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teen had flashed before her eyes on hearing the news. Now they flashed once more, only to flash out of existence again as she realised they never could be.

  With Peter Robinson in her house, her wounds never would heal; rather, they would only get worse and worse, hurting more and more each time, until finally they killed her.

  He walked idly into her kitchen and stood over her. His face was terrifying, as if what he was doing didn’t phase him at all. To him, she was not a person, not a human being. She was a target. That’s all this was to him: target practise, like shooting at some rings or going to hunt for ducks. And he had done this a thousand times before, she knew it, because his eyes and his manner were like that of a cool professional. He knew how people died. He knew what their last breath sounded like, how they would scream and beg at the end for him to stop, how it appeared when the life drained from their eyes. He knew it so well that it had come to bore him.

  He loaded up his gun, getting ready to shoot. And in all this, she was lying there, slumped against the kitchen table just- watching. She could do nothing else. Perhaps she had the option to crawl away, but it simply did not occur to her; at any rate, if she had done that, he would easily have been able to catch up with her or outrun her and do what he was going to do anyway. So she watched as her murder weapon was loaded. She watched as he inspected it was ready. And she watched as he cocked the gun with its barrel pointing towards her head, his eye gazing coolly down the scope.

  “Please,” she begged again, despairingly, hopelessly.

  He shook his head. And then he pulled the trigger.

  In a second, she was gone: Miriam Stopwood, seventy years of age, widow to Muhammad and mother to Sadiq, grandmother to Qasim; former archaeologist and founder of the Church of the Holy Tabernacle, who liked to ride horses and go swimming in her spare time. Gone.