‘Have you read this? What Hogarth wants? To stop our sisters covering up in public. She wants to tear off their veils. And stop Muslims coming to Britain. Not Jews. Not Hindus. Not unbelievers. Just Muslims.’

This time there was no dissent, no arguing over nuance. Asad could feel his mind beginning to clear and a fresh sense of purpose emerging. He nodded grimly.

‘And I’ve got a date to meet him.’ Mirza did not need to say Abu Mujahid’s name. ‘Tomorrow evening. I’ll tell you where on the day.’

#

Wandsworth Common, South London

Rod Houghton heard the crunch of tyre on gravel outside the house as headlights swept over the curtains. He rose from the sofa and opened the cream curtains a fraction of an inch. He heard laughter as the car door opened and slammed and the young couple from upstairs came towards the porch light, giggling and clutching each other. He returned to the sofa and sat in silence as they made their way noisily through the hall and up the staircase.

Houghton had arrived at the flat twenty-four hours earlier after a circuitous route through Aylesbury and back to London. It had been the NRF safe house for two years, chosen for its seclusion and anonymity. The other flats in the building were occupied by students and youngsters fresh from college, the sort who paid little interest in the comings and goings of neighbours and who rarely stayed more than a few months.

In the darkness, it was easy to lose his thoughts and he drifted back to his twenty-one-year-old self, risking his neck in Helmand on behalf of a country that didn’t give a shit, a time when his hair was still black rather than silvery grey. He’d seen everything in black and white at the time – it was a fight between decency and the death cult of the Taliban, between right and wrong. And then, when he came back to Britain, years later, he discovered that the same cult had its fingers around the throat of his homeland and was injecting its venom in the very streets of Bolton that he’d grown up in. Places that had changed beyond recognition – not just with Muslims but with Russians and Poles too. And while there’d always been Poles in Bolton, they were now everywhere. It felt like he was a firefighter coming home to discover his own house burning down.

And the frustration, after all that he’d seen and done, all the times he’d risked his life in special ops, to come home and end up begging for work while the Poles and the Russians and the Muslims took the jobs and the council houses and the appointments at the doctors and the places in the decent schools. He felt he’d fought for another country, only to lose his own. And then, to rub salt into the wounds, he had watched with disbelief and dismay as the politicians washed their hands of Afghanistan and walked away, abandoning his dead comrades’ legacy and leaving its people to their miserable fate.