No journey by London bus or tube is quite as mundane these days as it once was and yet, by all accounts, Jean Charles de Menezes (27) saw his own intended journey, last Friday morning, as nothing more than another day at work.
The Brazilian-born electrician had been due in Kilburn to help fit a fire alarm. The only impact the previous day's attempted bombings seemed to be having on him was the one they were having on millions of other Londoners: they were making him late.
"He rang me . . . saying that he would be a little late because the tube lines weren't working properly," said Gesio de Avila, a builder and close friend whom Mr De Menezes had been due to meet that morning for the fire alarm job. "I said, 'OK, as soon as you get to Kilburn, call me.' That was the last conversation I had with him."
Around the same time, Mr De Menezes left the council flat where he lived in Scotia Road, Lambeth, and cut through to the main road of Tulse Hill, where he boarded the number 2 bus, heading north towards Stockwell. Boarding with him, it now seems clear, were several plainclothes police officers, who had followed him from his home.
"When he didn't call me, I called and called and called," Mr Avila said "I left messages on the voice message system. I sent him SMSs. All day I was worried."
At about 12.45am, Mr Avila went to bed.
"Then the phone started to vibrate by my bed. It was a police detective. He said that he had something very important to tell me."
Mr De Menezes had been dead since before 10am on Friday, reportedly shot five times in the head and back by armed officers inside a tube train at Stockwell. In retrospect, his journey, until its bloody conclusion, was significant precisely for its ordinariness - and for what it may say about the new calculus of risk and counter-terrorism on the streets of the capital.
As the shockwaves reached his home country yesterday, those who knew him as a child expressed astonishment. "It's not just what happened but the way it happened," said Geraldo Cunha, who lives next door to Mr De Menezes's grandmother in the town of Gonzaga and watched him grow up. "Five shots in the back of the head. What for?"
Mr De Menezes first came to Britain in 2002, apparently initially being rejected in an interview, then finding an opportunity through a girlfriend in Sao Paulo. A cousin suggested he may first have come to London to work without authorisation, but had managed to legalise his situation. He had planned to return to Brazil within six months, relatives said.
He had returned home to Brazil only once, last May, when he visited his parents at an isolated farm reached along mile after mile of dirt track outside Gonzaga.
"I'm begging God for justice," Mr De Menezes's mother, Maria Ambrosia de Menezes, said in floods of tears. "I'm begging that the police be punished. It's not fair to kill an innocent worker. I told him to take care [ in England] . . . but he just laughed. 'It's a clean place, mum. The people are educated. There's no violence in England. No one goes around carrying guns, not even the police'."
Many questions cluster around Mr De Menezes's final few minutes when he got to Stockwell station: why was he wearing, as police report, clothing bulky enough to arouse the suspicion he was hiding explosives? Why was he not challenged sooner? Why did he jump the turnstile when ordered to halt by armed officers?
Those who knew him dispute the questions' premises. "I think that the police are inventing this thing about the thick jacket," his friend Mr Avila said. "He would not have had a thick jacket in summer."
Alex Pereira denied his cousin would have jumped over the ticket barrier. "Running, maybe, but not running from the police. Everyone runs for the underground, but he wouldn't jump. Why would he jump?"
A small crowd of largely Brazilian demonstrators gathered outside parliament yesterday, holding their national flag and decrying the shooting. At Stockwell, flowers, cards and candles adorned the blue hoardings outside the underground station, along with messages of protest.
In Brazil, the mayor of Gonzaga had come to give Mr De Menezes's parents the news of his death on Saturday. "They brought a medical team too, since they knew we'd all be sick at the news," his father, Matosinhos Otone Da Silva, said. His face buckled into fits of tears. "How could it have been? He was so happy in England.
When the mayor arrived, Mr Da Silva pre-empted him. "It's fatal," he said.
"Yes, it's about England and your son," the mayor said. "Your son was murdered."
"We lost our heads," Mr Da Silva said.
Additional reporting: Tom Phillips, Angelique Chrisafis and Tania Branigan.