From what Rachel says in his diary the officials at the Algerian Consulate in Nanterre aren’t likely to be much help. I can’t trust them, I’ll have to see if I can find someone on the estate who’s got some scam going with the passport officer, it will save a lot of time and a lot of money.

In the end, it was easy. Momo steered me in the right direction, his father had been involved in some dodgy stuff back in the day, back when Algeria was just coming out of the socialist terror and everyone thought they’d be able to come and go whenever they wanted. Passports were selling like hot cakes, you’d hand over your cash in the morning and you’d get your Ausweis delivered to you at Café Da Hocine the same night. But it only lasted a couple of months before the doors slammed shut again, the socialist dictatorship in Algeria came back with a vengeance and this time got into bed with two other dictatorships – corruption and religion – and Momo’s dad had to stop trafficking in passports because he was no match for the new regime, so he took all the cash he’d made and set up as a halal butcher and pretty quickly he got the reputation of being the best halal butcher for quality, value and strict adherence to Qur’anic law. He does a lot of his business at Eid, he goes all round the estate slitting sheep’s throats, for a whole month he’s up to his elbows in sheep’s blood. So I got myself a brand-new green Algerian passport, same-day service, and all it cost me was five kilos of prime fillet steak. Poor Rachel had to slog his guts out to get his. It was weird, having the passport made me feel like an illegal immigrant. That’s the thing about being mixed-race, you’re not one thing or another. What I need is a French–Algerian–German passport. But you have to make do with what you get in this life, as Monsieur Vincent used to say when he’d see us drooling over a brochure for some shiny high-tech equipment.