And so the questioning had continued until, having deprived Diop of sleep, restricted his access to food and water, and beaten him a little, his interrogators decided that he had told them all he could, and it was time for him to languish in a cell until the courts got around to trying him as an accessory to terrorism. Only as he was being taken to Fleury-Mérogis did Diop learn of Fouad Belkacem’s murder. He already knew that Marković had been shot and killed. The police had appeared curious to learn who might have been responsible, which surprised Diop since he had assumed that the police had themselves killed Marković. Now, it seemed, Fouad was also dead. Baba Diop found this troubling because he recognized that, depending on the culprits, he might be next in line.

All of which explained how Baba had come to be confined in Fleury-Mérogis. After being brought before an investigating judge, he was remanded to a supposedly secure unit of the prison’s maison d’arrêt des hommes, where he was likely to remain for the foreseeable future. Following his eventual trial, the end result of which Diop could gloomily predict, he would most likely end up back at Fleury-Mérogis, or even be given the opportunity to find out for himself whether La Santé was, in fact, cursed, or if its refurbishment had succeeded in banishing the hex. This was how Diop saw the next decade or so of his life unfolding. It made him sad. He was not a wicked man. He had tried not to hurt people unless absolutely necessary, but it had been his misfortune to fall into bad company on many occasions, and in at least four different countries.

Diop was not unalarmed at the prospect of incarceration in Fleury-Mérogis. He was aware of its large Muslim contingent and its reputation as a font of radicalism. Amedy Coulibaly, the Malian who murdered a policewoman and four Jews in Paris in 2015, and Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who shot twelve dead at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, had both been radicalized by their time at the prison. Diop, one of his fellow detainees warned him as they were placed in the van, would be entering an environment that was unsympathetic at best to non-Muslims, and policed by unarmed guards who preferred not to risk their lives by stepping into the exercise yard when the prisoners were at liberty there.