Malki felt calm now, cool, OK. A flash of pink light caught the corner of his eye as the front door opened. He remembered his instructions and snapped into action.

Crumpling the still warm tinfoil in his hand into a ball, he went to throw it over his shoulder but stopped, thinking to himself that it would be unwise to do so. He smiled at his own lucidity, and brought his hand down, tucking the foil deep into the corner of his hoodie pocket and then, with mechanical precision, twisted the van key, slid the handbrake off, engaged the clutch and drove slowly forwards, straight across the road to the rendezvous point.

He was congratulating himself on having remembered the instructions but forgot to stop and crashed the front of the van into the low garden wall, smashing the left headlight.

Glass tinkled cheerfully onto the pavement. Malki bit his lip.

Omar kicked the door open and found everyone frozen still in the hall. Two strange men were there, dressed in army fatigues. The air smelled odd, smoky, sulphurous. Everyone was staring at Aleesha and for a moment neither Mo nor Omar could work out why.

She was standing with her arm up, as if she was pointing at the wall clock, looking over her shoulder. Omar followed her eyes to her hand. A blur of black red, violent red, fingers jumbled like a scattered jigsaw.

A sudden red snake raced down her arm.

Wild eyed, she turned to face the stranger in front of her. ‘My fucking hand!’ she said, using both accent and words that were forbidden in the house.

The gunman whimpered a sorry.

A fatter gunman leapt across the hall to Omar and Mo, pointing his gun in each of their faces and back again. ‘ONE OF YOU FUCKERS IS BOB.’

Neither spoke.

‘YOU.’ He poked the gun at Mo’s chest. ‘You’re Bob.’

But Mo had a different nose than the rest of them. Omar had the family features, Aamir’s long nose and Sadiqa’s narrow jaw. Without waiting for Mo to answer he turned his gun on Omar and said quietly, ‘You’re Bob.’

Sadiqa couldn’t contain herself any longer. She reached for her favourite child and shouted, ‘Not Omar! Not my Omar!’

At this Eddy became confused. In the silence, through the open front door, came the sound of shattered glass falling from the lights as Malki backed the van away from the wall’s embrace.

‘Fuck yees,’ said Eddy spitefully. He reached over and wrapped a hand tight around Aamir’s throat. The small man didn’t object or raise a hand; he kept his eyes down, implicating no one.

Eddie squeezed, saw that the old man was not going to resist or defend himself and was suddenly calm. ‘Yous can tell Bob this: I want two million quid, used notes, by tomorrow night. Call the polis and this fucker dies. Fucking payback. For Afghanistan.’

‘ Afghanistan?’ spat Sadiqa. ‘I’m from Coatbridge, what’s that…’ She caught her indignantion, dropped her chin to her chest, shutting up.

Aleesha’s hand was slowly coming down and she watched the blood pulse from the messy end of it. ‘My fucking hand,’ she whispered.

Letting go of Aamir’s throat, Eddy skipped behind him, wrapping his forearm around the old man’s chest, holding him along the Empire line.

Everyone in the hall braced themselves for a gun to Aamir’s head, more shouting, but Eddy did neither. Instead he tipped his weight back, easily lifting the old man off his feet and carried him backwards out of the front door like a heavy lamp.

Sheepish, Pat broke eye contact with Aleesha, muttered another sorry and followed him outside.

The hall suddenly came alive: Sadiqa lumbered across the hall to catch Aleesha, whose knees were giving way. Holding her daughter’s arm above her head to stem the bleeding, she knocked the phone from its cradle and stabbed 999 on the keypad. Billal blocked the bedroom door with his body as he pulled his mobile from his pocket, punching the number in with his thumb. Even in the bed, the baby thrashing at her breast, Meeshra lunged for the mobile on the side table and called the emergency services.

Omar and Mo chased after the gunmen, out into the street.

The van had one headlight gleaming extra bright from the smashed casing. As it drove off along the street the back door was shutting, a chubby hand pulling at it, and Omar gave a plaintive little cry. ‘Nugget…’

Mo grabbed his shoulder and tugged him towards the Vauxhall. The boys bolted for the car.

Mo drove as Omar watched for the van. It was a dark road. On the left was a golf course, on the right a dark stretch of balding bushes and shrubs leading up to a blank wall. Though the road was broad and straight, though the streets were quiet, they’d lost a massive white van, the only other car on the fucking road.

They had it at one point, they were sure: Mo had spotted tail lights ahead, high enough off the road to be a van. He saw a glimpse of white door creep cautiously around a corner, defying a red light.

As they came up to the road over the M8 motorway Mo slowed for a red light and Omar suddenly swung his arm over Mo’s face, hitting his chin. ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stop!’

Mo stamped on the brake, bringing the Vauxhall to an abrupt skidding standstill. Beltless, Omar slid like a comedy drunk into the footwell, his cheek smacking off the dashboard.

‘Police!’ shouted Omar from the footwell, pointing past Mo to the door. ‘’S police car!’

A squad car was tucked neatly into a small cut-off, lights dark, poised to catch speeding motorists. The two police officers inside had been watching the Vauxhall battering down the empty road towards them, had expected to follow it onto the motorway, pull it over and practise their sarcasm, but the emergency stop surprised them. They watched as Omar jumped out of the car, leaving his door swinging wide as he ran over to them.

‘Police! Please…’ A rude pink bruise was forming on his cheek from the collision with the dashboard.

Wary, the officers unclipped their belts, opened the doors and stepped out to meet him. ‘Were you wearing a seat belt just then, sir?’

‘Sorry, no, but listen, my dad, my dad’s been taken away in a van.’

But they weren’t listening to him. The policemen were looking at his clothes.

Both the boys were wearing traditional white baggy trousers and shirts. They had just come from Mosque and so appeared to the officers as particularly clean and strange looking. Omar had a zip-up Adidas hoody over his kameez and trainers, but Mo had a cardigan on and loafers and his scraggy beard was untrimmed.

Suddenly aware of how alien they looked, Mo attempted a friendly smile. ‘All right, mate?’ he said cheerfully to the nearest policeman but tension and fright distorted his voice and his face. Both officers’ hands strayed to their belts. A lorry rumbled along the motorway below them.

‘No,’ Omar said helplessly. ‘Please help us, men took my dad away in a van. They had guns.’

The police examined them in silence. From the open Vauxhall doors the sounds of Radio Ramadan floated out over the still suburban midnight: some guy, young, talking in a phoney Arab accent, arguing about the Qur’an.

Both boys suddenly realised how foreign this whole thing was going to look to the police

Taking this as a cue, the officer standing nearest Omar opened his notebook and spoke slowly. ‘Could you tell me your name, sir?’

‘Omar Anwar.’ He carried on talking as the officer wrote it down. ‘Look, men with guns came to our house and stole my dad, took him, they’d guns.’

The officer refused to look up from his notebook. ‘How are you spelling that, sir?’

‘He’s been kidnapped.’

‘I see. O – M- A- R, A – N- W- A- R?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, we followed the van as far as the last set of lights but we lost them then and I think they’re headed for the motorway. They could go anywhere…’