Jia’s love for her father was as encompassing as the ocean, but her brother was the cloudless sky above her. Zan was a spiritual soul who seemed out of place in the Khan’s life. There was no doubt that their father loved him, but this didn’t stop him from trying to toughen him up. Zan never complained, and Jia was always ready to defend him. But now Akbar Khan had hurt him in ways that she could not have envisaged.

‘Our father is a good man,’ Zan said slowly. ‘He’s not what you think he is.’ Something in his voice wavered, and it was all Jia needed for rage to take root. Like spitting masala in an earthenware pot, this rage would grow with time until it bubbled out of control and consumed her.

‘They arrested you because of him!’

Impassive, dispassionate, Zan sat cross-legged, his back against the wall. ‘He’s my father. I’m his eldest son,’ he said. ‘He trusts me. I know that now. It’s time you realised that too.’ Despite all that happened, Zan had managed to wipe his father’s slate clean. His forgiveness was lost on Jia.

‘I’m going to kill him,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘A lot happened, a lot of things you don’t know about.’ And he began slowly to unravel his story, of recently opened bank accounts, of their father’s business interests, of the business Akbar Khan had set up in Zan’s name for tax purposes, without Zan’s knowledge, of the money laundering the police suspected him of being involved in, and of much darker, graver things. ‘That was why they took me in for questioning,’ he said. ‘They wanted me to help them put Baba behind bars. They showed me photographs, so…many…photographs. Pictures of people they said were missing under mysterious circumstances, of wives and children of men dead as a result of vendettas, drugs and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of the pictures were brutal, others were just sad. They said Dad was responsible. They thought I would turn against him.’

The images were etched into his mind. He saw them every time he closed his eyes. He thought about what the officers had said, how they had stared at him from across the desk as though looking down the barrel of a gun. ‘They talked to me like I was shit on the street, Jia. I was born here. I’ve been to better schools than they have. I speak better English. But they didn’t see any of that. All they saw was what they wanted to see, a dirty Paki with a criminal for a father.’

‘They can’t talk to you like that! They should be reported!’