Binta fiddled with her fingers. ‘My husband, God rest his soul, was killed by some Christian boys he employed. They were people he called by their birth names and did business with. My sister’s husband and her son were hacked to death by their Christian neighbours because a woman urged them to.”

He always smiled at their jokes. But, that morning, he was not smiling. His face, made fierce by war paint, glistened with sweat and odium as he raised his machete and brought it down. Bright, red blood, warm and sticky, splashed across Faiza’s face and dotted, in a fine spray, the shell-pink nightdress that her father had bought her.