Ray fiddled with the radio. Gabriel immediately recognised the voice of Chris Walker, a talk radio presenter famed for his straight-talking mockney.

‘…and once again, we not only have the failure by the police to protect people on the streets, we have double standards. I have no problems condemning the white terrorists who killed and maimed on Pall Mall yesterday. But where are the Muslim community leaders condemning attacks by Muslims who commit acts of terror on our streets? Like that one that stabbed a charity collector – a charity collector – in Leicester this week? Instead, we have hate preacher Ishmail Sherif on the British Broadcasting Corporation virtually calling for Muslims to take up arms. We have a prime minister refusing to act – allowing the cancer of terror to grow. But last night, Deputy Prime Minister Lesley Hogarth broke ranks with the PM and called for a Freedom Bill with tougher action against the extremists. And she’s joining us on the phone right now.’

Gabriel turned it off. She drove in silence.

Ray spoke quietly above the engine as they drove past a trickle of children in rugby kits heading towards the recreation ground.

‘He’s a minority view, you know that,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but he’s a loud minority view, Ray. With a radio show. And a column in the Express. He may be a minority, but there’s a hell of a lot of them now. And he – they – are whipping it all up. This isn’t going away, Ray. My dad would have hated this.’

#

Gabriel had been sixteen when her father died. He had been a surveillance motorbike rider with the Met, an extraordinary job she now knew, but which at the time he could talk little about. The young Gabriel had sensed a world of speed and danger, secret meetings, exotic hotels and exotic-sounding towns like Aberdeen, Newcastle or Louth.

Sometimes he went away from home, often with no warning, occasionally for a week. And then he’d return, always bringing Gabriel the same present – a bar of Toblerone chocolate. And he’d tell stories of how he had bought it – once from a newsagent who was really a drugs baron, another from a stall where he’d been working undercover. Gabriel devoured the chocolate within a day every time, but kept the triangular cardboard sleeves in a drawer in her bedside table. Years after, she discovered that he bought them from the garage at the end of their road, a last stop before walking through the door. When she learnt that, she had loved him even more.

Then, one Tuesday evening in April, a policewoman came to the door. Gabriel had answered it; her mother was taking a nap. Gabriel had known from the way that woman stood, from the sombre broken face, from the pain in her eyes, what had happened. Her mother came up behind her and she gasped, knowing the worst – before a word had been uttered. The policewoman had come inside and focused on her mother, with Gabriel watching from the velvet chair by the window.