‘You spoke to my mother?’ he asked. Had Noor LeBrac infiltrated all the women in his life?

‘Apparently Gray, he of the matching name and nature, wasn’t impressing her at all, so she asked to speak to the person in the room with the highest IQ.’ Noor was enjoying herself. The slightest ghost of a smile on her face.

Beside her lay Grazier’s file. Also his wallet, opened, its contents displayed as if she had been going through them. There was nothing much in there. Licence. Couple of business cards. Forty quid. An Oyster card. Credit card. A photo of him with his children from three years ago. The last shot taken of Stevie. LeBrac picked it up and sighed with a depth of sadness that played with his head. As everything to do with this woman did.

‘People keep telling me I’ll get over it,’ he found himself saying. ‘I don’t want to get over my son.’

She pocketed one of his business cards, returned the rest of the contents, and handed back the wallet. But not the file. ‘All those years ago I never got to read what the press scrounged up about me.’

The file contained not just interviews, but clippings from the time of the bombing. He didn’t want her reading them. Even the more reputable newspapers had gone for the knee-jerk headlines and it was Noor who copped the worst. Long before she confessed, she’d already been found guilty by the media. As well as by him. They had often made a play on her name. Noor meaning light. So they spoke of the darkness within.

She opened the file and removed an article. ‘“Cold and driven,”’ she read out.

He tried to retrieve it from her, but she held it away.

‘A university colleague wrote that,’ she said. ‘Angus Stephenson. But then again I won a university medal and he didn’t.’

She scanned another article. ‘According to Anonymous, I was “the least maternal person in the Morphus Street mothers’ group.”’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘I remember the anonymous type well. Insignificant twits.’ She looked at Bish angrily. ‘I love my daughter to death but I hated the domestic part of it. More than anything, I hated talking about the domestic part of it.’

‘Give it here,’ he said, holding out a hand for the file. But she refused and he wasn’t in a position to fight her for it.

‘“A fanatic about everything Islam”,’ she read on. ‘That came from a supposed schoolmate. What were you fanatical about when you were fourteen, Chief Inspector?’

It was the first personal question she had ever put to him. ‘Well . . . I wanted to join the seminary. I went to a Jesuit school and discovered St Francis of Assisi. He was sort of the first environmentalist and I wanted to be him, hairshirt and all.’

She looked surprised at that. But his revelation seemed to soften her a little. ‘I wore a hijab my entire third form,’ she said. ‘I wanted to make a point about how Muslim women were treated after my mother was verbally abused at a park. My point was proven. On top of the discrimination I was subjected to then, eighteen years later someone labelled me a fanatic over it. No one labels a nun a fanatic for wearing a habit. Or a priest for wearing a collar.’