They slept at the foundry that night. Beatrix awoke early and took Sascha Duffy’s Audi and drove north, where Basra ran up against the Shatt Al-Aarab watercourse. She drove by the al-Mina football club, where twenty or thirty youngsters were kicking a ball across the parched yellow grass, and then by the Al-Tahreer General Hospital. She passed buildings that had been wrecked in the war and had still not been repaired, pylons that had been torn down, their cables stolen. On the horizon, gas flares leeched dirty smears of grey smoke into the sky.

It was eight in the morning and it was already hot, dizzyingly hot, and there was only so much that the air-conditioning in the car could do. Beatrix was sweating by the time she reached the al-Mina prison. It had been built by the Americans after the capacity in the nearby al-Ma’aqal had been exceeded. It was small by Western standards, with just four hundred inmates, and it was already overcrowded. It didn’t look particularly substantial. Beatrix thought of the great Victorian edifices in London and Manchester, their vaulting brick walls and their sense of impregnability, and this collection of prefabricated buildings seemed wispy by comparison. The facility was encircled by razor-topped fences, twelve feet high, and those were protected by concrete baulks. The main entrance was a slab of concrete with a gate cut in the middle. The buildings beyond looked like warehouses. An Iraqi flag flew from a building that Beatrix guessed was used for administration.

She knew all about the reputations of Iraqi jails. Saddam had used them as depositories for anyone who had the nerve to challenge the regime, and once you were inside, there was no coming out. There were stories of what had happened in Basra’s prisons during the time the British were here, too.

She was a hundred feet away from the gates. She didn’t want to get any closer.

She looked around. The surrounding area had a collection of buildings that had been damaged during the war. Repairs had started on some of them but had since been paused. The insurgency had forced foreign contractors away, and they had still to return.

That suited Beatrix very well.

She was able to approach a nearby three-storey building without arousing suspicion. A metal door, chained and bolted, prevented access to the front, but the ground-floor windows were protected only by plasterboard, and Beatrix was able to force her way inside. It looked as if the place was being refitted as an office. The exterior cladding was missing in places, and the interior consisted of barren concrete surfaces and open apertures where doors and windows would eventually be fitted. Beatrix found the central stairwell and climbed to the second floor.