It was the Chinese girl who helped him out, even though she didn’t mean to. Max had become used to the low-level noise of little kids crying. He had started to block it out. But one child was making more noise than the others. He was sitting close to where Jack lay in front of the stage. The little boy was sobbing noisily and uncontrollably. As Max looked across the heads of the other hostages, he could see why. A gruesome trickle of blood was flowing from Jack’s nose. His face was white. He looked like a corpse.

The sight chilled Max, but he was distracted by the Chinese girl striding up to the wailing kid. She pulled him roughly to his feet and started hissing something at him. Then she clipped him hard round the back of the head.

One of the teachers dressed as a decoy reacted immediately. From her – she looked female to Max – position by the blacked-out window, she lurched towards the little boy. He was crying even louder now, and the Chinese girl was hissing even more intensely at him, like an angry goose.

‘Get back!’ T1 barked. ‘Get back now! Or somebody will get shot!’

The teacher stopped. She spun round helplessly. T14 strode up to her and dragged her back to her original position by the window.

‘Take that child to the back of the room!’ T1 instructed the Chinese girl. She did as she was told, roughly pulling the crying kid away from the sight that he found so upsetting. It was clear that she was not doing it because she felt sorry for him. An unpleasant, self-satisfied smile played across her lips.

This gave Max the opportunity to examine the cables. From his position outside the toilet door, he could see the nearest IED. It was by the wall, a few metres away. He saw that the red cable snaked into the IED and emerged on the other side. The black cable continued in a circuit around the room. That meant the black cable was the one he needed to cut.

He felt a surge of anxiety. What if Angel had got it wrong, and cutting the cable triggered a detonation? His mouth went dry at the thought. But then a memory hit him: Angel, controlling the chopper in the wild blizzard above Valley House. She was calm, capable and borderline scary, but above all she knew what she was doing.