Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil by Melina Marchetta

Bish didn’t know what the solution was, but it wasn’t this.
    The boxing gym on Rue Delacroix was yet another world. The smell was a cocktail of blood and spit and body odour and the stillness of the air was stifling. Bish felt like a foreigner and it had little to do with language or culture. Young men, some of them in their teens, pounding into boxing bags, or each other. It was a room pulsing with testosterone-fuelled energy and the sense that there was nothing else for these men. They eyed Bish suspiciously as he made a sweep of the place, searching. For years the only photos out there of Jamal Sarraf were from his days with the football club. Man United’s great British Arab hopeful. The photos showed a handsome kid with a wide grin and laughing eyes. He was popular. He was a good look for the club.
    ‘Is Jamal Sarraf here?’ Bish asked a young man carrying a bucket and picking up towels. The lad pointed to the ring closest to them, where two men were fighting it out. One was Senegalese, judging from the T-shirt he was wearing. His opponent was lean and muscular, with a short-cropped beard and a quick right hook. Being a man of soft bulk himself, courtesy of a diet of liquid lunches, Bish couldn’t help holding a hand to his gut and vowing he would soon begin a regimen of more vegetables, more protein and fewer excuses. He’d been happy enough to leave exercise to the young because he believed it was futile, and then Daniel Craig had come along as Bond and ruined it for any man growing old disgracefully.
    The bout finished and the two men touched gloves. As the older man stepped from the ring, Bish approached.
    ‘Jamal Sarraf? Bish Ortley.’
    Sarraf didn’t respond but the look in his eyes said there’d be no handshaking between them.
    ‘I’m the father of one of Violette’s friends,’ Bish continued. ‘And my daughter’s desperate to know that your niece and the boy are safe.’
    The man standing before Bish seemed a world away from the promising footballer he had been as a teenager. Back then, Jimmy Sarraf was the star of the England Under 17 team and sought after by a number of the big clubs. When Man United signed him up to their junior team, the headlines read LITTLE BIG MAN and Sky News did a feel-good piece on him. ‘He’s a cheeky bugger, that one,’ Sarraf’s childhood coach in Shepherd’s Bush had said. When seventeen-year-old Jimmy was first interviewed on TV and asked what he’d do when he made it in the big league, tears welled up in his eyes. ‘Buy me mum and sister a house each, as big as that mansion Posh and Becks have out in Hertfordshire.’ Bish recalled the boy talking nonstop and at a speed beyond reckoning in that interview.
    After the bombing, people wanted blood. Live blood. They wanted someone to hate, someone still breathing, and they got it when London police raided the Sarraf council flat and found evidence to suggest that Louis Sarraf had not acted alone. Jamal and his Uncle Joseph had been caught on camera in the courtyard with Louis, arguing emphatically, all three agitated. The younger Sarraf had looked relieved when his father and uncle shook hands. He had embraced his father. To the authorities it was a deadly handshake, and it took longer than it should have to release Jamal and his uncle, even after his sister confessed.
    ‘Can we sit down somewhere and talk?’ Bish asked Sarraf, aware of the stares from the rest of the men.
    Sarraf retrieved a newspaper from a nearby bench and threw it at Bish, who didn’t need to be fluent in French to understand it. The familiar photo of him standing behind Violette. Good to see that the British and French were united in something.
    Jamal Sarraf walked out of the gym and into a back alley and he followed.
    ‘Is it true you’ve spoken to her?’ Bish asked, and suddenly he felt a grip around his throat and found himself shoved against the steel fence. He saw rage in the man’s eyes, glimpsed a clenched fist.
    ‘I