The police station is a fortress of breeze blocks and bullet-proof glass planted right outside the estate, one side overlooking the state, the other overlooking the neighbourhood where Rachel lived. All the cops know me. Babar, the desk sergeant, jerked his thumb towards the hall. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know – chief’s office is down the end of the hall. The one with the padded door.’ Com’Dad has been around for, like, ten years. He and I showed up about the same time, me from Algeria, him from some sink estate up north. He’s an expert in Sensitive Urban Areas. I don’t know if he’s made any difference to ours. I don’t think so. It’s the same as it ever was except the kids have grown to be gangsters, the gangsters have grown old and fat, and the old guys walk round flashing their battle scars like they’re vets back from the war. Everyone else – the families, the ordinary people – just get on with life same as they always did. Some of them have jobs, some are on the dole, some are on disability. The kids are either in care or at school or somewhere in between. The only thing that changed was when the jihadists started showing up. It’s something to do with the war in Algeria, apparently, or the war in Kabul or the Middle East or I don’t know where. They use France as a safe haven, as a base for operations. Whatever the reason they’re here, they’ve fucked everything up for everyone, that’s why we’re wandering around till we can’t take it any more. Before anyone knew what was happening, these death-dealing fuckers had taken over. If you blinked, you’d have missed it: everything changed, the clothes and everything. After that, the estate started to empty. The local economy packed up and moved out, the shops, the offices, the cash-in-hand work that keeps the jobless afloat. That’s their strategy: block the escape routes, make lots of noise, keep people poor – that way they’re one step closer to paradise. They treat people like sheep. And we fell for it, me, Momo, Raymond, all of us – mostly because we believed the Führer’s spiel: ‘Join the Brotherhood, you can have everything, you can have money and djina,’ partly because they were constantly tugging at our djellabas, we couldn’t set foot outside without one of them jogging over and reciting the ten commandments of the suicide bomber. The Brotherhood and their fucking djina got us in big trouble, we were in and out of the police station, dragged up before the courts, forced to do community service. The only thing left for us was jail. We were branded for life. We had Com’Dad on our backs 24/7. But later, when he saw we were getting out of all this fanatical end-of-the-world bullshit, he put in a good word for us with the authorities, had us sent on training courses, got us apprenticeships. We were even taken on tours of parliament and got to meet our Député. It wasn’t going to change anything, but it was something to do.