Momo and Raymond swung by the house and told me some horror story, the fuckers were talking like it was something they saw on TV. I nearly didn’t listen when actually it was a real tragedy. And I know all about tragedy, I’m up to my neck in it in Rachel’s diary. ‘And you only come and tell me now,’ I yelled. ‘The moped was fucked,’ Momo said, the liar. It was about Nadia, a sixteen-year-old Arab girl, worked as a trainee at Christelle’s place by the RER station, The Golden Scissors. She’d disappeared. I’m sure I probably knew her, but all those girls look exactly the same, same hair and everything, I can never put a face to a name. They should be forced to wear something so you can tell them apart, you never know, I mean this is the proof. ‘Who’s Nadia?’ I said. ‘Just some girl,’ Momo says, the fuckwit. ‘She lives in Block 22,’ Raymond says, ‘Her old man’s Moussa, works in the steelworks, you know the guy who drives the green Ami 6.’ The men all look the same to me too, Moussa, Abdallah, Arezki, Abdel-Ben-Some-shit. Anyway, you never hardly see them, all they do is work and sleep, they’re up at the crack of dawn and working half the night – except Sundays, the Lord’s day, when they all hang out in lame cafés, eaten up by nostalgia and gambling on scratch cards or the horses. Even when you do see them, they’re just crooked shadows appearing and disappearing into the darkness. Anyway, the whole estate was mobilised to look for Nadia – parents, kids, police, fire brigade – everyone running around. The women were out on the balconies wailing and praying and yelling at their husbands. At first everyone said she’d run away, then they were saying she’d been kidnapped, since yesterday they’re saying she was murdered. A bunch of TV crews showed up and set up their cameras in the skankiest part of the estate – the sort of no-go area even people on the estate never set foot in. Someone said they’d seen some girl getting beat up by some guy with a beard, a young guy from Block 11, some big shot always banging on about how he’s been to Kabul and London and Algiers, calls himself Allah’s Terminator. Apparently he didn’t like the way she dressed, didn’t like her day-glo hair or the fact she hung out with boys – and not just any boys – Kafirs – unbelievers. So he slapped her about, spat in her face, pulled her hair and yelled ‘Last warning!’ It all went down in the stairwell of Block 22, some kid coming downstairs saw it and he told his mates, they told their mates and so on until it got back to Moussa. Moussa, who didn’t stop to think, grabbed a knife and headed out looking for the guy with the beard. The neighbours grabbed him as he was leaving the block, took away the knife and marched him off to see Com’Dad. The two of them had a little chat round the back of the supermarket – no witnesses. The guy with the beard was busted and twenty-four hours later he was out again. No corpse, no crime; no crime, no perp. The Terminator’s lawyer – some guy with a beard and a three-piece suit – knew how to play the system, he got to faxing and phoning every association, every Islamic consulate, every brotherhood, every marabout and every sleeper network – even woke up the Minister for the Interior. The sky was black with fax toner and thundering with righteous anger. Com’Dad was purple with rage when he got a call politely suggesting he release the killer and reopen the mosque in Block 17. Don’t rock the boat – the whole city is happy to think she’s run away. The Terminator was giving it large about how he’d got his ticket to paradise – djina, they call it in Arabic – put one over on the cops and heroically confirmed his status as Emir of the estate. Then, this morning – shock horror – they find poor Nadia in the basement of some shop that’s been boarded up for years, all naked and tied up with barbed wire, her face and body burnt to shit with a blowtorch. The parents identified her straight off. It was their little girl, they just knew it. They put the bracelets on the emir as he was coming out of the mosque. Apparently he was spitting fire at Com’Dad: ‘Allahu Akbar, your day will come.’ The imam immediately announces there’s going to be a big service on the esplanade between the tower blocks to honour the hero, support his worthy parents and raise money for the cause. It’s going to be on Friday at 8.30 p.m. And he issues a fatwa saying anyone who doesn’t show is a sinner and Allah will not fail to punish them. To forsake a Brother in Islam when he’s attacked by Kafirs is among the greatest of sins. The place will be rammed. I’m planning on being there. It’s not some spur-of-the-moment decision, I swore to myself I’d cut the throat of that SS fucker who’s trying to turn this estate into an extermination camp, and now’s the time.