After the pilot had braked and the aircraft had stopped, she was kept in her seat until the last of the soldiers on the far side of the sacking screen had gone with their kit and weapons and ammunition and food. Their voices trailed away from her. She wanted so much to be brave. She wanted so much to be worthy of her father. The guards un-fastened the safety belt. They made her stand. From a plastic bag one of the guards took a loose white robe, with open seams and tapes under the armpits. The white robe was lifted over her head, and the tapes were tied at the sides. She was alone. In four days she would have been eighteen. She had been brought to the second city of her native country for public execution.

They led her down the echoing interior of the aircraft, out into the bold crisp sunlight of the morning. She was a small, waif figure amongst the men. She wanted to think of her father, and she could not because the pain of her body had crept through to her mind. She wondered if her father, at his same moment, at the moment when he was lashed to the post in the garden of the Evin gaol, had thought of her, his daughter. A short and hazed thought, and then gone. The lorry waiting a few feet from the aircraft ramp spilled out its exhaust fumes over them. A guard on each elbow, half walking her, half carrying her to the back of the lorry, and a small knot of men waiting there for her arrival. The young Mullah was there. She had stood in front of him in the courtroom high in Block One of the Evin gaol in the late afternoon, only yesterday.

Perhaps he had travelled from Tehran to Tabriz last night, after he had heard the case against her, weighed it, passed judgment, announced sentence. Perhaps he had boarded the aircraft after her and sat away from her and amongst the soldiers. It was of little matter. The Mullah stared into her face. She tried to stare back at him, but her guards pulled her forward to the back of the lorry and lifted her bodily up and inside. The Mullah had taken a very few minutes to hear her case. She had not spoken in her defence. She wanted it over. She did not know how long she could stay brave.