That Saffron had stopped loving him. Stopped wanting him. He understood his father’s absence from his life. Stephen Ortley had always been emotionally distant, but his mother’s love had promised so much when he was a child.

‘It’s a bit like circumstantial evidence,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘The way we remember our childhood.’

‘So you’re a psychologist now?’ It came out harsher than he meant it to.

‘No, but I meet a lot of troubled people in here and it all seems to stem from either childhood or the men these women met.’

As much as he resented Noor being privy to his personal life, he wanted to keep talking to her. ‘Can I ask you something? And you don’t have to answer.’

‘All right.’

He heard hesitation in her voice and almost changed his mind. ‘That circumstantial evidence thirteen years ago – you were overheard threatening the manager of the Brackenham supermarket two days before the bombing. You told him, “Your time will come.” Is that right?’

A long silence.

‘My father was demoralised,’ she finally said. ‘And don’t think for one moment I’m justifying what he did. But he started his life in this country stacking boxes and he ended it stacking boxes. The manager of the Brackenham store was thirty years younger and was patronising and rude and had no respect. My father was losing the plot in the end, he thought his own family were conspiring against him. Jimmy had made decisions without him. Apart from the Premier League, he had been pursued by a French team before signing with Man United. My father found out through a magazine article months later. He was angry – hurt that Jimmy had consulted his own brother but not him. There was a rift, and Uncle Joseph came to visit because he wanted peace. It was the handshake caught on camera that supposedly incriminated Jimmy and my uncle. But days before, when my father came home from work humiliated, I was so angry I went down to the supermarket and told Jason Matthews what I thought of him. The witnesses heard right. I did say that, but in a sane world where the media and the public aren’t after your blood, those words would be taken as they were meant – that one day Matthews would be a man in his sixties demoralised by someone younger in the workplace, and then he would know how my father felt.’

There was something besides regret in her voice. He wished he were hearing this face to face.

‘So many assumptions. So many. You were there that day,’ she said. ‘My mother’s crying in that cell was scaring Violette, and I told Jimmy to make her laugh. And all anyone could say was that the Sarrafs were laughing while Brackenham buried its dead. How could people I’d known all my life possibly believe that my words meant I was going to make a bomb and blow Jason Matthews up? How? I bet you’ve said the exact same thing in your own anger.’