‘Can we talk about where you sat on the bus every day, Violette?’ Post asked from across the table. He had a harelip scar that made him look angry.

‘Front seat, left-hand side,’ she said.

Where the bomb was planted, Bish thought, although it seemed to have its most deadly effect on the right-hand side.

‘Until yesterday,’ Post reminded her. ‘When Lola Barrett-Parker finally convinced poor Mr McEwan to let her and Manoshi Bagchi sit where you and Eddie Conlon sat every other day.’

‘You weren’t happy with Lola taking your seat, were you?’ Braithwaite said.

Violette had a look of bitter amusement on her face. ‘Yeah, so last night I went back to my cabin and started building myself a bomb to put under Lola’s seat, because where I come from that’s what you do when a thirteen-year-old steals your seat on a school excursion.’

Post opened a folder and Braithwaite removed a photograph, leaning over and placing it in front of Violette. It had been taken outside the police barricade where the uniforms were keeping the press at bay. It was a crowded scene. Reporters, and desperate local parents arriving. This morning they wouldn’t have known it was the English bus that had been blown up. They were all jostling for space, begging to be let in, every parent’s worst fear in their expressions. In the midst of the panic was a man in his early thirties, of Middle Eastern appearance, wearing a beanie. Dark eyes, dark short-cropped beard.

‘Is that your uncle, Violette?’ Braithwaite asked. ‘Is that Jamal Sarraf?’

The shrug again. ‘I haven’t seen my uncle since I was four years old.’

‘You Skype with Jamal Sarraf every couple of days, except for the past fortnight,’ Braithwaite said.

‘If only they’d give my mother a laptop,’ she said, feigning regret. ‘Then the three of us could be Skyping each other 24/7 and planning bombings all over the world.’

‘You think it’s funny, Violette? Do you find these photographs funny as well?’

Braithwaite scattered them before her. Images of the kids taken to hospital. Missing limbs. A girl with half her face wrapped in bandages. Another connected to a life support machine with burns to most of her body. Bish reached over to shut the folder. Violette pushed his hand out of the way and then scraped her chair back. Braithwaite and Post were on their feet in an instant, but she only placed one foot on the table and indicated the toes of her trainers.

‘That’s Manoshi Bagchi’s blood. She came flying through the window and landed at my feet, and I’m kind of sure she was missing a body part. I don’t need to see your photographs. I saw the real thing this morning.’

Her eyes lingered on the photograph of Jamal Sarraf. ‘And the reason my uncle was out here is probably the same reason this woman and this man and this man were,’ she said, pointing. ‘Because somehow he found out I was here and was desperate to know if I was alive.’