‘My brother and me, we trusted our parents,’ he said. ‘They trusted the British justice system but they locked us up for throwing one stone. One stone! Almost identical case in Ravenscliffe a week earlier and the kid got a non-custodial sentence. You know why? Because he was white. The system is stacked against us. It’s a game, a big fucking game of dress-up and fancy barristers getting fat on it.’ His eyes were full of anger, the rest of his face contorted as he spoke. ‘You know how old I was? Nineteen. I was nineteen. He was eighteen just a week before it all kicked off. They fuckin’ locked us up for time. We stopped trusting.’

‘The Jirga let you down,’ Jia said. ‘My father let you down. He was a good man but he lacked knowledge of the British way of doing things, systems that we have worked in and have access to and now control. We’ve become more powerful in the last year than our fathers did in twenty. We understand the white mind and we can manipulate it.’

Razi shook his head, not at her words, but at his own pain. He pointed at his brother, Raza, who hadn’t looked up from his plate since they sat down. He was eating in silence, a spoon in one hand, the other resting on a battered notebook that lay next to his plate.

‘He was a good kid,’ said Razi. ‘He was just walking the wrong way home from college that day. Art college, he was at – I fought Mum and Dad to let him go, and for what? Here, pass me that,’ he said to Raza.

Raza reluctantly handed over the book.

‘Look, look what he does. Draws these all day.’ Razi handed the notebook to Jia. She opened it, carefully turning each page as if looking at a priceless artefact. Page upon page of grotesque images confronted her, bearing witness to the effects of the so-called British justice system on boys with brown skin and Arabic names. She stopped at a self-portrait. It was a sketch of a head cut open and a hand pouring guns and pills into it. Closing the book and putting it down in front of her, she leaned back in her chair. The boy had had talent once but the system had damaged him. Less melanin in his skin, and art teachers and lecturers would have given character statements and told tales of future promise at the Crown Court on his behalf. He would have walked away with a bruised ego and a lesson learnt. The verdicts in the case of the white rioters in Ravenscliffe that Raza spoke of had been lenient, something that was widely known in legal circles. Jia had studied them at the time and then put them aside. The thought that she could have helped was acerbic; it grieved her.