‘They dragged me out of the car.’ Romida’s voice was empty when she spoke again. ‘We were in some street, I don’t know where. People were staring. And then they looked away. They knew not to get involved. They knew, and they looked away . . .’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she rubbed them back, almost angry. ‘They dragged me into a house. It smelled. It was disgusting. I didn’t know what would happen, or where they were taking me, or where I was. I thought they were taking me to work in a brothel . . . And then Jeetu forced something over my mouth, and everything just . . . faded. When I woke up, I was on that ship. With two other girls.’

‘I am so sorry,’ Casey murmured. ‘So sorry.’

Tasmina interrupted, gesturing angrily. Romida flinched as she listened.

‘Tasmina is saying’ – Layla spoke carefully – ‘that they never saw the babies, that they didn’t know what happened to them. And then Zohra . . . Zohra . . .’

Tasmina was crying, pushing away one of the other girls as she tried to hug her.

‘How can people do this?’ Layla translated impassively, as Romida blazed with a blistering rage. ‘How dare they? How dare they do this to us? We are people.’

And Casey thought of the shrug from the world. Hundreds of thousands of people in a bleak refugee camp, and a casual ‘that will do’. And soon, so soon, they would be trying to send the refugees back to Bangladesh, where the murders and the gang rapes could start all over again. Casey felt that burn of anger, for Romida, for all the girls with no future. It’s not fair: a childish whine for such an injustice.

‘But I am free now,’ Layla translated as Romida straightened up. ‘I have survived. And now I will go back to the camp’ – a wry smile spread across her face – ‘and I will see my mother, and Jamalida, and everyone. And one day, Jamalida and I will be tailors together, as we always said.’

Khadija leaned forward and handed Romida two pieces of fabric. Her eyes met Casey’s defiantly. ‘I am not afraid,’ she said.

Casey spoke to all the women, one by one, taking careful notes. Some of them described being taken off the ship, to a clinic with basic medical facilities. Driven in the back of what might have been an old truck, they thought. Khadija – the brightest, the angriest – swore about the men, using words that Layla refused to translate.

‘They could have been taken to anywhere in Chittagong,’ Casey said in an aside to Hessa. ‘And the surrounding area.’

‘The thing is,’ Hessa stumbled, ‘many of these women might not even know what IVF is. You know what Savannah said about that footballer. It’s hard to get information in those camps, with those rates of illiteracy.’

Casey dug out a photograph of Dr Greystone without much hope, but the women shook their heads.