They had put a rope around his neck.

He looked up and saw that it was attached to a rusted tangle of ancient pipes in the ceiling.

Hands were touching his arms. He heard a metallic click. He found that his arms were secured behind his back.

And now the words came in a torrent. Now he had no difficulty at all in speaking. Now even the razor blade pressed against his eyeball could not have shut his mouth.

‘I have a wife and children!’ he screamed, and his voice echoed back at him in this secret basement.

Wife and children!

Wife and children!

‘I’m just a taxi driver! Please! You have the wrong person!’

The man from the car was covering his face with a black mask. Like an executioner. He turned to Mahmud Irani.

‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’ he asked.

Mahmud stuttered, ‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—’

But then the words choked in his throat because, beyond the red light of the camera, one of them was sticking A4 sheets of paper to the worn white bricks of this underground place.

They were all the faces of girls. Young girls. Smiling girls.

And, yes, they were all smiling, every one of them – although some of them had smiles that were stiff and shy, and some had smiles that were natural and full of confidence.

They all smiled in their own way. The school photographers had insisted upon a smile, encouraged them to smile, tried to make them laugh.

They were formal portraits, the kind that a school takes every year to record and honour a student’s growth, and they caught the girls at the fleeting moment in their lives when they were poised between the children they had so recently been and the women they would one day become.

The smiling faces watched Mahmud Irani.

And he knew these faces. All of them.

He had known them in rooms full of laughing men. He had heard the girls scream for help when no help was coming. He had seen them blurry and on the edge of unconsciousness, foggy with cheap booze and strong drugs as their clothes were removed.

He had laughed at those girls with all the other men.

And now his words were edged with bitterness and contempt and anger.

‘Whores,’ he said. ‘Cheap whores who like drink and drugs. Sluts who show themselves. Girls who like men. Many men. Typical girls of this country. Oh, listen to me! These are not decent girls! Will you listen to me?’

Someone was kicking the stool he stood on.

‘Whores,’ spat Mahmud Irani, and then he said no more, not another word, because the stool was gone and all at once the rope around his neck cut deep, deep, deep into his throat and his feet were kicking wildly at nothing but the air.

He soiled himself immediately.