‘We’d passed a couple of gangs of kids roaming the streets, heavily armed, and we’d avoided them, but so far we hadn’t seen any grown-ups. It seemed quite quiet at the house. We went up the path and in through the front door. It wasn’t locked – the lock had been kicked off. The downstairs of the house was like the rest of Slough – wrecked. Broken glass, broken furniture, all my mum’s photos on the walls scrawled over or spray-painted, books thrown everywhere, plates smashed in the kitchen. No signs of life, though.

‘Or death.

‘Until I went upstairs …

‘I found my sisters in their bedroom. I only recognized them from their trainers. It was just three dried-up corpses, all shrivelled, lying on the bed next to each other. In a row. I sat down then, on the floor, and I cried. For the first time since this had all begun I cried. Until I was too tired to cry any more. I curled up in a ball and I think I fell asleep. I didn’t care about anything much right then. About Henry and Andy downstairs. About me. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever expected to find them alive, but the reality of it, seeing them there, their bright trainers as good as new, their bodies …’

Once again Malik fell silent. And Ella waited, squeezing his hand gently.

‘Did you find anyone else?’ she asked after a while.

‘No.’ Malik’s voice sounded flat and unemotional. ‘And to tell you the truth I didn’t want to look. I just hoped that my mum and dad had gone to somewhere better. I bundled my sisters up in a sheet and carried them downstairs. They hardly weighed anything. My faith says you’re supposed to bury the dead as soon as possible. It looked like Ameena, Nadia and Zahra had been dead for weeks. They were good girls, though; they hadn’t lived long enough to do anyone any harm. So I knew that if there was a heaven they’d already be there. God wouldn’t worry too much about what they’d left behind. I couldn’t bear for their bodies to be exposed like this, though. So I took them out the back to bury them.