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says, down the line. ‘So where do we find this charmer?’

 

CHAPTER 5
    Clive, Zoe’s boss, has cancelled a longstanding community outreach engagement. So a day that started badly soon gets worse; Zoe finds herself addressing a gaggle of sixth formers about the work of Ford and Vargas, and about the nature of human rights legislation.
    She tells them about Lisa Williams, twelve years old when she was killed in a hit-and-run. This was back in 2003. The driver was Aso Ibrahim, an Iraqi asylum seeker already on bail for driving while disqualified.
    Lacking clear evidence that Ibrahim had been driving dangerously, the Crown Prosecution Service charged him with Driving While Disqualified; the more serious offence of Causing Death While Disqualified didn’t become law until 2008.
    Ibrahim served two months in prison. Since his release, he’s been appealing against his deportation.
    Zoe tells the class that over the course of nine years, Aso Ibrahim cost the taxpayer several hundred thousand pounds in legal aid for lawyers and interpreters. There were immigration hearings and trials, at which he was convicted variously of harassment, possession of illegal drugs and, three years after Lisa Williams’s death, Driving While Disqualified.
    Then she asks the sixth formers what they’d do about him.
    The consensus, as she’d presumed it would be, is – send him home .
    ‘But he’s entitled to stay,’ she tells them, ‘because he’s the father of two children with a British woman. Though he doesn’t actually live with those children, taking him away from his estranged girlfriend and those kids would breach his rights under Article Eight of the Human Rights Act.’
    She asks them what they think about that.
    She sits back and listens. The kids debate the danger Ibrahim would be in, back in Iraq. They talk about his two children and their right to a father. They talk about the bereaved parents of Lisa Williams, and their right to a daughter.
    Zoe lets them discuss it for a bit, then tells them about how the British National Party had used Lisa Williams’s death as a propaganda tool during local elections in Barking.
    She tells them how Lisa Williams’s father, a good and broken man, had made a public appeal for the people of Barking not to vote BNP because this injustice had nothing to do with the colour of his daughter’s skin.
    One of the sixth formers, a good-looking, supercilious kid called Adam, suggests that Aso Ibrahim should be hung.
    Zoe says, ‘Now you sound like my husband,’ and everyone laughs.
    Then she tells them about Article Three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Prohibition of Torture, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, dictates that Ibrahim should be granted asylum in the United Kingdom, because rejection of torture is a moral and legal absolute.
    She asks if there are any questions.
    There are always questions. Adam tries to hold her gaze, but Zoe’s been an expert at that game since before this kid was born.
    ‘No questions?’ she says. ‘Come on. There must be one. Who’s got a question?’
    The quiet girl sitting off to the far side raises a timid hand.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Stephanie.’
    ‘Yes, Stephanie?’
    ‘Do you, like, get a clothing allowance?’
    Zoe looks at her, deflating.
    Stephanie says, ‘Because your clothes are really nice and everything.’
    Her classmates perform a lot of exasperated eye rolling, sucking air over their teeth.
    Stephanie blushes, and suddenly Zoe’s fiercely on her side. It’s in her nature.
    ‘Good question,’ she says. And as she’s saying it, she begins to believe it. ‘No, we don’t get a clothing allowance but we’re expected to meet a required minimum standard of dress every day. And when I say minimum , I mean – going to a royal wedding.’
    Stephanie smiles, seraphic. Zoe smiles back, wanting to help her, wanting her to come away from this pointless little forum with something of worth.
    ‘It’s easier for men,’ Zoe