The buildings are lower near the edge of the small asphalt path that leads towards something that looks like a large square cage or enclosure. She can just make out one soccer goal and as she gets closer she sees the other one. Camp Nou.

She stops and looks upward with a pounding heart, then slowly makes her way towards the fence. It takes a little while to find the entrance, but as soon as she does, she doesn’t hesitate, just bends down so as not to hit her head and takes a few steps onto the coarse plastic surface.

The field is empty. She looks at the time on her phone. Just before eight. She turns around and listens, but all she hears is the wind whining through satellite dishes and rusty chicken wire. Slowly she walks into the darkness towards the centre of the field and touches the artificial grass with fingers stiff from the cold.

Something rustles behind her and she freezes in place. Then she straightens and turns around. Someone has stepped through the opening in the fence. Not just one person, she realizes, but two.

And neither of them is Gabriella.

25 November

Malmö

Yassim turns to him again, and no matter how much Jacob wants to, he can’t resist the warmth in those eyes. It’s just like the garden in Beirut, like in that clinically cold apartment, or in the stairwell in Brussels.

‘I told you about the bombing,’ he says. ‘The one that wiped out my family.’

‘You said it was a drone strike,’ Jacob says. ‘That’s why you wanted to expose the US’s war crimes.’

Yassim nods. ‘Yes, that’s what I said. That was my cover story, that I believed that. That I hated the Americans so much because they wiped out my family.’

‘But that was also a lie?’ Jacob says calmly.

Yassim nods. ‘It’s not a lie that my family was murdered,’ he says. ‘But they weren’t murdered by the Americans. It was at the beginning of the war. Or before there even was a war, when it might, might still have been possible to save something. My father was powerful, a strong leader. He knew everyone important in Syria, and he invited them to my sister’s wedding, because that’s what you do, that’s how you broker peace. The only ones who didn’t come were the Islamists, Baghdadi Islamists. They didn’t want peace; they wanted what we have now, war and misery and hell. So they placed a bomb at my sister’s wedding to knock out their enemies. But the only thing they destroyed was my family.’

He falls silent, stares quietly at Jacob. ‘You have to believe me,’ he says. ‘This is the truth.’

‘Why did you lie to me?’ Jacob says. ‘Didn’t you trust me?’

Yassim smiles crookedly. ‘I’ve been living under cover for five years, darling. I don’t trust anybody.’