‘I’m not blind.’

‘Well, it’s been a while.’

Sam lifted his hands and let them drop to his sides. He couldn’t think what to say next. The sight of the stump made him feel queasy. What if something like that happened to Karza? Or worse? ‘So – ah, a lot’s happened since I was last round here.’

He remembered sitting alone in this room with Jana, waiting for Karza and Bala to come in so he could take his brother home. He had fancied her, all right, but he’d known that at the first sign of anything serious between them, her parents would have seen it as permanent and he had other plans.

Bala let out a long, smoky sigh and turned back to the screen.

‘I need your help.’

At least that made Bala smile. ‘That’s a first.’

‘Mum’s worried about Karza. She wants me to find him.’

Bala snorted. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘She hasn’t heard from him in five months. She doesn’t even know if he’s still alive.’

He raised his shoulders, let them drop, then looked back at the screen.

‘Anything you can tell me to make a start, like where you last saw him?’

‘When they drove off and left me for dead, you mean? About fifty K east of Aleppo. That help you?’

Sam had always assumed that Bala was the more reckless of the two. Their mother had always said he was a bad influence. But listening to him now, and thinking of Karza posing absurdly with his ammunition belts, it occurred to Sam that maybe he had got it wrong and it was the other way round. Their mother would have been in denial, of course, as she so often was where Karza was concerned, and having Bala to blame would have perfectly suited her picture of his brother as the innocent, misguided dupe of more dominant personalities.

‘Can you just give me something? Who bought your tickets or who got you across the border? Someone I can ask.’

‘We drove.’

‘To Syria? From here?’

‘Taking medical supplies for a charity.’

‘Which one?’

He shrugged.

‘Which group were you with?’

‘Jaish Muhajireen wa Ansar. That’s the Army of Emigrants and Helpers – since you don’t speak the language.’

God, he was a pain. Sam bet he didn’t speak more than two words of Arabic either, but he was fluent in self-righteousness.

‘We were in an assault on a Scud base near Aleppo, then an army barracks at the airport.’ He shook his head. ‘Karza got lucky – he always does. They let him use the RPG and he scored a direct hit on a bus full of government conscripts. Went right to his head.’

Sam struggled to get his head round the idea of his little brother as a killer. Even after they’d received the photograph and he had seen Karza’s expression, he had dismissed it as showing off.