Last week I got a call from a couple I’d not seen for five years. They had been in hiding or on the run since 1993. “It’s finally happened,” said Jack. “After 13 years we’ve been given the all-clear by Special Branch. We’re coming out.”

The police had decided, he explained, that there was no longer “any credible threat to our lives”. This didn’t mean they were going back to their home town of Leeds. Or even revealing where they live now.

But after three sets of name changes and one complete identity transfer, they were being given leave to get off the witness protection scheme they’d been on since 1994. They could begin returning to their real identities.

I could hear Jack’s wife Zena clattering around in the background. Now she came on the phone, with that familiar irrepressible laugh, that same broad Yorkshire accent. What exactly does this mean, I asked her. “No more lying and hiding in corners,” she told me. “We’re taking back our lives.”

Who are these people, you may wonder: mass murderers, supergrasses, witnesses to some unspeakable crime? No. Jack and Zena, as I still have to call them, did nothing more dreadful than fall in love.

I first met them almost exactly 10 years ago in the private back room of a London club. They were a striking couple: Jack white, wiry, shaven-headed; Zena, a decade-younger Asian beauty, with long black hair and a lovely smile. At that point they had been on the run for three years. It showed. Jack’s pale blue eyes had the look of a trapped animal; as she held her teacup Zena’s hand shook.

With them was the former hostage John McCarthy. Hiding in a run-down flat in a remote part of Norfolk they had written in desperation to four public figures outlining their situation: Peter Lilley, then in charge of social security; Tony Blair, the new leader of the Labour party; Terry Waite; and McCarthy. The first two hadn’t replied. Waite had written back and offered his help; McCarthy had taken up their case.

As we sat drinking tea, they told me their shocking story. They had lived in nearby districts in multiracial, inner-city Leeds (in due course to produce three of the July 7 bombers). In the long hot summer of 1992 they had seen each other around, made friends, then slowly fallen in love.

By late autumn Jack was proposing marriage, but Zena knew this was impossible as she was promised to a man from Kashmir. From the two meetings she’d had with him she knew she didn’t want to spend her life with him: quite apart from being a hill farmer from a foreign country, Bilal spoke little English and was, in her words, “arrogant and old-fashioned”.

So one cold night in January 1993 she and Jack eloped. In a scene worthy of a movie, Zena lowered her cases on torn sheets from her bedroom while her father slept below. As they sped away on the train south, she was aware she had done something wrong, but neither she nor Jack were ready for the family’s reaction.

When she phoned home to tell her beloved father she was okay, he said coldly that she was now dead to him. The family, he told her, had hired a private detective and a bounty hunter to track them down. Her brothers warned Jack that if they caught up with them they’d be “in bin bags”.

So Jack and Zena began an extraordinary life on the run, pursued by Zena’s family, who stopped at nothing to try to get her back. The brothers got access to secure social security department computers to track them down; they laid a false theft charge against her that resulted in her being arrested and nearly returned to them. They even smashed the windows of Jack’s elderly mother’s flat in an attempt to intimidate her into revealing her son’s whereabouts.

Jack and Zena searched in vain for sanctuary. One by one the agencies that could — and should — have helped them let them down. The police, social security, victim support. The couple ran from Huddersfield to Cleethorpes to Grimsby to Lincoln to the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth and on.