“They reckon if our bus had been full, there’d be a string of body bags. Thank God everyone used to fight over the back seats.”
“How many sitting at the front, Honey Bee?” Saffron asked.
“I don’t know. Mr. McEwan, plus about half a dozen. Fionn Sykes was there too. He usually sat at the back, but he was fixing up the luggage.”
She looked stricken for a moment. “There were two others—they were outside, opening the gate. Violette and Eddie.”
Bee looked up at him and Bish saw regret and fear on her face.
“I couldn’t see a thing,” she said. “I didn’t do a thing. I just wanted to get out of there, and then…then I thought I saw Stevie. And I just knew that if I got to him, I’d be safe…But it ended up being Eddie. Eddie Conlon. That’s who I saw outside the bus, except I haven’t seen him since, and I don’t know where she is—Violette.”
Bish pressed a kiss to her brow. “Bee, who’s in charge?” he asked. “Who’s been taking care of you all since it happened?”
“No one, really. Gorman’s running around like a bloody idiot. Reckon he’s speaking to the embassy.”
“And the other one?” Bish asked, remembering a young woman he had met briefly at the port in Dover. “Lucy?”
“Basket case.”
There had been three “shaps,” as the kids liked to call them, on the tour. Two were teachers—Russell Gorman and Julius McEwan—earning extra money over the summer break. The other was a university student wanting to sharpen up her French language skills. Bee had put her name down weeks ago for the eight-day trip through Normandy, paying the deposit herself. Neither Rachel nor Bish knew about it until the deadline for the final balance. Bish had a feeling she just wanted to get away from her friends. They were all fake, she’d complained lately. He’d noticed a change in his daughter since her return from a junior athletics meet in Gothenburg earlier that year. Perhaps it was the introduction to a foreign culture, and the diversity. Bee was never short of an entourage at home, but she wasn’t quite meshing with any of them one-on-one.
Saffron finally angled Bee away from the grisly view and back to the bedroll. Close by, a boy of about fifteen sat slumped with his head on his knees. Bish crouched beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. The boy looked up.
“I didn’t get to ring my mum,” he said, fighting the tears. He was holding a sheet of paper torn out of a wire-bound notebook. It had a list of names and dates of birth written in a neat hand. Some had phone numbers written alongside. Since Bee was identified as Sabina Ballyntine-Ortley, Bish figured the details had been copied from the passports. On the back of the sheet was a sketch of seating placements. Bish took it from the boy, relieved at someone’s initiative to be practical under such circumstances.
“What’s your name?” he asked the boy.
“Matty.”
“Who wrote this, Matty?”
The boy shrugged.
“Who has your passport?” he prompted.
“Lucy. The shap. She was in charge of holding the passports since Dover.”
Lucy the chaperone wasn’t as switched off as Bee thought if she’d taken the time to record these details.
“Most of our phones are out there,” Matty said, pointing in the direction of the bomb site. “Someone had theirs on them and they passed it around so we could ring home, but it ran out of credit halfway down the list. Gorman won’t let us use his phone because he’s waiting for a call from the embassy.”
Bish retrieved his phone. “What’s your mum’s number?”
When the boy had finished speaking to his mother, Bish’s phone did the rounds. From the handwritten list, he worked out that if a kid had contacted home he was to tick his or her name. Those who had been taken to hospital were marked with an H. There were seven names marked “Unaccountable.”
He saw a tick next to Eddie Conlon’s name. Bee had seemed concerned about him and would be relieved to hear he’d contacted a parent. Bish noticed the date of birth beside his name: Eddie had turned thirteen in February. When Bee had mentioned Eddie, Bish got a sense they were the same age, not four years apart.
“Chief Inspector Ortley.”
Russell Gorman, the teacher from Strood, was coming towards him. There was a fevered look in his eyes.
“The locals think they’ve got total control.”
“Well, Calais and Boulogne do belong to them,” Bish reminded him. “Who have you been dealing with here?”
“A local. Capitaine Attal. I’ve been letting him think he’s in charge until someone arrived,” Gorman said.
Bish was about to correct him. He wasn’t here to investigate. The Metropolitan Police didn’t send their officers to France to investigate a bombing. But a cry at the entrance made him turn, and he saw a couple embracing a pair of identical twins who looked about Bee’s age.
“I know who did it,” Gorman said. “Bad blood,” he added.
“What are you saying?” Bish asked.