Hessa had grown up just off Brick Lane, by the mosque that had been a synagogue and a church before that. All her life in a neat little flat, too small for her family now. Inside it was a quiet home, despite the graffiti on the door and the street noise outside. Sometimes, to escape her family’s questions, she wandered the beautiful Huguenot streets nearby, peering in through the wide windows where the silk weavers once worked

But Casey knew that Hessa’s mother had been born in Sylhet, up near the Indian border. And that her mother told stories of tea gardens in the mist rolling for miles, green on green. But Hessa had shied away from those old stories, and fought her way to the Post instead.

‘That skirt was most probably made in Chittagong, in fact,’ Hessa went on. ‘That’s where a lot of the big garment factories are. The whole industry began there, really. From nothing.’

Miranda turned to Casey.

‘You went out there last year. To the Rohingya camps.’

‘Yes. Down in the south, next to the border with Myanmar.’

Casey didn’t want to think about those camps.

The yellow dust, that was what she remembered. Yellow dust, and two little girls laughing.

They were prancing, giggling, in the strip of sunlight between two grey-patched tents.

So tightly packed, the tents in those camps. Miles of them, just a shoulder width apart, and far too low for anyone to stand up. Row after row, so it looked as if the whole hillside wore a carapace of canvas. Each tiny space, for a whole family.

And in the middle of it all, two little girls twirling.

All the rest was hell.

Those creaking bamboo bridges, over slow trickles of shit. A water pump, spitting brown drops over a crying toddler. A little boy with a badly burned face, trying so hard to smile.

One day, Casey had watched a puppy scramble down one of the narrow paths. There were only paths in these camps, not roads. The puppy snuffled, here and there.

And Casey realised: he was trying to find a place to die.

One place of stillness, that was all. To lay down his head and give up. And she glanced around, and saw the camp children watching too. Because there was nothing else to watch, not today.

Bored faces, and yellow dust, and a desperate, dying puppy.

And everywhere, the signs, handwritten: ‘Don’t go outside at night, not on your own.’

In the cartoon red letters: ‘You will never be asked for favours, not for food. Not ever.’

And, underlined, again and again: ‘Never be on your own.’ ‘Never be alone.’

‘Could it happen there?’ Miranda was asking. ‘In Bangladesh. This sort of farm.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Casey. Then: ‘Maybe.’

Because there had been rumours, all over the camps.