Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil (44 page)

Layla’s phone rings all morning. Interviews. A death threat. Her mother. A death threat. Phillip Grayson wanting her to ‘pop into the office for a talk’. And yet another death threat. She sits on the stairs outside her flat door. She can hear her landline ringing nonstop.

If the truth be told, Layla is petrified. Not just because of the threats, but because there’s no turning back now. She’ll have to make a list of all the things she needs. Office space. A barrister. A paralegal. God almighty, she’ll have to sell her flat and move back in with her parents.

Her mobile rings again and this time she sees her sister’s name.

‘If you’re going to speak to the press, Layla, you need to look like a million pounds or they’ll make out that you’re nothing but a council flat girl who has no idea,’ Jocelyn says.

‘A million isn’t that much these days.’

‘Two million then. So two suits. I’m taking you shopping.’

Jocelyn’s crying. Everyone seems to be crying these days.

‘And if Ali offers you an overdraft, Layla, take it.’

‘Well, I’ll think about it, but I may have another way.’

‘Layla, do
not
move back in with Mummy and Baba.’

‘Keep telling me that,’ Layla says. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

She returns Phillip Grayson’s call.

‘Come in and let’s talk, Layla,’ he says. ‘If you win this, LeBrac and the Sarrafs will go for compensation. You can’t go after those responsible on your own.’

Can she really still be naïve enough to feel surprised? It was always going to be about money for the Graysons of the world.

‘Remember when you used to send me out to see the “Arab clients”, as you liked to call them, Phillip? Because most of them were old-fashioned and preferred to meet with one of their own kind? So what if they find out that it was you who told the press I was sacked because of my so-called links to a terrorist? I have a feeling they’re going to want to start looking for different legal representation. A firm that doesn’t reek of racism.’

He makes an impatient noise. ‘Then why call me back, Layla?’

‘I want you to swap the word “sacked” for “made redundant” and I want a package. I’ll get back to you with the details. And for your information, Noor LeBrac and the Sarrafs would never go for compensation. Out of respect for the people Louis Sarraf killed.’ Layla wishes she had one of those old phones she could slam in his ear.

She hears the sound of the front door opening on the ground floor, and tentative footsteps walking towards the stairs.

‘Layla?’

Surprised, she peers down the staircase and sees Jemima.

‘They’re wasting your time,’ Layla calls out. ‘I’ve already told Grayson what I want.’

Jemima reaches her, holding a takeaway coffee. ‘Everyone says you’d be a fool not to take the job back.’

‘Why, when I can get a redundancy package instead?’

‘Enough to pay a paralegal?’ Jemima asks.

Layla can’t hide her surprise.

Jemima gives her a look. ‘Offer me a job or you’ll end up with someone like that crap paralegal from Leeds who couldn’t understand your writing.’

She holds out the coffee. ‘Latte with half a sugar?’

Layla can’t help a smile.

‘What else do we need?’ Jemima asks.

We
. Paralegal:
tick.

Her phone beeps again. ‘If you’re going to work for me, start by reading this.’ She hands the phone to Jemima. ‘And if it’s a threat, delete it.’

Jemima studies the screen. ‘Sounds more like a come-on than a threat.’

‘Jimmy?’

‘Nope. Someone called Rachel.’

Layla’s heartbeat is back to out of control. Forgive me, Jimmy, she thinks, but a come-on from Rachel Ballyntine is what I need at the moment. ‘What does it say?’

‘Let’s do this.’

Bee came to stay with Bish and even took him out for brunch at an old church converted to a café on Westferry Road.

‘My treat,’ she said when they were seated at an outside table. It was one of London’s drearier autumn days and Bish and Bee couldn’t have been happier with the weather as they enjoyed spectacular eggs and coffee under a filthy sky.

‘Is this because you’re impressed that I sort of saved your girlfriend?’ he asked, reaching over for the last of her bacon.

She sipped her coffee before answering. ‘First, she’s not my girlfriend. Second, you didn’t sort of save her, you did actually save her.’

Not according to Grazier. ‘We’d rather you don’t get identified as having anything to do with what happened in Calais yesterday,’ he’d told Bish on the phone. Bee had found out from Marianne.

‘Anyway, I was impressed long before that,’ Bee said. ‘When you rolled around in the rubbish with Gorman at the campground.’

‘Really? I was oblivious to impressing you for a couple of weeks?’

‘No. You haven’t impressed me for a couple of weeks, you impressed me a couple of weeks ago. Bum crack showing and all.’ Bish could tell she was trying not to laugh. ‘Even Crombie admitted you weren’t as useless as you looked. He was also impressed.’

‘With the bum crack?’

This time she did laugh. But then she set her coffee cup down on a precise spot. ‘I’m going to tell you something and you can’t get mad.’

There was a look in her eye that said he wasn’t here for a treat. ‘I can’t promise you that, Bee.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘But I’m not going to.’ Now Bish was truly suspicious. ‘I’m presuming there’s a 99.9 percent chance you’re not pregnant.’

She was slightly amused, so he figured it couldn’t be that bad. ‘People trust you,’ she said, leaning forward and moving his cup out of the way. ‘Parents. The government. Now even the French trust you, and they think everyone’s beneath them. Violette’s mum trusts you, and according to Violette she trusts no one.’ Bee looked hard at him. ‘So if anyone rings with what may appear to be alarming news, tell them to trust you. Because you’ll take care of things.’

As if on cue, his phone rang. He looked at the screen. Grazier. They had already touched base that morning but Bish picked up the call anyway.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

‘Manoshi, Fionn and Lola have gone missing from the fucking hospital.’

Bish stared in alarm at Bee, who was looking over his shoulder – to avoid eye contact, he presumed.

He covered the phone so Grazier couldn’t hear. ‘Bee, what’s going on?’

Before she could answer, someone pulled up a chair and sat beside him.

‘I’ll get back to you, Grazier,’ Bish said, looking from Bee to Violette. ‘Trust me.’

Violette was thinner in the face and the dark circles under her eyes were prominent. But she seemed less fierce. Even relaxed.

‘I need you to come with us, Chief Inspector Ortley,’ she said. ‘We mightn’t be terror suspects anymore, but we’ve got a better chance of getting up to Yorkshire with you. I want to show Eddie where our father died. It’s part of why I came over here, and I’m not going back without doing that.’

Driving a bus with explosives through a French convent school seemed so simple compared to dealing with Violette LeBrac Zidane.

‘Where’s Eddie? And the others?’ He wanted a response that didn’t involve a felony.

Violette and Bee seemed to have taken a vow of silence.

‘They’re
injured
,’ he said. ‘They can’t be out of the hospital.’

‘It’s not as if they’re still on the critical list,’ Bee scoffed. ‘They’re off drips and eating solids and bored to death.’

‘Look,’ Violette said, ‘it was only supposed to be Fionn, but Lola and Manoshi caught on and decided they were coming along or it would be
hashtag we-know-where-Fionn’s-gone
.’

Bee shook her head in disgust. ‘Whose stupid idea was it to put those two together again?’

It was Bish’s turn to stay silent.

‘And the thing with Fionn is his mother,’ Violette said. ‘He needs to see her.’

‘We thought we’d kill two birds with one stone.’

He stared from one to the other. He didn’t like all this bird death with little promise of success.

‘We’ll be back down south by nine tonight,’ Bee said. ‘Win-win.’

‘And all you have to do is tell anyone who rings that they can trust you,’ Violette said.

‘Noor’s not going to like your plan, Violette.’

‘
Noor?’
she said, hostility suddenly in her voice. ‘We’re on first-name terms, are we?’

‘Yes, we’ve bonded over your being the star of social media and CCTV for the past weeks, Violette.’

Her eyes narrowed even more.

‘How’s Eddie taking everything?’ he asked, reminding himself that he was the adult here.

‘Did you see the graffiti on the news?’ she asked. ‘Someone wrote
Eddie Bin Lardin lives hear
on his cottage wall. Can’t even spell. Frickin’ dumb people give me the shits.’

‘Same,’ Bee said.

Bish nodded. Same.

‘So where are they?’ he asked, as Bee put money on the table and stood up. ‘How the hell did you get Fionn into a car?’

Sighing from his companions, as if Bish were an idiot for asking so many questions.

A long car horn sounded loudly from the road.

‘In that,’ Violette said.

‘What?’ He turned to look.

‘We got him out of hospital in that.’ She was pointing to the Salvation Army twelve-seater with wheelchair access that had just pulled up. Lola, Manoshi, Fionn and Eddie waved ecstatically from the backseats.

Bish stumbled to his feet. Bee and Violette followed him to the van, where Charlie Crombie poked his head out of the driver’s window. ‘He’s not driving.’

That was how Bish found himself riding shotgun to Charlie Crombie on the road to Yorkshire with a carload of kids who should have been in school or in hospital. The upside was that the fathers of Lola and Manoshi finally found something to unite them: their desire to have Bish arrested on a string of charges. Katherine and Sadia were only slightly more forgiving.

‘Have you lost your mind, Bish?’ Katherine asked when Lola passed him her phone. ‘Ian’s called the police. You do know that?’

‘They are sick children,’ Sadia said. He could tell he was on speaker phone.

‘I think they’re sick of being sick children,’ he said. ‘And they were heading north regardless of whether I came with them or not. Would you rather I’d let them go on their own?’

‘I’m calling your mother,’ Sadia said.

Bish rang Grazier and waited for the swearfest to end before he spoke. ‘You’re a heart attack waiting to happen, Grazier.’ Now he was reduced to channelling Sarraf.

‘Turn the bus around and bring them back,’ Grazier ordered.

‘I don’t have access to the keys. Charlie won’t relinquish them for the time being.’

Charlie shot him a look that said he was never going to relinquish them.

‘I’ll have the kids back at the hospital tonight,’ Bish said. ‘Meanwhile keep the media away from this. Call off whatever police Ian Parker’s got on board. No roadblocks. No car chase.’

‘I’m up for a car chase,’ Charlie said.

Grazier swore again. ‘Where are you heading?’

Bish didn’t quite lie, just left out some of the truth. ‘Fionn needs to see his mother. I’ll ring you when we get there.’

‘No, you’ll see me when you get there,’ Grazier said. ‘And judging by the phone call I just had from Ian Parker, you’ll be seeing them as well.’

When Bish hung up, his phone rang immediately. Twice. Elliot. Rachel. He ignored them both.

‘Can you please switch that off?’ Crombie said. ‘It’s annoying me.’

‘Chief Inspector Ortley, is it true you were involved in what happened at Marianne Attal’s school?’ Manoshi asked.

Bish turned around to face the rest of the kids. Perhaps it was time to own his hero role.

‘Someone tweeted that you broke a man’s arm and ran over a statue of a saint,’ Lola said.

Or perhaps not.

‘Chief Inspector Ortley, is it true you thought there was a point-one percent chance that Bee was pregnant?’ Lola asked.

‘Why only point one?’ Violette said. ‘Being a lesbian doesn’t mean someone’s knicked off with her uterus, Chief Inspector.’

‘I might want kids one day,’ Bee said. ‘Sperm’s all I need.’

‘You can have mine if it’s okay with my missus,’ Charlie said.

‘Eyes on the road,’ Bish ordered. He looked at Violette. ‘Is that what you aspire to? Being Charlie’s missus?’

‘Yes.’ Violette seemed proud to own the title. ‘He’s going to be my first ex-husband.’

‘Cheeky bitch.’ Charlie was grinning.

When they passed through Cambridge, Bish was ordered to swap seats with Bee and found himself next to Violette.

‘I need to say something to you, Chief Inspector, that you won’t like hearing,’ she said, not wasting any time.

There were screeches of laughter from behind them. He turned to see Eddie Conlon imitating someone, doing pelvic thrusts in his seat, entertaining the girls.

‘If this is about your mother —’

She held up a hand to warn him against further mention of her mother.

‘It’s about Bee. She thinks she wasn’t enough to keep you all together . . . and that her brother would have been. She thinks she wasn’t worth it.’

He winced, glancing at Violette. She nodded in confirmation. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, she sighed.