They followed the police officers into the shop, where strips of crime-scene tape hung from the doorway and flapped about in the breeze. Faadi hadn’t heard the man’s name when he had introduced himself; he had been too distracted by the young woman with the blonde-tipped hair who had smiled at him kindly and in doing so made his face flush with a heat he suspected might be visible. She didn’t look like a detective. For a start, she seemed too young – around the same age as his brothers, he guessed – and she was far too pretty. Then there was the fact that she seemed just too … well, just too nice. Not like the detectives he had seen on TV shows, who were mostly old and grumpy.

He watched his mother fight back tears as she studied the burnt-out carcass of the shop. An acrid, dirty smell lingered in the air – air that still looked grey – and the skeletons of what had once formed their livelihood lined the walls: charred shelving units, blackened cans and shrivelled plastic; the dusty ashes of piles of newspapers and magazines.

‘This was definitely arson?’ Mahira asked, her voice unsteady as it tripped over the question.

The female detective – Chloe Lane, Faadi remembered; he had been paying enough attention to catch her name – nodded. ‘I’m sorry. This must be very difficult for you.’

There was a single window in the storeroom at the side of the building. It had been smashed with a house brick that had been found beneath a set of shelving, and a burning rag had been used to start the fire. The rag had been taken to the lab for testing.

Faadi watched his mother take a tentative step into the blackened depths of the room, carefully picking her way through the debris of what remained of her business. ‘We’ve reported so many things,’ she said, her voice tinged with both sadness and anger. ‘Theft, vandalism … verbal assaults. You’ve seen the abuse scrawled on the walls out the back. No one has listened to us. I thought the police were supposed to take a zero-tolerance approach towards hate crime?’

It was a phrase that had been used a lot recently in the Hassan household, particularly by Faadi’s two older brothers. This was the first time he had heard his mother use it, though. Every time Syed and Jameel got into yet another argument or fight, the words would reappear, staining the air like the mention of a relative no one wanted to be reminded of. It seemed to Faadi a strange phrase. If someone stole something from somebody, they must have hated that person in some way, if only during the act of stealing. If they hadn’t hated them, even if only for a split second, would they have been able to take something from them? If someone fought with another person, that must mean they hated them in some way or another. You had to hate someone to hurt them, didn’t you? No matter what crime Faadi imagined, each one involved a perpetrator who, if only for the briefest of moments, had been capable of hate. It seemed to him that every crime was a hate crime.

He had said so once. The idea had been met with a slap to the head from Syed, accompanied by the suggestion that he keep his fat nose out of things he was too young and too stupid to understand.

‘Your complaints have all been logged,’ DC Chloe Lane was saying. ‘But this is the second fire to take place overnight in the area … We’ve no reason at the moment to believe it is a race-related matter.’

‘The fire up at the hospital, you mean?’ Mahira asked. ‘You think that what happened here might be linked to that?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ the male officer told her. ‘Forensics are still looking at the cause of the other fire.’

A cold shiver swept the length of Faadi’s body. He had heard about the fire in the old hospital; everyone had been talking about it in school that day. Bad news and gossip spread much like fire did: thick and fast, leaving nothing in their way unharmed. He knew a dead body had been found there, and that the person had been set on fire. It didn’t quite seem real. Things like that only happened in films and on TV, not right here on their doorstep.

Another thought occurred to him. If the person who had started the fire at the hospital was the same person who had set fire to the shop, had that person been hoping somebody might still be inside there too?

Were they trying to kill someone?

He didn’t want to think about it. The person most often inside the shop was his mother. His father had another job – he was a sales representative for a stationery company – and though his brothers were supposedly employed by his parents to help out at the shop and give his mother some time off at weekends, the reality was that they tended to turn up for a couple of hours before making their excuses about needing to leave. They were always going to interviews for other, more permanent full-time jobs, but the interviews never seemed to go their way.

What if his mother had still been inside the building when the fire had been started? Had someone wanted to hurt her? The thought filled Faadi with sickness and he swallowed nervously, his focus still fixed on the shop floor.

‘Are you okay?’

He was snapped from his thoughts by Chloe’s voice, calm and soothing. She was looking at him with kind brown eyes, her lips turned up in a half-smile that Faadi realised was intended to make him feel better. He nodded, finding himself tongue-tied. There was a smear of foundation lining the young woman’s jaw, and he wondered why the policeman with her hadn’t told her about it.

‘People are saying that the fire at the hospital was started deliberately,’ Mahira said, ‘and not that the person just happened to be inside and got caught up in it.’ She glanced at her son warily, but Faadi knew exactly what she meant. The victim at the hospital had been set on fire purposely. The thought horrified him, making his own body flare with a sudden and uncomfortable heat.

The male officer looked at him with caution, as though he was deliberating over his choice of words before he spoke them. ‘We can’t say anything for certain yet.’

Faadi looked around the room, following his mother’s eyes as they continued to absorb the mess that had been made of the place. The family had moved here for a new life; a fresh start. Now, looking at the ruins of her business, Mahira knew it had been their biggest mistake. They should have faced their problems in Cardiff – no matter what that had meant for Syed. Sometimes it really was a case of better the devil you knew.

‘As soon as we find out more,’ the male detective continued, ‘we’ll let you know. In the meantime, have you been in contact with your insurance company?’

Mahira nodded. It was the last thing she wanted to think about having to deal with, but she had already contacted them and they were in the process of establishing their investigation. From what she knew of insurance companies, she assumed that meant they would be assessing the ways in which they might be able to avoid a payout.

‘You have my number if you need anything, Mrs Hassan,’ Chloe said. She reached out and put a hand on Mahira’s arm, leaving it there for just a moment. ‘If there’s anything you need or anything you think of that might help the investigation, please contact us.’

Faadi watched his mother nod. She was unable to make eye contact with the other woman, as though doing so might unleash the tears she had been struggling so hard to hold back. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

Faadi didn’t really know what she was thanking her for.