‘Vandalism?’
‘Yup, that was when the clever clogs went down the street and keyed every car in it, all the way down one side and back up the other. That’s a lot of damage in a street of fancy cars. Call it ten grand. Custodial sentence, right there.’
Shahid shrugged. He did not look unduly troubled by the thought of people’s SUVs being messed up. Mill went on:
‘And there’s another one, animal cruelty. Dead birds, someone’s been sending them to houses in the street. Blackbirds. Not all of the houses, just some. In A5 envelopes. Bit sick, if you ask me. Know anything about that?’
‘That’s disgusting, but it’s nothing to do with me.’
What Mill did not say was that the dead birds had been sent in the last fortnight – in other words, while Shahid was already in Paddington Green. The link between We Want What You Have and Shahid’s internet access had been found two days before, after the latest wave of activity. By the time they knew about the link with Shahid, they already knew that he couldn’t have been responsible for what was now going on; at best he might be involved with somebody else. But there was a strange pattern to the way the site had worked. When it began, it had been photos of houses taken, Mill had long since concluded, by someone with a strong local interest. Then it went away for a while. Then it came back again, much darker, with abusive labels on the site, abusive postcards sent to the houses, graffiti in the street, cars being keyed. Now dead blackbirds had been sent through the post to seven different addresses. It seemed much angrier. The shift in tone and behaviour was baffling.
Shahid’s eyes were moving from side to side. He was thinking hard.
‘I know nothing about this,’ he eventually said. ‘Try the Belgian, if you can find him.’
‘It began some time before he came and stayed with you. Have you changed the encryption on your wireless internet at any point in the last months?’
‘No,’ said Shahid, unthinkingly – before realising he had just been tricked into giving up a perfect defence. If his internet access had been open, the traffic might have been nothing to do with him. He sighed. ‘It is encrypted and I am the only person who had the password. As you know, I let the Belgian use my internet access but not my computer.’
‘You’ll understand why this looks strange to us. You’re under arrest as a terrorist suspect, now it looks as if you’ve been making all sorts of menaces on the internet, threatening your neighbours, scaring the living daylights out of them. Doesn’t look too great, does it?’
‘I’m starting to get used to being accused of things I didn’t do,’ said Shahid. ‘I have no reason to believe you.’ He crossed his arms and looked over at the one-way glass. Yet again he found himself wondering who might be on the other side and what they might be thinking.
‘So who did this?’
‘No idea,’ said Shahid, and for the first time in their meeting, it seemed to Mill that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.
87
The London centre for asylum and immigration tribunals, where cases concerning the immigration status of asylum-seekers to the UK are decided, was near Chancery Lane. Hearings took place in the complex of court rooms, where the judges shared offices and picked up their weekly paperwork, the whole building having the inconsistently decorated air and too-bright colours of underfunded public-sector work. There were times when the whole building seemed to smell of instant coffee. This was the place where the fate of Quentina Mkfesi was to be decided.
The hearings had a standard format. On the Monday, the judges – a separate inquisitorial service inside the Ministry of Justice – would cold-read a brief and hear evidence from the witnesses, represented by their lawyers, with the government’s case for refusal of asylum being made by another lawyer. On Tuesday they would have more hearings. On Wednesday they would go home and begin to read up on the case. On Friday they would make a decision and write up their judgment, which would determine whether or not the applicant would be allowed to remain in the UK.
It followed from this that the allocation of judge for an asylum applicant was crucial. So although Quentina Mkfesi didn’t know it, her entire future – the next few years of it anyway – hung on the identity of which of two members of HM Government’s immigration and asylum service would be assigned to deal with her case.
On Monday 22 September, Alison Tite and Peter McAllister, both of them immigration judges, arrived at work within thirty seconds of each other. They shared an office on the second floor of the building, clumsily partitioned so that it shared a window with another office. Both of them were carrying coffee, hers a cappuccino in a styrofoam cup from the small Italian deli down the road, his a gigantic milky drink from the Starbucks by Chancery Lane Tube station.
Alison Tite was a thirty-seven-year-old barrister with two small children, married to an actuary, who had initially practised family law, but who had then drifted into immigration work because she wearied of the set cast of characters in her former field, and of the intensely personal bitternesses involved. Immigration work felt more connected to the larger currents of history, which she found more satisfying. Her favourite part of the cases was always the two days she spent reading background information on the specific case files. A recent example: she read The Kite Runner as background to a lurid case about a would-be Afghan refugee whose brother had been stoned to death and whose family shop had been firebombed and then confiscated. Or so he said; there was something convincingly Taliban-like about that sequence, arson before confiscation, and Alison allowed his appeal. Alison liked the feeling that the man in front of her, or woman or child, came as the representative of a world, of a way of life, and she needed to understand that world to make a judgment about whether that man/woman/child should be allowed to stay or had to be deported. Her favourite book was We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.
The great flaw in the system was that deportation did not mean deportation. In almost all cases it was not legal to return the asylum-seeker home to Sudan, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or wherever. In most instances, the asylum-seeker packed off on a plane would face torture or death or both. That was wrong and, more importantly to the system, illegal under European human rights law. So failed asylum-seekers couldn’t be allowed to stay legally: they could not work or claim a full range of citizens’ benefits from the state. And yet they couldn’t be sent back to the country they had come from. Even from the most realistic, least idealistic perspective, it could not be seen as an ideal solution. In practice, what happened to the failed asylum-seekers was that they were sent to detention centres.
Alison knew that the main thing about the system was not her opinion of it, and within the constraints of her power, she did what she could to be as fair as possible. If she was the judge on an applicant’s case, that applicant stood a much better than average chance of winning the right to remain legally in the UK. She had one other thing going for her: she could write very well. That meant that although the percentage of her cases granted PRR (permanent right to remain) stood out as high, when her judgments were read, they were difficult to challenge. When her name was on the docket, the asylum-seeker’s barrister cheered up, and the Home Office’s groaned, and reached for the Red Bull.
Today it was Alison who was groaning. She had period pains, her youngest child had earache and had woken her three times the night before, her sister had invited herself down to stay for the weekend and in consequence had inflicted a double load of everything – cooking, cleaning, washing up, commiserating, hand-holding, and complaining about schools and husbands. The result of all this was that for Alison, in a way she would have admitted to almost nobody, being at work was a relief, verging on an outright pleasure. Gang-raped Somalis, tortured Syrians, genitally mutilated Kikuyu activists, Chinese gangmasters claiming to be political dissidents: bring ’em all on. Not a single one needed to be given Calpol, or told that they still didn’t look a day over thirty. When she arrived in her office, a fat file, tied with the traditional ribbon – the ribbon that always made her think of other people’s fingers, and all the things those fingers must have done – was already on her desk.