But Michel just went on weeping, tears pouring down his face and dripping off his chin. ‘They slaughtered my family, now they’ve come for me. But killing me wasn’t enough for those sick, cruel bastards. How did they find her? How?’

Ben crouched down in front of him and gripped his quaking shoulders. ‘Michel. Stop crying. Get it together and speak to me.’

It took a while, but Michel managed to calm himself, and then a little while after that he began to talk.

Michel explained that he was from Egypt, and had immigrated to France in 2015 along with the huge wave of new arrivals into the country that year. Though he was a Coptic Orthodox Christian, he’d had to fake being Muslim to get into France, since he claimed that the immigration authorities were turning away Christian minorities from Middle Eastern countries for fear of offending the Islamic majority. He hadn’t come to France by choice, but been forced to flee Egypt after his family, like many other Christians there, were persecuted by Sunni extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Officially they were considered terrorists by the Egyptian government, but Michel believed that the authorities secretly supported them. The situation there was getting worse every year.

‘What happened to your family?’ Ben asked.

Michel struggled to contain his emotions as he talked. ‘My parents were kidnapped from our home and beheaded. My sister and I ran away, but she was caught, forced to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man. When she rebelled against him, she was stoned to death in the street by a mob. I only heard about it afterwards, because I was in hiding. I took a gun and went to the house of my dead sister’s husband. When he answered the door I shot him in the gut, then ran. Later I found out that he didn’t die. As much as I hated him for what he’d done, I thanked the Lord for not letting me become a murderer like the people who wiped out my family.’