The red light watched him squirm and writhe and twist, wild with panic and pain, so much pain, his body thrashing desperately at the rope that cut into his flesh, deeper and deeper every second.

The rope first compressed his jugular vein and then the much deeper carotid arteries, stopping the flow of blood to his brain, abruptly turning it off, his brain instantly swelling, making Mahmud’s eyes roll back into his head and his tongue loll out of his flapping mouth and a choked gurgling sound come from somewhere deep inside his throttled neck.

The red light watched Mahmud as he was strangled by the rope around his neck.

And the pain!

Mahmud did not know that there was so much pain in the world. The minutes passed as slowly as centuries. But after what seemed to him a thousand years but was less than five minutes he finally stopped kicking and his arms went limp by his side.

Mahmud Irani choked out his very last strangled breath in that secret white-brick basement that hides deep below the city.

The red light went out.

And on the wall, the faces of the girls were still smiling.

Part One

PART ONE

The BlAck StAge

1

We sat in Court One at the Old Bailey and we waited for justice.

‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.

I stood up, never letting go of the hand of the woman next to me. It had been a long day. But finally it was coming to the end.

We were there for the man she had been married to for nearly twenty years, a man I had never known in life, although I had watched him die perhaps a hundred times.

I had watched him come out of their modest house in his pyjamas on a soft spring evening, a middle-aged man wearing carpet slippers, wanting to do only what was right, wanting to do nothing more than what was decent and good, wanting – above all – to protect his family, and I had watched the three young men who now stood in the dock knock him to the ground and kick him to death.

I had watched him die a hundred times because one of the young men in the dock had filmed it on his phone, the small screen shaking with mirth, rocking with laughter, the picture sharp in the clear light of a March evening. I had watched him die again and again and again, until my head was full of a silent scream that stayed with me in my dreams.

‘He was a good man,’ his widow, Alice, whispered, gripping my hand tight, shaking it for emphasis, and I nodded, feeling her fingers dig deep into my palm. On her far side were her two teenage children, a girl of around sixteen and a boy a year younger, and beyond them a young woman in her late twenties, the FLO – Family Liaison Officer.