‘Eddie’s mum died about a year ago so they must have bonded over lost mothers,’ she said. Her tone was callous, but there was something else in it too. ‘Violette thought she was too above it all to tell anyone anything.’

‘Why didn’t the other kids like her?’

‘What makes you think they didn’t?’

‘No one seemed to be concerned about her being locked in a cupboard, Bee.’

‘We didn’t know, okay?’ she shouted. ‘We didn’t know.’

She turned to stare out the window. Bish caught Saffron’s eye in the rearview mirror.

‘She played with people,’ Bee said after a while. ‘And that accent. It was hideous. It was like watching a really bad episode of Neighbours.’

‘And Eddie?’

‘I think he had a big crush on her. During the day they were always together. Sometimes he was withdrawn. Other times he was really funny. He’d break out in song and he did a really good pelvic-thrust version of “Moves Like Jagger”. He was totally obsessed with music.’ Bee was pensive for a moment. ‘They were both kind of uninhibited. This one time we were at a town fair just outside Saint-Malo and there was a platform for dancing, but it was empty. Until them. They danced like no one else existed in the world. They did most things like that. Most times.’ There was a strange quality to Bee’s storytelling. A wistfulness, perhaps. ‘On the bus she’d be teaching him Arabic. The kids at the back used to make fun of it but she didn’t care.’

‘It’s a hard language to learn,’ Saffron said.

Had she tried? Bish wondered. Once, as a teenager, he’d been intrigued enough to borrow Arabic language books and tapes from the library and study them in his dorm room. Until his father was notified by the headmaster.

‘It’s not really who we are, Bish. Your mother’s more English than the Queen. No more Arabic study now, promise?’

And Bish had promised, although he wondered why his more- English-than-the-Queen mother had named him Bashir, and why the earliest memory he had was of her calling him habibi. But he chose not to pursue it. Stephen Ortley had worked hard for the Foreign Office. He was respected and loyal to his country and he expected his wife and son to be the same. Bish had honoured that part of the deal. He didn’t know what his mother had honoured. She had been a no-show for part of his teenage years, even during those times when his parents were living not half an hour’s drive from where he was boarding. When he was home for school holidays he could see that she did her best to be the mother he remembered from when he was a child, but by the time he was fifteen he had switched off. Saffron’s saving grace in his adult life was that she was a good grandmother. Her grief following Stevie’s death almost broke her.

‘There’s no way Violette did it, you know,’ Bee said.