Mary Ragoobeer and her husband Jose had been married for twenty-two years. They lived in the flat above the Żabka with their three sons. Mary worked locally and was about to begin an Adult Nursing course at university with the goal of becoming a palliative care nurse, the kind who sits with patients in the last months of their lives and helps them die well. Shane was eighteen and at the start of adult life. Sean was seventeen, the middle son. Scotty, the youngest, was fifteen. Leah Beth Reek, also eighteen, was Shane's girlfriend and a hospice volunteer who had been at the flat that evening. Viktorija Ijevleva had come to Britain from Latvia and was working at the shop downstairs. Five people went into Sunday evening with ordinary plans, expecting Monday morning to follow. None of them lived to see it. Scotty survived being pulled from the wreckage of his own home with injuries he and his father would carry for the rest of their lives.

The Żabka, named after a Polish convenience store chain, had opened in December 2017 under the lease of Aram Kurd, an Iraqi Kurd in his thirties who had come to Britain years before. Polish supermarkets had become small landmarks in the British high street through the 2010s, serving the country's Polish community and curious British neighbours alike, selling pierogi and rye bread and the particular flavours that homesickness wants. Hinckley Road, the A47 running west out of central Leicester, was the kind of street where shops like this lived, mixed in among takeaways and barbers and the small commerce of a working neighbourhood. The Ragoobeers lived above one of those shops, the way thousands of British families do, with the same wall between their living room and someone else's storeroom. They had no reason to think that ordinary arrangement was a danger to them.

Across early February 2018, Aram Kurd, his fellow Iraqi Kurd Arkan Ali, and a third man, Hawkar Hassan, bought petrol in carefully spaced trips, the kind of detail that becomes evidence in a courtroom. Forty-five litres of petrol, several litres of barbecue fluid, four litres of white spirit. They worked with Viktorija Ijevleva, Arkan Ali's girlfriend, to set up the insurance paperwork that would pay out if the shop burned. Mr Justice Holgate, sentencing the men later, found that during a meeting on the day before the fire all three agreed Viktorija should die in the explosion they were about to set. The reason given in court was that she 'knew too much.' The reason underneath was that her share would not have to be paid. They poured the accelerant inside the shop late on the evening of 25 February. They knew the Ragoobeer family lived in the flat above. They lit the fire. The explosion was instant and total.

Leicestershire Police declared a major incident within minutes of the blast. Hinckley Road and Carlisle Street were closed. Search and rescue worked through the night looking for survivors. Kurd, very visibly injured, gave a series of media interviews the next day claiming to have been trapped under rubble himself, expressing concern for the victims, telling reporters how lucky he was to be alive. Within days he, Ali, and Hassan were arrested. They were initially charged with manslaughter and arson; on 31 August 2018 the charges were upgraded to murder when the Crown Prosecution Service decided that the volume of accelerant proved an intent to kill. The trial began at Leicester Crown Court in November 2018 and ran five weeks, with the three defendants assisted by Kurdish interpreters. All pleaded not guilty. Hassan and Ali testified, denying knowledge of either the fraud or the fire. Kurd declined to give evidence in his own defence. On 28 December 2018 the jury convicted all three unanimously on five counts of murder. Kurd and Ali received minimum sentences of 38 years. Hassan received 33 years.

A funeral for the Ragoobeer family in April 2018 drew hundreds of mourners. Leah Beth Reek's family spoke publicly of an eighteen-year-old who had volunteered at a hospice, who had wanted to help dying people. Viktorija Ijevleva's mother apologised, on her daughter's behalf, to the families of the people her daughter's choices had helped to put in that building, an act of grace from a parent in unimaginable grief. The site on Hinckley Road has since been rebuilt. The shop and the flat are gone; what was built in their place sits where five people lived their last hours. Polish-owned shops continue along British high streets, doing the everyday work of carrying culture across borders. The crime was not about the Żabka or about Polish Leicester or about Iraqi Kurdish Britain. It was about three men who decided that a fraudulent insurance payment was worth the lives of people they did not know, and one woman they did. The cost is not the burned shop. The cost is Mary Ragoobeer, who wanted to nurse dying people, and her boys Sean and Shane, who never reached twenty. Leah, who was eighteen. Viktorija, who was twenty-two and trusted the wrong people. Five names that need keeping.