The second or third time, they drove to Dover. He parked the van on a quiet street lined with brick houses. There were hedges in front and, behind them, large windows with net curtains. Behind one of these curtains was an Islamic school for ladies. The appointment was for 4 p.m. He couldn’t go in; so he left her at the door with six boxes, and said he would drive around for a while. And off he went, and didn’t return for the next two hours. Since there weren’t many students – twenty, maybe – it didn’t take her long to show them the burqas and headscarves and pamphlets on issues close to their hearts, such as purdah and family planning (why not to). She sat in the front room of the Islamic school as the students examined her wares, and she stared through the white net curtain at the high green hedge on the road outside, at the British people walking by. It is easy to forget how exotic normal-British people once seemed to Mariam Maher. The smell of the place – thick, cloying, warm – was the smell of female bodies in close proximity to each other. She knew that smell. It was the smell of home, the smell of her school, the smell of the madrasa she had gone to in the evenings, after her aunt discovered that she shared her father’s love for Sufi poetry, the smell of every cousin and aunt and all the women she had grown up with. The smell made her think of her cousin, Aliya. You be brave for us, Mariam, Aliya had told her as she left for the airport. These were the last words Aliya spoke before Mariam did her vanishing act to England. So Mariam tried to be brave. She wiped away tears, and by the end of the day she had sold one burqa, three headscarves, two books and a small woven carpet of the Kaaba.

JUDGE: What is she saying?

TRANSLATOR: She is not good at her job at all.

JUDGE: [to Solicitor] This is hopeless.