“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.