‘Yeah.’ He turned to her; she was just inches away. He could feel her breath. She handed him the other four files and his eyes roved slowly over them, one by one. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Do you know them?’

‘Yeah. Then anyway.’

‘Were they friends?’

‘Yeah. Sort of.’

‘In June 2006 you were all brought in for questioning by Blackburn police.’

‘How do you know that?’

She pointed him to the common note on the five files. He looked at it silently, his face creasing in pain. ‘It were nothing,’ he said at last.

‘What was nothing?’

‘It were just a girl. Her foster mother reported us. They had us in, asked us what happened. Let us go. As I said, it were nothing.’

‘Was there anything else they talked to you about?’ He said nothing. ‘Did they try to coerce any of you to do anything for them? Offer money perhaps?’

He was hesitating. Something had happened, she was sure. If not to Sami, then to one or more of the others. ‘Nah, nothing else.’

She tried to lock eyes. ‘Forget about the police. Your friends, Sami… were they doing something that could have got you into real trouble?’

He turned away, staring blankly at the window. ‘I dunno, I never knew what it was.’

‘Never knew what what was? What happened, Sami?’

He bowed his head and sat looking at his hands for what seemed an age.

‘I never told anyone this before.’

Chapter 8

8

2006

The fourth night was the worst because he could see no way out of it. What did they want? Some kind of confession or admission? To sacrifice himself for them in some way? To march into the Rovers’ stadium and blow himself up? Those conversations with the other four kept coming back; he’d assumed at the time it was all bullshit, exchanges of fantasies. Had they been trying to draw him into something? Surely not Asif. That look he gave him as he was being led away was regret – and fear. Not a hungry, fighting look. No, not Asif – but the others… maybe.

The searchlight beaming into this cell – or whatever the space was – cast strips of brightness that seemed harsher than ever.

He thought of the real cell where the police questioned him after the foster mother complained.