Half a mile south, outside the West Acton Friday Mosque and Community Centre, the other reporter, Aamir Malik, one of the Beast’s most specialized employees, checked his reflection in the glass door. He smoothed his already-smooth lapels and tightened his pale-green striped tie until the Windsor knot sat snug under the crisp downward curves of his collar. He’d been born in Newham to Pakistani parents with whom he only rarely spoke English, especially now they were growing less independent. One of his maternal uncles had been a political correspondent on the Mirror of Karachi and under his influence Malik had become a newsman. The Beast had no one better at getting information out of Muslims.

He went inside, introduced himself and asked to speak to the head imam. Ten minutes later, he was sitting in the imam’s spartan office and blowing on tea that was still too hot to drink. There was no colour in the room other than some framed gold-on-black calligraphy and a shelf of lever-arch folders in red, yellow and blue. Malik was saying, ‘People must have been very angry about the suggestion that the police should search all the ladies.’

‘Furious,’ said the imam, shaking his head unhappily. ‘And I must tell you, a lot of that fury was directed at your very newspaper.’ The imam’s face gleamed nut-brown beneath a white skullcap, and a white neck-beard marked the line of his jaw. He still had a Punjabi accent and Malik allowed ever more of his parents’ gestures and inflections to come through.

‘Because of the editorial.’

‘Yes, because of that article.’

‘I’m sure things must have become very heated.’

‘Oh, very heated indeed. People were even talking about going to your offices and burning them down. You must understand – you should already – that you can’t say these things. People were very, very incensed. How would your colleagues at the Daily Beast respond if someone threatened to –’ he did not want to say it and instead circled his hand vaguely in the air – ‘to do that to their wives?’

‘Oh, they’d be very angry. And the families of those four boys must have been especially angry.’

The imam’s manner changed slightly. He must have been in on their escape. But Malik didn’t care about that today; it could be a follow-up story tomorrow. So he skirted around the boys themselves, kept the imam talking about how angry the congregation had been, and took notes.

*