‘Sabah el Kheir,’ the man says. He’s in his early forties, with a receding hairline and an impassive look on his face. Or he’s trying to come across as impassive.

‘Morning,’ Jamal murmurs in response. There’s no doubt in his mind that the man knows who he is. The waiting on the street corner. The certainty that he understands Arabic. There’s a compartment in Jamal’s head that’s always alert to the possibility of someone’s vengeance for what his father did. And now it’s also alert to the possibility that Ortley and the government are using neighbourhood spies to keep an eye out for Violette and Eddie. In the London that he owned as a boy, Jimmy is a stranger as a man, overwhelmed by the crowds, paranoid at any recognition.

He takes the Tube to Charing Cross and then the train to Tonbridge and arrives within the hour. He’s never met Eddie’s adopted parents but Anna Conlon was a letter writer. Every year on Eddie’s birthday she had sent Jamal a card with a photo. She mentioned her husband often. John Conlon was a gravedigger and, Jamal suspects, less forgiving than his wife. The Conlons had moved to Kent when Eddie came to them. Originally from Liverpool, they couldn’t bear to live in their old neighbourhood after losing a son.

Conlon is waiting for him at the station. He’s somewhere in his late fifties, but grief seems to have added to his years. It’s a strangely quiet morning they spend together; Conlon has nothing to offer on Eddie’s whereabouts, and Jamal isn’t much of a talker these days. But he finds himself enjoying the stillness of it all.

‘I dug my son’s grave all those years ago,’ John tells him as they sit eating lunch in, of all places, a cemetery, watching a procession pass them by. John has brought ham rolls and beer for them both. Jamal doesn’t have the heart to tell him that regardless of how superficial his practice of Islam is, he avoids pork and alcohol. ‘And a year ago I did the same for my wife. If I have to dig Eddie’s grave, someone will be digging mine soon after.’

No use telling him not to think that way. Jamal would do the same thing. Noor too.

‘What happened between you and Eddie, John?’

‘I think I broke his heart even more than our hearts were already broken,’ Conlon says, and there’s a crack in his voice. ‘I don’t care if he’s done something wrong and the French want to talk to him. I don’t care if the police here want to talk to him. I just want Eddie off the streets. I want people to stop hurting kids who look like him.’

When his phone rings on the train back to Charing Cross Jamal knows it will be Noor. Anytime between three and four-thirty is her time to ring him.

‘Where are you?’ she asks.

‘On the train. I went to see John Conlon.’