After a quick phone call, he went to pick up his mother and drove her down to Dover. Earlier that week she’d traveled to Boulogne to visit the injured kids, and had met both Katherine Barrett-Parker and Sadia Bagchi.
“You could have told me you were going,” he said. “I would have taken you.”
“I find that the best way to battle the demons, darling, is to get into a car and drive for hours.”
Bish understood demons. He had never heard his mother speak of hers. He wanted to ask about them, but feared they involved Stevie’s death. So they spoke of Bee instead.
“She just holds everything in,” Bish said.
“Well, she took after you, and you took after my father,” Saffron said.
His eyes left the road for a moment; he was surprised to hear the comparison. There was a wistful smile on his mother’s face. Bish was always fascinated by the snippets of information about her earlier life.
“I still can’t understand how the Worthingtons got away with taking you from him.”
“The same way most people get away with the wrong thing,” she said. “Wealth. After our mother died, Aunt Margaret had us flown back to Kent for the holidays and we were never returned.”
“Imagine being up against Great-Aunt Margaret in her prime,” Bish said.
Saffron went quiet and Bish thought the conversation was over. He wanted to know more about their stolen history, and was relieved when she continued.
“We hated our English names. Our parents named us Khalid and Safeyah. We may have looked like foreigners in Egypt, but we felt like strangers here. No one ever speaks of it, but I know it killed my brother in the end.”
“So you don’t think it was an accident?” Bish asked. Carl Worthington died before Bish was born. His uncle had been a big drinker, and one night his car went off a Cornwall road and into the sea.
“Who knows?” she said. “He was old enough to remember more than I ever could. Carl had adored my parents and spoke of them often, reminding me of how happy we had been in Alexandria. A simple life, but Bashir Nasrallah was not a simple man. Just one of few words.”
“And you never saw him again?”
“No. I think my father tried once or twice to see us, but I can’t imagine Aunt Margaret making it easy for him. He remarried years later. That much she chose to share with us.”
Bish heard bitterness in her voice, but sadness in her sigh.
“I went a bit silly after my brother died,” she said. “Aunt Margaret told me often enough that my reputation was in tatters. I met your father and then you happened, when I was just about Bee’s age. I told him I was pregnant and he could have walked away, but he didn’t, so we fudged the dates and got married. No one dared talk about it.”
She turned to look at Bish. “I promised your father I wouldn’t do anything to affect his prospects with the foreign office. I owed him, in a way, and the expat lifestyle suited us. I think we made each other as happy as we possibly could.”
Made each other as happy as they possibly could? A marriage like that could be read in so many different ways.
“Saffron’s not such a bad name,” he said.
“It’s damn ridiculous,” she said with a laugh. “So twee. It sounds worse as I get older. Thank God Bee and Stevie had the sense to call me Sofi.”
Saffron reintroduced him to Katherine Barrett-Parker outside her daughter’s room, before going to see the registrar, who was an old friend. Lola’s mother was slightly warmer than she had been the first time, mostly because Saffron was a good press agent.
“She’s recovering quicker than we thought she would,” Katherine said, a little defensively. “This business about my husband insisting she be transferred to England has got out of hand. We’re not racists, and we’re not ignorant. Boulogne was merely impractical. We did it as much for the other two kids as for Lola.”
“Is your husband around?” Bish asked.
“He was here this morning, but had work to attend to.”
“Would you let Ian know that if he’d like to talk, one father to another, I’d welcome it?” Bish held out his card, hoping he wasn’t laying it on too thick.
“Your mother told me about your loss,” Katherine said. “Well, she was speaking of her own loss, I suppose…”
Bish didn’t want to use Stevie’s death as a means to get Ian Parker talking. He looked away and was about to pocket his card, but Katherine took it.
“Can I speak with Lola, Katherine?” he asked.
“Ian won’t—”
“She may be able to shed light on where the two missing kids are,” he said. “It’d be heartbreaking if we lost them too.”
He could see she was torn.
“Please don’t tell her about the deaths,” she said, relenting. “It’s been tricky, but the language barrier in France made it easier to keep the truth from her.”