The boy shrugged, his cheeks and ears instantly red again. “Not really,” he mumbled. “There was a girl from school. We were flirting.”
Flirting didn’t appear to conjure up great memories for the lad.
“Tell me about Charlie Crombie.”
Fionn seemed relieved that the conversation about flirting was over. “He used to be a student at my school. We were both bluecoat scholarship students, but our paths never crossed. I suppose you know of the cheating thing?”
Bish nodded.
“I heard him tell Rodney Kennington that he had to repeat a whole history unit at his new school, and that they were going to accept the trip as one of his assignments.”
Fionn was pensive a moment.
“The thing with Crombie is that he was hands down the leader.”
“Was there a need for one?”
“Always.”
“A bullying cheat? That was everyone’s only option?”
“Yes. If he didn’t establish hierarchy, he’d be at the mercy of the other year elevens. He said he could smell the weakness in their piss from a mile away. The only two who had balls were ‘the alpha bitches’: Violette and—pardon me, sir—your daughter. The rest of us were his minions.”
Yes indeed. Bee came from a long line of alpha bitches on both sides of the tree.
“You liked being one of his minions?”
Fionn laughed. “It was a strange sort of fun. I’m better as a follower, except I was almost wetting my pants half the time Crombie suggested something to the group. It was mostly getting back at the French kids. The French police captain’s daughter is another one you don’t want to cross. Sometimes it got vicious.”
Fionn looked up at Bish, as if working something out for the first time. “Crombie’s a bit bent, you know. He sees things at a tilt. It’s why Violette made sense to him. Everything about her screamed ‘different’ to the rest of us. Nothing matched. Her accent. Her name. Her face and her hair. She was pretty intense.”
The young man sighed. “It’s hard not to think of her as anything but the Brackenham bomber’s granddaughter, now that I know that.”
“And the Eddie thing?”
“I heard someone say his mother died, not even a year ago. But I don’t know, they seemed to just get each other.”
“Did you feel that she was hiding something?”
“Weren’t we all?”
Was Bee hiding something, apart from her sorrow? “What were you hiding, Fionn?” Bish asked softly instead.
Another flash of pain in his expression. “The girl I had been hanging out with—we board together at Ashcroft. She came home to Newcastle with me at Easter. My best mate too. It was pretty awful. They hooked up in the end. Came back to school and spread stuff around about my mum. I think I miss being friends with him more than the idea of her, but it was a bad term and I thought the holidays would be even worse, knowing they were together. So the tour made sense.”
Fionn seemed embarrassed by his disclosure. “If you tell me that my time will come at university, sir, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Bish laughed. “I was a social twat at university, so I’d never lull you into a false sense of security.”
Fionn grew pensive again. “He’s a smart one, that Crombie. Don’t know why he cheated on that exam. He didn’t have to, you know.”
Quiet souls like Fionn Sykes noticed the not-so-obvious. Did the truth of what led up to the bombing belong to a hidden part of this boy’s memory?
Bish would have loved to know what Fionn had observed of Bee, but talking about her seemed a betrayal.
A nurse came in to check the boy’s blood pressure and Bish thought it was a good time to leave.
“Mr. Ortley,” Fionn called out when he was at the door.
Bish waited, but Fionn didn’t speak again until the nurse had left.
“I think it would be easy for people to hate Violette because she belongs to that family, but regardless, she didn’t hand out sexual favors on the bus. I think it’s wrong that they’re saying things about her that aren’t true. It’s just wrong.”
Elliot rang him when he was on the M20 heading home. “Every time I turn on my TV or open a paper, there you are.”
“What is it you want, Elliot?”
“Layla Bayat. She’s a connection to the Sarrafs and could have information about Violette and Eddie. Grazier wants us to speak to her.”
“Good luck with that, Elliot, but you and me aren’t an ‘us.’”
“We are if the home secretary says we are.”
11
Ms. Bayat?”
Layla looks up to see two men standing at the door of her office.
“Can I help you?” she asks, feeling far from helpful because whoever these men are, they should have been announced. Her office may be a shoe box next to the toilets, reflecting her status in the firm, but all she wants is for people to do their job and respect the importance of the four suffocating walls around her, thank you very much.