None of the photos was ordered chronologically, so in these ones Zaid ranged from early fifties to early thirties, then back into his forties, and in two of them he was overweight, the shirt and jacket he was wearing straining at the stitching.

In the first, he was outside the front of a home he owned in the south of France: I couldn’t see much of the house itself, but I could see its name written on one of the gateposts in Arabic – a nod to his father’s Iranian roots – and knew that what I could see of the building tallied with the description of one of the four houses he owned.

In the second, he was on the tarmac at some kind of airfield, smiling for the camera, his arms opened wide, presumably in celebration of the fact that he’d just bought himself a plane. In his left hand was a large, inflatable ignition key with a key fob reading ‘The Zaid Express’. I didn’t know much about jets, but I knew enough: even second-hand, even conservatively, he’d have probably dropped £20 million on it.

In the third, he was on a ski slope somewhere, among a group of what must have been friends. He had his arms around two of them and he looked fit and tanned.

My gaze lingered on the pictures.

Again, something stirred in me.

I took in what I could see of his house in France, its Arabic name, and then switched to the airfield – it was definitely somewhere in the UK: in the distance I could see a long row of 1930s terraced houses – and then to the shot of him on the slopes. He was fitter on that trip, sculpted, but in the other two his face was bloated and red.

I looked at other photos, taken in his twenties when he was assigned to the British Consulate in Hong Kong and to the embassy in Jakarta. There was a shot of him, overweight again, in Dubai in the mid 2000s, presumably when he’d been working further along the Arabian peninsula in Oman. More photographs of him, this time in Russia, in Kenya, in South Africa, all of which tied into the locations of jobs he’d said he’d had while working for the Foreign Office. As I looked at a portrait of him on Cape Town waterfront, I thought again about his reasons for still working at the FCO, despite having enough money not to work for twenty other lifetimes: You should always listen to your parents – especially ones as remarkable as mine.

I stepped back from the wall.