‘What you starin’ at digger?’

I shook my head. ‘Mrs Fox, have you any idea where Louise has gone?’

‘I know she’s not in London, that’s all. She may be abroad.’

‘Got a packet out of the doctor. She left him as lean as a woodlouse in a plastics factory. Heh heh heh.’

‘Mother, will you stop it?’ Mrs Fox turned to me, ‘I think you’d better leave now. I can’t help you.’

Mrs Fox opened the door as her neighbours closed theirs.

‘What did I tell you all?’ said Pea. ‘We’re in disrepute.’

She turned in disgust and pegged down the hall on her stick.

‘You know, don’t you, that Elgin was to be in the civil list this year? Louise cost him that.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘A happy marriage has nothing to do with it.’

‘Then why wasn’t he?’ She slammed the door and I heard her crying in the hall. Was it for her lost connection with the great and the good or was it for her daughter?

Evening. Couples out on the sweating streets hand in hand. From an upper window a reggae band with a long way to go. Restaurants were pushing the alfresco style, but a wicker chair on a dirty street with the buses grinding by isn’t Venice. I watched the litter blow among the pizzas and raffia carafes. A vulpine waiter fixed his dicky bow in the cashier’s mirror, slapped her bottom, put a peppermint on his red tongue and swaggered over to a group of under-age girls drinking Campari and soda. ‘Would madams like a something to a eat?’

I caught the first bus regardless of its destination. What did it matter since I was no nearer to Louise? The city was suppurating. The bus driver wouldn’t open the doors while the bus was moving. The air in there smelt of burger and chips. There was a fat woman in a sleeveless nylon frock sitting with her legs apart fanning herself with her shoe. Her make-up had slipped into ledges of grime.

‘OPEN THE DOORS FUCKFACE,’ she shouted.

‘Fuck off,’ said the driver without looking round. ‘Can’t you read the notice? Can’t you read?’

The notice said DO NOT DISTRACT DRIVER WHILE BUS IS IN MOTION. We were stock still in a traffic jam at the time.

As the temperature mounted the man in front of me resorted to his mobile phone. Like all mobile phone users he had nothing urgent to say, he simply wanted to say it. He looked at us all to see if we were looking at him. When he finally said, ‘Goo nye then my mate Kev,’ I asked him very politely if I might borrow it for a moment and offered him a pound coin. He was reluctant to separate himself from such an essential part of his machismo but he agreed to punch in the number for me and hold the phone to my ear. After it had rung pointlessly a few times he said, ‘That’s out then,’ pocketed my pound and hung his treasure back round his neck on a bulldog chain. There had been no answer at Louise’s house. I decided to go and see for myself.