Then he pauses, puts a hand on Jacob’s knee.

‘I mean I didn’t trust anyone back then. We’d just met. In the beginning, the first year after the bomb, everyone thought the Americans were behind it. I mean this was in the Middle East; the Americans are behind a lot of shit. It was easy to believe that. I was already living in Beirut and working as a photographer. One evening at a bar in Gemmayzeh, a few months after the wedding, a Russian man offered me a few drinks. I thought he was coming onto me, and I was pretty self-destructive back then, open to anything really. But after we talked for a while, I realized he wasn’t just a diplomat, like he said. And that he knew exactly who I was.’

‘He was a spy?’ Jacob says.

‘Gregorij Korolov is his name,’ Yassim continues. ‘That first evening, he invited me to his apartment in one of those new buildings just above Cornichen, not far from my apartment. Then he opened a bottle of vodka. Such a fucking cliché.’

A slight smile and a glance out at the trees that stream by like water.

‘He showed me pictures from the wedding, from some satellite or drone, and I could see how a waiter at the wedding brought in some boxes. Gregorij said they were full of explosives. He showed me documents and a video of interviews with infiltrators they had in Baghdadi’s circle, who described the plan. Gregorij even had calculations that proved the bomb couldn’t have come from the air, had to have been placed under the buffet table at the party. There was no doubt. The Islamists were behind it. And he asked me if I wanted revenge.’

‘But why you?’ George asks, looking sceptically at Yassim. ‘You didn’t have any connections with them?’