Rachel had always said LeBrac was easier to hate because she was young, educated, attractive.

‘And Arab,’ Bish would remind her.

‘How many years does one’s family have to be in this country not to be a foreigner?’

Bish couldn’t answer that. His family had achieved it by wiping out any traces of his grandfather’s culture. All Bish knew about his late grandmother was that Lily Worthington had been a headstrong young woman who joined the army as a nurse at the outbreak of World War Two. Her first posting was Alexandria, where she fell in love with a young Egyptian interpreter named Bashir. They were married soon afterwards and had two children. Lily died of cancer when Saffron was five and her brother ten years old, which prompted the Worthingtons to retrieve the children from Alexandria and bring them up in England. It was the early 1950s. Bashir Nassrallah had no way of fighting his wife’s wealthy family and could not afford to fly to England to see his children, and so a connection was lost. What Bish’s family history had instilled in him, according to his ex-wife, was an attraction to all things Arab.

‘You’ve got a thing for Arab women,’ Rachel told him one night in the dying days of their marriage.

‘Yes, that’s why I married a redhead from Cornwall.’

‘You married a redhead from Cornwall because you wanted to make your father happy,’ she said softly. ‘He told me at our engagement that the family was worried you were going to end up with one of those foreign types.’

‘I married a redhead from Cornwall because I was in love with her.’

And he had been. Rachel was bolshie and gorgeous and he made her laugh. But he realised early on in his marriage that she was more what he wanted than what he needed. Then the kids happened and they were both in love with being Bee and Stevie’s parents. Their son’s death forced them to acknowledge that wasn’t enough.

‘When Arab women are brilliantly smart, you’re threatened by them,’ she said, ‘and when they’re beautiful, you love them. And when they’re both, you’re antagonistic towards them.’

‘And you have the facts to back this up?’

‘Fact: when they’re beautiful you love them – Yasmin Le Bon.’

‘Well, her family’s Iranian, so not exactly Arab. Any more of these facts?’

‘Fact: when they’re beautiful and smart you despise them – Noor LeBrac. In your eyes she was guilty from the day they arrested her.’

‘She confessed to building a bomb that blew up twenty-three people, Rachel.’

‘She didn’t confess for six months. Noor LeBrac got to you from the very day she was arrested. What did she do to you that was so unforgettable?’

It was more what he had done.

He presented himself at the Holloway Visitors’ Centre, which was run by a children’s charity organisation, to a woman whose name tag identified her as Allison. When he explained that he didn’t have a visiting form and had been sent by the Home Office, a few phone calls were made. Instead of directing him to the visits hall, she took Bish to another checkpoint deeper within the prison. Two guards sat in an office behind a serving window.