‘Mrs Miller,’ he says, ‘I asked you not to go near my daughter, didn’t I? But once again I find you have ignored my request.’

He stares at me blankly through the sunglasses. I feel small but I won’t let him see that.

I consider the best tack. ‘Really, Mr Kattan, we just had a perfectly harmless lunch. She wanted to talk. You said yourself she’s lonely.’

‘Why would she want to talk to a journalist? She is devastated, and you are trying to find out about her politics.’

My stomach plunges. Danny is sitting there in the driver’s seat; he glances over. For an infinitesimal moment our eyes meet. I am pierced by those eyes – and then he looks away. I feel stung.

Instinctively I glance in the back of the car and there is Maya. It is hard to see her face clearly and she is still wearing sunglasses, but there is something so bowed and sad about her posture.

Then Kattan says, ‘Please, Mrs Miller, this is the end of our dealings now.’

I am torn. Do I try to help her, or do I go quietly? I glance at Danny but he is fiddling with something on the dashboard. I start to turn away, then I turn back.

‘Is Maya all right?’ I ask boldly. ‘Are you?’ I say louder, so that she can hear too. She doesn’t respond but leans her head back against the seat.

‘Ah, your new friend, Maya.’ Kattan takes his glasses off and looks down at me. ‘Yes, Maya is fine.’ There’s a small mark across the bridge of his nose where the glasses have rested. His dark eyes are grave. ‘Please, give your husband my regards.’

My husband, who has apparently disappeared.

And I smile at Hadi Kattan as best I can and then I walk away, and I know they are all watching me.

The big car passes by when I get to the end of my own drive, and when I stomp down to my house, I find that my hands are sweating where I’ve clamped them into fists.

* * *

I didn’t want to return to my empty house. I despised myself suddenly for the Danny thing. How could I have been so stupid? I was already struggling with our worlds, our worlds that clashed, that did not unite. With my attraction to a man who did something I disagreed with so fundamentally – and worse, with my own morality. I had a husband, a family. And yet the part of me yearning so desperately recognised my deep and apparently insatiable predilection for danger – something my friend Dalziel had awoken in me, aged eighteen, and still something I couldn’t seem ever to quash for very long.