As they cleared plates, Sara saw that the parents were near to dropping with a happy fatigue. Just after 9.30 p.m. she rose to leave, embracing them both and planting a gentle kiss, the tickle of a daisy, on the baby’s forehead. She walked to Holloway Road tube station, taking the Piccadilly line to King’s Cross to change for the rest of the journey home to Tooting. It brought another reminder of the contented family she’d just left. Salman had recently started a new job at Cambridge Science Park; despite the commute – tube to King’s Cross, train to Cambridge North, then all the way back each evening – it was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. If it worked out, they were already talking of moving out of London to a different life of country markets, green fields and space for a growing family.

It was an exciting time for Sara too. She’d just finished her articles and in a few weeks was to begin her pupillage at a forward-looking Chambers in the Temple.

She was home by 10.40 p.m., her father still up, watching, as was his custom, the first half of Newsnight. She told him about the baby and the honour they’d bestowed on her. He beamed.

‘Amazing about the Olympics,’ she said.

‘Hey, I’ll be retired by then! I’ll get booking my seats.’ The beam broadened even further and he gave her a big hug. ‘Off to bed now. Can’t all be on holiday.’

Happily tired in a world that seemed calm and beautiful, she had a night of dreamless sleep.

And then, at 6.47 a.m., her mobile had sounded.

The horrors of memory.

The memory of how on the next day, July the 7th, when it was too late, she stayed safely in the confines of her own home and watched the burnt-out bus above ground and the white-suited helmeted figures heading below ground working to retrieve the blackened fried bodies of the dead.

Of never being able to live with herself if her cousin, Salman, heading into King’s Cross for his daily commute to work, was caught in it.

Of her shame that Salman living would be, to her, more important than others dying.

Of the baby girl called Sara.

The memory of 2005. The year of birth and death.

Without realising it, staring out of the window, she’d slumped against the side of her seat. Fields and trees had been replaced by London’s suburbia slicing through her reflections. She straightened. She remembered Elizabeth’s parting words and typed ‘sociopath’ into her phone. The phrases and adjectives brought bile to her throat. Superficial charm; lack of shame; promiscuous sexual behaviour with a tendency to violence; changes image to avoid being caught out; needs stimulation; authoritarian; desire to enslave victim; callousness; may state goal is to rule the world.