He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of his career, and my mum liked to keep him respectable: khaki slacks and linen jacket over a pale green shirt. I always thought of it as Empire chic, and it certainly did something for my mum. He looked suitably colonial in the sunlight, sitting on a wicker chair that was almost as wide as the balcony. There was just enough room left for a stool and white plastic end table. I put the coffees down on the table by the pub-sized Foster’s Lager ashtray and my dad’s tin of Golden Virginia.

From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours.

‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then.

‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’

‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it.

I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time.