish. Outside his police work, talking was the last thing he wanted to do.

Rachel handed him a muesli bar from her bag, then retrieved her mobile and started flicking through it.

‘I found photos on Bee’s iPad. They’re not on her Instagram account. These four were hidden in a folder marked “martial arts”.’ She held out her phone.

Bish stumbled to the sink, his stomach churning. He thought of the vulnerable teenage girls he came across at the station, caught up in porn.

He felt Rachel’s hand on his shoulder. ‘They’re not what you think,’ she said.

He splashed his face with cold water and dried it with a tea towel. When he was seated he took the phone.

The photos were a shock all the same. Bee with her arms around Violette Zidane and Eddie Conlon. An expression on her face that Bish hadn’t seen for three years. Pure happiness. Another shot of Bee rolling her eyes while Eddie’s tongue cheekily hovered near her ear, Violette watching on with a half-smile. Then the three of them staring solemnly ahead with eyes so dark and skin so perfectly matched. Another of them laughing. Bee looked gorgeous. They all did.

‘She told me she’d had nothing much to do with Noor LeBrac’s daughter, but that’s definitely her, isn’t it?’ Rachel pointed to Violette.

‘They were forced to be roommates for the entire trip.’

‘Who’s the boy, Bish?’ she asked quietly, and he knew what she was thinking. Beautiful boys with golden skin belonged to Rachel and Bish.

‘Eddie Conlon. He’s the one who’s gone missing with Violette. They’re trying really hard to keep his name out of the papers.’

Bish studied the photos one more time before handing back the phone. ‘Can you email them to me on that thing?’ he asked. ‘I can print them off here.’

Rachel concentrated on the task of sending the photos and he watched her master something he had no idea about.

‘What made you suspicious about the martial arts file?’ he asked.

‘I bumped into her instructor at the supermarket a couple of weeks ago and he asked after her. Told me how disappointed he was when she dropped out back in May.’

Had they become those type of parents? Who didn’t know where their kids were?

‘What could she possibly have been up to on Saturday mornings?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘I was going to ask her when she returned from Normandy, but then . . .’ Rachel shrugged.

But then someone blew up their daughter’s bus and it didn’t seem important.

Bish heard a sound at the door and leaned back in his chair to see David Maynard standing in the hallway. Maynard was an unorthodox principal. Every kid at the school had his mobile number. Bee had told Bish the story of his speech to the seniors – not to get into the car of a drunk driver, to ring him instead. Any time of the night. He’d drive them home, no questions asked. The child protection people wouldn’t have been impressed, but the parents were.

‘I rang the doorbell but no one answered,’ Maynard said.

‘It doesn’t always work,’ Rachel said.

Maynard stepped into the kitchen. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked Rachel. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Oh, you know. The usual.’ She was trying to keep her tone light. ‘Bee’s hanging out with terror suspects.’

Maynard seemed tentative, as if waiting for Bish to invite him to sit down. When he didn’t, Maynard stared over Rachel’s shoulder at the photograph on her phone.

‘Bee was friends with Violette Zidane?’ he asked. ‘Who’s the boy?’

‘Eddie Conlon,’ Rachel said. Her phone rang and she went off to answer it, leaving Bish with Maynard. It wasn’t the most pleasant silence, so Bish decided to break it.

‘She thought you were an idiot first time we met you,’ he said, because he wanted to destroy something and Maynard was accessible.

Maynard nodded. ‘Yes, she told me. And that you totally disagreed and said I was the sort of chap you’d enjoy a pint with.’

Bish didn’t go around using the word ‘chap’ so it rankled even more to be misquoted.

Fearing that Grazier or French Intelligence would somehow discover a more intimate connection between his daughter and the missing kids, Bish drove to Gravesend late that afternoon to see Bee. The house had been in the family for generations. A three-acre property that was ridiculously too big for a woman living on her own, but it was home. Saffron had spent decades travelling for his father’s work, ‘to some of the most tedious parts of the world, darling’. His father had never made it high enough up in the service to have preference regarding where to be sent next. Great-Aunt Margaret Worthington had commented more than once that lack of ambition ran in the Ortley line. It’s what some people believed when a cop chose not to become a detective.