“Sabah el Kheir,” the man says. He’s in his early forties, with a receding hairline and an impassive look on his face. Or he’s trying to come across as impassive.
“Morning,” Jamal murmurs in response. There’s no doubt in his mind that the man knows who he is. The waiting on the street corner. The certainty that he understands Arabic. There’s a compartment in Jamal’s head that’s always alert to the possibility of someone’s vengeance for what his father did. And now it’s also alert to the possibility that Ortley and the government are using neighborhood spies to keep an eye out for Violette and Eddie. In the London that he owned as a boy, Jimmy is a stranger as a man, overwhelmed by the crowds, paranoid at any recognition.
He takes the tube to Charing Cross and then the train to Tonbridge and arrives within the hour. He’s never met Eddie’s adoptive parents, but Anna Conlon was a letter writer. Every year on Eddie’s birthday she sent Jamal a card with a photo. She mentioned her husband often. John Conlon was a gravedigger and, Jamal suspects, less forgiving than his wife. The Conlons moved to Kent when Eddie came to them. Originally from Liverpool, they couldn’t bear to live in their old neighborhood after losing a son.
Conlon is waiting for him at the station. He’s somewhere in his late fifties, but grief seems to have added on the years. It is a strangely quiet morning they spend together; Conlon has nothing to offer on Eddie’s whereabouts, and Jamal isn’t much of a talker these days, but he finds himself enjoying the stillness of it all.
“I dug my son’s grave all those years ago,” John tells him as they sit eating lunch in, of all places, a cemetery, watching a procession pass them by. John has brought ham rolls and beer for them both. Jamal doesn’t have the heart to tell him that, regardless of how superficial his practice of Islam is, he avoids pork and alcohol. “And a year ago I did the same for my wife. If I have to dig Eddie’s grave, someone will be digging mine soon after.”
No use telling him not to think that way. Jamal would do the same thing. Noor too.
“What happened between you and Eddie, John?”
“I think I broke his heart even more than our hearts were already broken,” Conlon says, and there’s a crack in his voice. “I don’t care if he’s done something wrong and the French want to talk to him. I don’t care if the police here want to talk to him. I just want Eddie off the streets. I want people to stop hurting kids who look like him.”
When his phone rings on the train back to Charing Cross, Jamal knows it will be Noor. Any time between three and four thirty is her time to ring him.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“On the train. I went to see John Conlon.”
“What has he got to say for himself?”
He’s reminded of her words yesterday. Tell him to be a damn father to his son. How much must it have hurt to say that? Etienne was Eddie’s father. She is his mother. They never had their chance.
“He’s blaming himself. Said he’d slackened off ever since Anna died. That he said something to hurt Eddie and that’s why he’s not coming home.” Jamal knows that Noor would have pushed John Conlon for more.
“What’s it like out there?” she asks.
“It’s the same and different.”
“Yimi’s grave?”
“Beautiful,” he lies. “Taken care of real good.”
He can tell she’s crying.
“I wish I hadn’t seen you, habibi,” she says, and it makes him weep himself.
“If you want to fight this, Noor, just tell me. We’ll get you out of there. The family will find the money to try again. You know that.”
“Just find Violette and Eddie safe,” she says. “That’s all I want in this world.”
33
When Bish returned from Strood he settled in for another session with the brain-numbing, Kardashian-inspired, selfie-obsessed Instagram photos. To make matters worse, his search was unaided by alcohol and his body was telling him loud and clear to rectify that. His dull headache tapped out the request in a taunting Morse code as his hands shook on the keyboard. But he resisted, and the patron saint of two-day sobriety rewarded him with evidence.
It was a photo of Manoshi and Lola sleeping, heads together, dribbling. Bish had determined that the bus carrying the British kids arrived at the campsite at 5:45 p.m. on the day before the bombing, this time having been displayed on a selfie taken by one of the twins from Ramsgate on the front steps of the bus. Serge Sagur had playfully photobombed it, which was surprising because most of the other shots of the ill-fated driver showed a seriously irritated man. The photo of the two girls sleeping was taken at 5:40, after the bus had turned off the A16 onto the narrow stretch of road leading to the camp gates, the road Bish and Saffron had walked on the day of the bombing. Surrounding the bus were rows of Scots pine trees that looked close enough to touch from the window beside Lola’s head. When Bish zoomed in to analyze the shot he could make out the shape of someone in the copse of trees.
The doorbell interrupted his find and he thought about ignoring it, but the second ring was accompanied by a text from Grazier.