But Eddie refused to look at Bish. ‘Just stuff,’ he mumbled.

‘Eddie, did you know Violette’s registration letter was a fake?’ Bish watched the kid nervously tap a beat on his thigh. ‘The embassy’s made contact with her grandparents in Australia. They think she’s on a Duke of Edinburgh hike in Tasmania, out of range.’

‘Are they upset?’ he asked quietly.

‘What do you think? She lied to them.’

‘Then I’ll ask her why she lied,’ Eddie said. ‘She’s in there on her own and I can’t get her out and I’m scared she can’t breathe.’

‘In where, Eddie?’ Bish was confused.

Eddie pointed to the dining hall. Lucy began blubbering again. Bish was so close to owning the misogyny accusation and telling her to pull herself together.

‘Mr Gorman said he’d take care of Violette but he didn’t mean take care in a good way,’ said Eddie. ‘He said foreigners stuff things up, like they did with Madeleine McCann.’ Eddie was talking a mile a minute, his fidgeting worse than ever. ‘He’s gone and locked her up, you know. In a cupboard in the kitchen at the back of the dining hall. He said it was for all our good, didn’t he Lucy? But it’s not, and if Mac was here he wouldn’t have let it happen.’

‘Then let’s find Mr Gorman and get her out of there,’ Bish said.

Rage didn’t come to Bish with much of a warning. It came to him only rarely, but when it did there were repercussions. His nickname at boarding school was the Hulk, not because of his size or his ability to fight, but because he was mild-mannered until someone pushed the wrong buttons. It had happened a week ago at work, and it all came down to stupid people. Not uneducated or slow. Just wilfully stupid. Gorman was one of them.

Bish found him outside, hovering around the canvas barrier that concealed the blown-up bus. Gorman was trying to ‘catch a word’ with Attal, who clearly had no time for him. Bish waited for the Frenchman to disappear behind the barrier, not wanting to make anything obvious to the locals.

‘Where the fuck is the key to that cupboard?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.

Gorman looked stunned for a moment but his surprise didn’t last long. ‘I’ve made contact with MI6,’ he said with a sense of self-importance. ‘They’re on the grounds now and they’ll want her in British custody.’

Too long a day. Too long without a drink. Bish grabbed Gorman by the arm and half dragged him to the rear of the dining hall, out of sight of the press and French officials. Gorman tried to pull free, tripping over a piece of tyre rubber, and they both went down with the finesse of the unfit, the middle class and the middle-aged.

Winning the tussle, Bish was able to retrieve a key from Gorman’s pocket, accessible by the string attached to it. A flicker of movement made him look up, to see his daughter staring down at him from the recreation hall window. Beside her were Crombie, Kennington, and a few of the others. Charlie Crombie smirked something into Bee’s ear, but she shrugged him off and moved away from the window.