‘These are other people’s lives we’re involving,’ Sarraf said to Bish. ‘They don’t deserve to have their phones tapped and their lives poked into. Give me your word that you won’t drag them into this. On your kid’s life.’

‘Leave my kid’s life out of this,’ Bish said.

‘Tell him, Jimmy,’ Noor said.

Sarraf sighed. ‘Violette emailed a photograph of her and Eddie to Nick Scolari.’

‘Etienne’s best friend,’ Noor told Bish. ‘He lives in a town close to Coleambally.’

‘She told him to pass on a message to her grandparents that they were not to worry. She was heading north. She had things to do before she came home.’

It was a game-changer. Bish could see from LeBrac’s expression that she agreed. Perhaps Rachel was right and the reason Violette was on the run had little to do with fear of an arrest. There had always been another purpose for the trip.

‘Violette’s being Violette,’ Sarraf said. ‘When she has a plan, nothing gets in her way.’

‘Not even a bomb on a bus.’ LeBrac was again focused on the map. Bish watched a sequence of expressions cross her face. Finally heard her halting breath.

She leaned an elbow on the table and buried her face in her hand. Bish almost reached out, but checked himself. Sarraf took his sister’s hand.

‘What is it, Noor?’

She composed herself. ‘I know where she’s heading.’

They waited as she moved the map closer.

‘Remember Etienne’s tours, Jimmy? We’d go to the local market, or the park, or wherever, and it was all a history tour. You loved them as a kid, and years later, when we had Violette, she loved them more. They were funny. Idiotic at times. Full of facts. Because the history tours included us in them. “This is where Mummy kissed Daddy for the first time, and where The Beatles recorded at Lime Grove studios and where the Germans bombed during the war and where Uncle Jimmy dropped his chocolate ice cream and cried all the way home.” ’

Sarraf gave a watery smile.

‘What’s that got to do with heading north?’ Bish asked.

She held out a hand to Bish. ‘May I?’ she asked. He stared at her outstretched hand, until she pointed to his pen and he gave it to her. ‘They’re on a history tour of our lives. Starting in Normandy, where you and I and Etienne and Violette were all born. That’s why she chose the French tour.’

‘Fuck,’ Jamal muttered under his breath.

‘So let’s presume they meet for the first time at the port of Dover the day after she arrives,’ Noor said, marking the map at Dover. ‘The plan is to take Eddie to Le Havre.’

‘But why not come to me?’ Jamal asked. ‘She waited seven days to come to me.’

‘Because there goes her plan if she does. You would have contacted Etienne’s parents straight away and Christophe would have been on the first flight over.’

‘But if the bomb hadn’t gone off, John Conlon would have been waiting for Eddie in Dover. That would have spelt the end of their history tour.’