Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

by Melina Marchetta

  Bish stood not far from the Spanish bus; the concealed body of the fourteen-year-old girl lay before him. He watched as Attal crouched, almost reverently, between the bodies of Michael Stanley and Julius McEwan. When the Frenchman noticed Bish he nodded in acknowledgment, and in that way the pair of them kept a strange vigil.

  Forty-five minutes later the coroner arrived. Julius McEwan’s body was taken first. A thirty-five-year-old man who lived with his mother, loved his dog, and loved his job. It didn’t seem to Bish such a bad life to have had. All three deaths had been quick. The pain wouldn’t be over quickly for the families, but one day there would at least be the consolation that their loved ones had never seen it coming.

  The next morning, a handful of parents arrived on the first ferry, two having flown in from holidaying in India, the other Eddie Conlon’s father. An older man. Disheveled. Disconnected. And certainly not someone Lucy Gilies would identify as a foreign type. Bish was about to introduce himself when sirens sounded and Attal and his team arrived in a small convoy. The capitaine hit the ground shouting orders. His people sprinted from cabin to cabin.

  “Do you think it’s another bomb?” Saffron asked as they watched from the veranda of the dining hall.

  Lucy, sans medication, was the one to break the news. The students without guardians had shared her cabin, and sometime during the night two of them had managed to disappear.

  Eddie Conlon and Violette LeBrac Zidane.

  5

  Bish rang his embassy contact at the hospital to update her on the Violette and Eddie disappearance and found himself on the receiving end of a heartbreaking update. He passed it on to the remaining parents, before they could hear it from the press. The news of Astrid Copely’s death stunned the already fragile group. Astrid had sat next to Michael Stanley, opposite Manoshi Bagchi and Lola Barrett-Parker. The wounds to her torso were so horrific that Bish hoped Bee would never learn the details.

  A group of local women were allowed to enter the campground with fresh food to distribute to the various busloads of foreign kids, as well as to the British families. There was a practical earthiness to them that provided a comfort beyond words.

  Bee was finally interviewed by Attal. She was rude in dismissing the translator. Her French, as far as she was concerned, was better than the translator’s English. Bish wasn’t happy with that arrangement and called in Saffron, who could at least translate for him. The capitaine’s questions centered on Violette. Had the girl revealed anything about her family’s identity? Had her actions spoken of anything suspicious? What did they talk about, seeing as they shared a room for six nights? Bee was surly in her responses. Angry. At one stage she demanded that Attal return the belongings of those on the bus.

  “Your suitcase is part of the investigation now,” Bish told her patiently. He knew her anger was covering her grief. It was how Bee dealt with tragedy. Fury first, and then she switched off.

  Attal wasn’t going to let her go so easily. Did the other students on the bus know that Violette was a LeBrac? Did they think she was hiding something? Bee told Attal that all of them knew her as Violette Zidane. A couple of them recognized the name and asked if she was related to Zinedine Zidane, who the French kids claimed was the greatest footballer of all time. Violette ignored them mostly. Except for the night before last, when she told a bunch of them that her uncle was a great footballer.

  The questioning seemed to be over and Bee was on her feet. “I want to ring Mum,” she said, holding out her hand for Bish’s mobile. He gave it to her and she left the interview room.

  Attal’s eyes met his, but Bish couldn’t read anything in his expression—even when the capitaine reached over and gave Bish his business card, as well as returning the handwritten list of names.

  Outside, Bee had disappeared. Bish went searching and found her sitting alone on the recreation hall steps. She had her “sod off” earphones on, which meant no conversation was going to take place.

  On the way to the main gate he walked ahead of Saffron and Bee and rang his ex-wife to let her know they were heading home.

  “We’ll be there by four p.m.,” he said. “She’ll be relieved to see you.”

  “David says you need to let her play out the anger,” Rachel told him.

  David Maynard, being a headmaster, was the expert on Bish’s daughter and every other kid in Kent. Bish muttered a good-bye and hung up.

  A moment later the phone rang. Again a blocked number. Elliot? Or one of the other parents.

  “The LeBrac girl going missing with Eddie Conlon is a bit of a cock-up.”

  Elliot hadn’t lost the art of stating the obvious.

  “I’d blame that on the friends you sent yesterday to scare her into believing they’d go after Eddie and her uncle.”

  “Ah come on, Bish. You know I’m pretty particular about who I’m friends with.”

  Bish wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

  “At the moment our greatest source of information is The Sun,” Elliot said. “First we read that Violette was put in a cupboard. Next that she gave every guy on the bus a hand job.”

  “Yes, because Murdoch’s people always get it right.”

  “Give us something, Ortley. Anything.”

  “What makes you think I have anything?” Bish asked just as Saffron and Bee caught up with him.

  “Because we’ve been tracking down the parents who’ve returned home. Most of them saw you speaking to the French cop in charge. All of them saw you walk into that interview with Violette and two men who we’re presuming are MI6. You’re the name on everyone’s lips, Ortley. So you might know more than we do at the moment.”

  “If anyone had brains they’d go visit Sarraf and find out what he knows,” Bish said. “Violette would have gone straight to him.”

  “Both sides of the Channel have done that,” Elliot said. “He told us to fuck off, but not before we discovered that his niece and the boy visited early this morning. He went out to buy croissants or baguettes or whatever the fuck the French eat for breakfast, and when he got back the kids had vanished.”

  “I’m presuming whoever you work for isn’t just focusing on Violette as a suspect?” Bish asked.

  “We have no idea who’s responsible for yesterday, but I think it’s pretty clear that those kids are on the run. From us.”

  “Who’s this ‘we,’ Elliot? Is it some sort of royal ‘we’? You and the Queen?”

  “Let’s talk when you get home, Bish. And give your mum my love. She’s doing a marvelous job over there.”

  Bish hung up and found his mother and daughter staring at him.

  “Elliot?” Saffron asked.

  “He’s working for either the Home Office or MI5.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Bish darling.”

  “Not as ridiculous as believing he made the trains run on time.”

  They approached the car in silence and got in. It seemed a long time ago that Bish and his mother had traveled down this dirt path, not just the day before. After executing an awkward U-turn, trying to avoid every other car parked in so narrow a track, Bish was relieved to be in control again. He had just reached a fork in the road when Bee made a gagging sound.

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  He stepped on the brake. Bee was out of the car, disappearing into a thicket of trees before they could stop her. Bish looked at his mother, not knowing whether to follow.

  “Daddy. Sofi!”

  He was never going to ignore a “Daddy.” Saffron was there beside him and they found Bee with a hand against a tree, bent over.

  “Don’t come closer. It looks vile,” she said miserably, turning around and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Bish and Saffron waited a short distance away, and when Bee reached them he put his arm around her shoulder.

  “You’ll be home with Mum soon, Honey Bee,” he promised softly.

  She held on tight to both of them, and when she let go the always prepared Saffron had wip
es.

  “Can we just sit here?” Bee asked. “I feel sick at the idea of getting back into the car.”

  Twenty minutes later they were on the road heading towards the port of Calais. Bee was tense, flinching at every sound, every siren. Bish wondered how much she’d actually seen of the dead and injured. Would the memories return now or in the weeks to come? He reached out to take her hand and she let him. He thought of those families traveling home without their loved ones and it made him hold her hand even tighter. Bish hadn’t felt blessed in three years. At this moment it was all he could feel.

  Driving through Calais he saw the hunched way that people walked. Regret. Guilt. Children from other countries had died in their own backyard. Had been killed so savagely.

  Bee was quiet all the way through French immigration, but when they were asked to hand over their passports by the UK Border Force, she was telling the officer everything. That she’d been on the bus that blew up and her father was a chief inspector for the Met and he was helping out with the investigation, and that the capitaine of the police wouldn’t give them back their luggage and all she wanted was to get home. And then she burst into tears.

  The officer was sympathetic.

  “She’s in shock,” Saffron said quietly, placing an arm around Bee and leading her away.

  “Is it as bad as they say?” the officer asked Bish.

  He nodded, collecting Bee’s documents.

  “Lucky you’re driving your daughter home, then,” the man said, his voice low enough for Bee not to hear.

  From Dover to Ashford, Bish tried conversation with Bee. Saffron had insisted on taking the backseat, and he could see she was fighting sleep.

  “Were you close with any of them?” he asked Bee quietly. “The kids who were taken to hospital?”

  She shrugged. “Fionn Sykes wasn’t exactly the most social person in the world. He spent most of the time on his own. He was a bird-watcher.”

  Glancing across, Bish caught a flash of pain in her expression.

  “Michael Stanley and Astrid Copely had a crush on each other. The day before…yesterday, everyone was making fun of them because they were caught kissing. Two geeks in love, we called it. Lola Barrett-Parker and Manoshi Bagchi took a photo of them. They took photos of everything. Lola was the biggest pain in the arse and Manoshi was a show-off cynic. Thirteen going on forty.”

  “Do you think Violette LeBrac and Eddie Conlon bonded because they seemed to have the same cultural background?”

  “Her name’s Violette Zidane,” Bee corrected. “She’s Australian and he’s from Kent. I wouldn’t exactly call that the same culture.”

  “You know what he means, Honey Bee,” Saffron said from the backseat.

  “Eddie’s mum died about a year ago, so they must have bonded over lost mothers,” Bee said. Her tone was callous, but there was something else in it too. “Violette thought she was too above it all to tell anyone anything.”

  “Why didn’t the other kids like her?”

  “What makes you think they didn’t?”

  “No one seemed to be concerned about her being locked in a cupboard, Bee.”

  “We didn’t know, okay?” she shouted. “We didn’t know.”

  She turned to stare out the window. Bish caught Saffron’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  “She played with people,” Bee said after a while. “And that accent. It was hideous. It was like watching a really bad episode of Neighbours.”

  “And Eddie?”

  “I think he had a big crush on her. During the day they were always together. Sometimes he was withdrawn. Other times he was really funny. He’d break out in song and he did a really good pelvic thrust version of ‘Moves like Jagger.’ He was totally obsessed with music.” Bee was pensive for a moment. “They were both kind of uninhibited. This one time we were at a town fair just outside Saint-Malo and there was a platform for dancing, but it was empty. Until them. They danced like no one else existed in the world. They did most things like that. Most times.” There was a strange quality to Bee’s storytelling. A wistfulness, perhaps? “On the bus, she’d be teaching him Arabic. The kids at the back used to make fun of it, but she didn’t care.”

  “It’s a hard language to learn,” Saffron said.

  Had she tried? Bish wondered. Once, as a teenager, he’d been intrigued enough to borrow Arabic language books and tapes from the library and study them in his dorm room. Until his father was notified by the headmaster.

  “It’s not really who we are, Bish. Your mother’s more English than the Queen. No more Arabic study now, promise?”

  And Bish had promised, although he wondered why his more-English-than-the-Queen mother had named him Bashir, and why the earliest memory he had was of her calling him habibi. But he chose not to pursue it. Stephen Ortley had worked hard for the foreign office. He was respected and loyal to his country and he expected his wife and son to be the same. Bish had honored that part of the deal. He didn’t know what his mother had honored. She had been a no-show for part of his teenage years, even during those times when his parents were living not half an hour’s drive from where he was boarding. When Bish was home for school holidays, he could see that she did her best to be the mother he remembered from when he was a child, but by the time he was fifteen he had switched off. Saffron’s saving grace in his adult life was that she was a good grandmother. Her grief following Stevie’s death almost broke her.

  “There’s no way Violette did it, you know,” Bee said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I asked her myself after you got her out of that cupboard, and she said if she truly wanted to blow someone up, she’d have put the bomb under Crombie’s seat.”

  Bish flinched. He hoped for Violette’s sake that she hadn’t said this to anyone else.

  6

  Bish had been home for less than a day when Elliot rang again.

  “Get yourself to Kingly Court, Ortley. A colleague would like to have a word.”

  He’d already downed his second Scotch of the morning. Wasn’t in the mood to stay focused. The previous evening he’d left an exhausted Saffron and Bee with Rachel and Maynard and driven home alone. Bish had always refused to break bread with David Maynard in the home he once owned. And here was Elliot trying to involve him in something he didn’t want to be involved in. It was boarding school all over again, except now the home secretary was involved.

  “Get off at Oxford Circus. I’ll send you the address,” Elliot said before hanging up.

  Bish hated public transport. These past two years he had lived in the Isle of Dogs. He worked locally and drove there, avoiding the West End at all costs. Saffron lived in Gravesend, his daughter in Ashford, both accessible within an hour via the A2 and M20. Getting to the West End was another story. The DLR seemed unnatural to him. An automated tram was too close to a metaphor of his life, on so many levels. No one at the helm, people putting their lives into those driverless hands. So he took the tube from Canary Wharf, regretting it in an instant. The heat and the body odor combined with his throbbing headache made him want to take up cycling.

  Elliot’s directions led to a café with outdoor tables. Bish suffered from the opposite of the seasonal illness. He hated sunshine, and for the life of him couldn’t understand how a man with skin as white as Elliot’s would want to sit outside. At school Elliot had been called anything from Casper to albino boy, and the older he got, the more ghostly he seemed to become. Rachel used to refer to him as the Specter of Death.

  The man sitting with Elliot had a pissed-off look that was directed at anyone who ventured too close. It was the sort of look that belonged to a harassed man at the end of the day, not at ten in the morning. Elliot introduced him as Grazier. He was older than Bish, but fit. Bish didn’t question whether Grazier was his first or last name because he didn’t want a relationship with the man and asking such a question would suggest he did.

  A selection of morning papers lay on the table before t
hem. All about the same person. SPAWN OF SATAN. VIOLENT VIOLETTE. POISONOUS AND PROMISCUOUS. The alliterations were turning his stomach. Violette LeBrac was front-page news everywhere he turned. Most media outlets had dropped the Zidane surname. Earlier that morning Bish had watched a panel arguing about Violette on a talk show. How had a minor’s name been made public? one of the panelists questioned. The killers of James Bulger were given more anonymity, and they’d actually been convicted of a crime. Violette LeBrac had not, so why was she being treated like a criminal? Another panelist brought up the rumors of Violette running off with one of the lads from the tour. At least Eddie’s name and age were being kept out of the media. Bish could just imagine the further savaging she’d receive about what pact existed between a seventeen-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old boy.

  “We were relieved to hear your daughter wasn’t injured in the bombing, Chief Inspector Ortley,” Grazier said.

  That “we” again.

  “You had the opportunity to speak to most of the students and parents as well as the French police, I hear?”

  “As a father. I have the right—”

  “That wasn’t a reprimand.”

  But it was something other than a friendly discussion, and Bish hoped Grazier would get to the point sooner rather than later.

  “I don’t even know where you work,” Bish said, looking at Elliot.

  “We work for the government.”

  “My postman works for the government,” Bish said. “Can you be more specific?”

  The waiter came with a tea for Grazier and a fried-up feast for Elliot.

  “Violette LeBrac Zidane holds dual French-Australian citizenship, so neither country is going to be happy with us,” Grazier said, ignoring Bish’s question. “Basically, we want this to go away, and the only way that will happen is if we find Violette and Eddie, alive. Every bleeding-heart organization in the country is crying foul over the way she’s been treated. So what’s your theory?”