Pausing only long enough to take a last drag on his cigarette before stubbing it out, Taleb yanks open the drawer of his desk where he left his tie and makes a grab for it. He didn’t untie it before removing it earlier, just loosened the loop, and now it contrives to lasso the trigger of his service revolver as it leaves the drawer, hoisting the weapon out and sending it crashing to the floor, where, to Taleb’s relief and faint surprise, it doesn’t go off. With a shake of the head at his own clumsiness, he carefully retrieves the gun, puts it back in the drawer and locks it safely away.

A few moments later, tie in place, he climbs the stairs to the upper floor of Police Headquarters, where the Director’s lair is to be found. He wonders if the crack about emphysema is a prelude to an unrefusable offer of retirement. As far as he knows, he doesn’t have emphysema, just a morning coughing routine and breathlessness on steep flights of stairs. He has no intention of asking a doctor for an opinion on the subject. Could that be it, then? A compulsory medical examination? No. That would be handled by Personnel. The Director would play no part in it, other than saying a few platitudinous words about distinguished long service at a brief farewell ceremony. A summons of this nature suggests a different kind of problem altogether. And since there’s no significant ongoing case in which Taleb is involved, he’s perplexed as to what the problem might be.

But temporary perplexity is at least rewarded by immersion in the air-conditioned cocoon of the Director’s spacious office, with its wide view of the city and sky. The less appetising features of Algiers - the dilapidated apartment blocks, the rusting satellite dishes sprouting from roofs like mushrooms, the traffic-snarled streets, the haze of pollution - are happily absent from this vista of dockside cranes and stately tankers gliding across the placid broad blue Mediterranean. Status has brought with it for Farid Bouras a sanitised panorama of Alger la blanche.

He is a smooth-skinned, good-looking man running to corpulence and baldness. He didn’t get to occupy such a post without lengthy lunches with influential figures in the hierarchy and it’s beginning to show. Many moral corners have had to be cut on his path to the top and the awareness of this hovers between the two men like an unspoken reproach. If Taleb were as corrupt as Bouras, it would make their relationship a great deal easier, especially since, ironically, they actually like each other.

‘Sit down, Taleb,’ says Bouras, with a lordly sweep of the hand.