Capital

computer. What that meant was that Iqbal had been doing things on his own laptop. But none of that had anything to do with Shahid. It had nothing to do with him! Nothing! To do! With him! NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM!
    ‘OK, he’s been using my wireless broadband,’ said Shahid. ‘You know when he came to stay with me. Look at the dates. You can obviously do that. You won’t find a single jihadi site anywhere on the records before Iqbal came to stay. It’s not that hard to work out, is it? Two and two, meet four.’
    ‘Tell us again about the last time you saw Iqbal,’ replied the heavy, sagging policeman, who was the very worst of them for never seeming to have heard what Shahid said. And they began, all over again, again and again, the same true stories, the same interruptions. It was a small comfort that even his interrogators were beginning to look bored and tired, though not nearly as bored and tired as Shahid himself felt. On and on and round and round and now Shahid was back in his cell, sitting on the floor, which he had come to like doing as he found he lost his belief that things were going to be all right; the contact with the floor and the wall, the fact that to sit like that he had to be curled in on himself, was comforting. Everything else might not make sense, but at least gravity was still gravity.
    There was a knock on the door of the cell. This in itself was not routine. When they came to take him for interrogations, they just opened the door; when they brought their terrible bland food, they just shoved a tray through the hatch. Nobody ever knocked. Shahid sat there for a moment, then said, he hoped sounding ironic,
    ‘Come in.’
    The door opened and a policeman came in, followed by a middle-aged woman in a trouser suit, carrying a slim briefcase in brown leather. The policeman nodded at her and then went back out. The woman was smiling in a way which did not indicate any particular emotion other than a desire to indicate that she was well-meaning. She held out her hand to point at the floor beside Shahid and said,
    ‘May I?’
    He nodded. She sat down, cross-legged, in the same position as him.
    ‘Fiona Strauss. Your family have hired me to be your lawyer.’
    Shahid felt his eyes fill with tears. For a moment he could not speak.
    ‘I’m surprised we can afford you,’ he eventually said. Without knowing it, Shahid had said the perfect thing, because the remark gestured gently in the direction of the lawyer’s importance; and at the same time Fiona Strauss, who was a sincere fighter against the things she thought were wrong, felt that this young man sitting on the floor of his cell needed her. She was a complicated person who took a simple view of things. He was the victim of an injustice, and he needed her.
    ‘I’m working pro bono,’ said Fiona Strauss, with a faint smile. She took a spiral-bound notebook out of her briefcase, opened it, and held it up in front of Shahid. On the page was written:
    ‘Assume we are being listened to.’
    ‘Right,’ said Shahid.
    ‘I’m told you signed a waiver of your rights.’
    ‘Excuse my bad language, but that’s crap.’
    ‘They have the piece of paper, I’ve seen it.’
    ‘Well, then it’s a forgery. They faked my signature.’
    ‘OK. I believe you. But for now we must assume it doesn’t matter. Have you been ill-treated? Are you being adequately fed, are you being allowed to sleep, are you being physically abused, are your religious beliefs being respected, are you being threatened, physically or in other respects?’
    As she was talking, she turned the notebook over to another page which said:
    ‘Don’t tell me anything they can use.’
    It was a lot for Shahid to take in. What he mainly felt was a sudden sense of connection with his family outside: chubby Ahmed, irritating Usman, sexy Rohinka, and Mrs Kamal, driving everybody nuts and – Shahid had always felt this, even when he had heard nothing, knew nothing about what was happening – doing more than anybody else to try and help him. His eyes teared up again. The lawyer, feeling him struggle, put a hand on his shoulder.
    ‘Don’t worry, we don’t have to do everything in one go. I’ll be coming back.’
    His voice choked, Shahid said, ‘They brought me a bacon sandwich. The first morning. Then they realised.’ And he broke down and began to cry, deeply and fully, the sensation close to one of physical pain, and it came accompanied, even as he cried, by the sense that