Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil Read Online Free Page A

LeBrac.’
    ‘Where is she now?’ Bish asked.
    Lucy was taking deep breaths and Saffron placed an arm around her.
    ‘I’ll be fine,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ve had something to take the edge off. They were a horrid lot, the kids. Violette. All of them.’
    Bish and his mother exchanged a look.
    ‘We never met any of Violette’s people at Dover,’ Lucy said. ‘Most of the older kids were unaccompanied, except for Bee. Violette said her family had moved to Deal last autumn. She had all the right documentation, sent from there. But they were fakes. According to Mr G’s contact at the embassy, she lives in Australia.’
    ‘But where is she now, Lucy?’
    Her blubbering resumed. Bish’s ex-wife had once told him that a male being critical of a crying woman was an act of misogyny, so he tried to be patient. ‘Have you any idea why she’d lie to go on the trip? Travelling across the world for an eight-day tour of Normandy isn’t exactly top of a teenage wishlist.’
    She shook her head. ‘This was my first time chaperoning,’ she admitted. ‘Mac – Julius McEwan – said that once in a while you experience a group that clashes.’
    ‘This year’s?’ Bish asked.
    ‘Yes. The ringleader was expelled from one of those bluecoat private boarding schools for cheating. Charlie Crombie. He’s a depraved little beast. It’s quite ironic that he’s the son of a reverend. The kids all seemed to relinquish power to him.’
    Lucy took another tissue from Saffron and dabbed at her eyes. ‘The thing is . . . Violette got herself a reputation with Charlie Crombie.’ Her voice had dropped, as if after such a day the worst thing that could happen was a tarnished reputation.
    ‘They had nothing to do with each other during the day, but . . . Of course it was forbidden to be in the cabin of someone of the opposite sex at night, but it’s hard to keep an eye on all of them and they were a sneaky lot.’
    ‘Violette and this Crombie boy were an item?’
    ‘I don’t know what they were. Violette spent most of the days with Eddie Conlon.’
    ‘Romantically linked?’ Saffron asked.
    Bish hoped not, seeing Eddie was thirteen and Violette seventeen.
    ‘I don’t believe so. Mr G thinks they hit it off because they looked the same sort of foreign, but Mac reckons . . . reckoned it was grief. Said he could pick it. Eddie lost his mum to cancer last year.’
    And Violette, Bish thought, had lost her father young and grown up without a mother. That was enough common ground.
    ‘What do you mean by same sort of foreign?’ he asked.
    ‘Eddie looks Mediterranean or Middle Eastern,’ Lucy said.
    ‘Was my granddaughter drawn to them?’ Saffron said. ‘Doesn’t she look the same sort of foreign?’
    Lucy thought about it a moment, as if it had never occurred to her.
    ‘Is your wife Middle Eastern, Chief Inspector Ortley?’
    ‘No, my father was,’ Saffron answered.
    ‘I’m so sorry, did I offend you by that term?’ Lucy’s tears were welling up again. ‘I’m not one of those people who judge by skin colour, and I sound as if I am.’
    ‘Nothing to be sorry about, Lucy dear,’ Saffron said, but her tone had cooled slightly.
    They headed back towards the recreation hall. The bombsite was now crawling with national and regional police, and a group of useless-looking suits. Attal seemed far from impressed and Bish could understand why. A bunch of officials stomping on evidence was the last thing they needed.
    ‘The French policeman’s daughter was on one of the other buses,’ Lucy told them. ‘The Pas-de-Calais football tour. They used school-aged junior coaches. Marianne Attal was one of them.’ Lucy leaned towards Bish, as if Attal could hear her at this distance. ‘What I would call a piece of work, strutting around as if she owned France itself.’
    They watched as Attal almost came to blows with a photographer trying to take a photo of what lay inside the canvas surrounding the