Tree of Pearls. Louisa Young

having him here. I had enough of that in the old days with Bent Copper Ben Cooper calling round at all hours trying to blackmail me and ruining my life, before I knew Janie’s secrets and before … oh, before so many things.

      ‘Why?’ I said again. If it wasn’t about Harry, if Harry was all right, then there was nothing I could possibly want to know about lurking anywhere down this line of talk. This means disruption and I am trying to settle.

      ‘In person would be better,’ he said, cajolingly, setting my hackles right on edge.

      ‘Why?’ I said again. Using the weapons of a three-year-old, and leaving him sitting in the silence.

      After a while he said, ‘We want to ask you some questions.’

      Well, that’s subtly and fundamentally different from wanting to talk to me. But it doesn’t answer my question.

      ‘What about?’

      ‘Angeline,’ he said – which was wrong of him, and set my hackles flying from the ramparts. I object to chumminess in people I don’t know, particularly if we are obviously not getting on. I also knew I would have to talk to him. I knew I was being obstructive and silly. But that’s how I felt. He would have to tell me sooner or later, why not now? Why this secretive big-willy stuff? He did remind me of Ben.

      ‘Just what’s it about?’ I said, interrupting.

      I could hear him thinking for a moment, and I heard his decision the moment before the answer popped out.

      ‘Cairo,’ he said.

      Cairo.

      El-Qahira, the victorious. People who know it call it Kie-ear-oh, one long swooping melting of vowels in the middle. People who don’t call it Kie Roh. As he did. This was quietly reassuring. It meant that he didn’t know the city or, probably, anyone in it. But the reassurance was small next to my main reaction.

      I have no desire to talk about Cairo. There is nothing about Cairo that bodes any joy for me and Lily.

      ‘I have nothing to say about Cairo,’ I said pompously. Breathing shallow.

      ‘Well let’s see, shall we? I’ll come to you at five tomorrow,’ he said, and the sod hung up.

      I resolved to be in the park.

       TWO

       Beware policemen in pubs

      By five the next day I had seen sense, though part of me still thought it a shame that I had. Lily had come out of school begging to be allowed to go home with her friend Adjoa, so that was easy, and I was free to lurk like Marlene under the streetlight at the bottom of my staircase until he appeared. He was not coming to my flat, whatever he might think. I had to see him, but I didn’t have to welcome him.

      It was such a wintry evening that no one was hanging around the stairwells or the strips of park and path that lie between the blocks of the estate, which is rare, because the estate is a very sociable place, what with the teenagers and the crackheads and the men yelling up at the windows of the women who have thrown them out, and just as well because people round here have a strong sense of plod. Enough of my neighbours break the law on a regular basis to be able to smell it when it comes calling. (I prefer to associate myself with the mothers and the kids still too young to be running round with wraps of god knows what for their big brothers. You know, the three-year-olds.) But what with the weather and the dark, no one but me saw the dark car rolling up quietly through the dingy Shepherd’s Bush dusk, and stopping, and its passenger door swinging open.

      ‘Get in,’ came the voice, the figure leaning over from having opened the door. I ignored it. How did he know I was me, anyway? Presumably they had bothered to acquire a photograph of me, somewhere down the line. I don’t like the idea, but neither do I imagine there is anything I can do about it.

      ‘Get in!’ Louder.

      I rubbed my mouth, and looked this way and that up and down the road, and then went round to the driver’s side. He wound down the window. Very pale face. Putty-coloured. Very dark brows, very arched.

      I said: ‘How would you, as a police officer, encourage your wife or daughters to respond to a stranger in a car who shouts “get in” at them?’

      For a moment I thought he was going to tell me to grow up, but he didn’t. He sighed, and said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ There was something so tired in it that I gave up. I got in the car, and directed him to a done-up pub down by Ravenscourt Park where they have a wood fire and nice food and good coffee. I yearn for comfort.

      I chose an upright little table and ordered what Lily still calls a cup of chino. He had a lime juice cordial thing, and I realized he was an alcoholic. Don’t know how. It was just apparent. We sat in silence for few moments, and I thought: ‘I don’t want this to start up again. I don’t want any more of this. Not again.’ I know that I am strong, that I can deal with it. But.

      ‘Cairo,’ he said. I felt my insides begin to subside. Like all the lovely crunchy fluffy individual concrete ingredients in a food mixer – switch the button and they turn to low gloop. ‘You know more or less what this is about.’

      I didn’t answer. A slow burning anger was running along a fuseline direct to my heart.

      What, through the gloop? The absurdity of mixed metaphors always cheers me up, makes me sharpen up.

      Cairo meant only two things to me now. Not the time I spent there in my previous life, nine or so years ago, though it seems like a lifetime (well, it is a lifetime – Lily’s lifetime, and more), living in the big block off Talat Haarb that we called Château Champollion, and dancing for my living in the clubs and on the Nile boats. When I saw every dawn and not a single midday. Not the friends I’d made then, the girls of all nations, the musicians of all Arab nations, the ex-pats and chatterboxes at the Grillon. Not the aromatic light and shade of the Old City, or the view from the roof of the mosque of Ibn Tulun, not the taste of cardamom in coffee or the flavour of dust. No … Cairo, now, only means Sa’id. And this could not be about Sa’id. So it had to be about Eddie Bates.

      ‘You flew to Cairo on Friday October 17th, on October 20th you continued to Luxor, and you returned to London via Cairo on October 24th. Is that right?’

      He pronounced it Lux-Or. Not Looksr. Definitely not an Egyptophile. Well, why would he be?

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Can you tell me about your visit?’

      ‘Can you tell me why you want to know?’

      It’s not that I don’t trust the police. I’d say not more than half of them are any worse than anyone else in life, which given their opportunities is probably a miracle. It’s just that last time I sat in a pub with a policeman he ended up blackmailing me into spying on Eddie Bates in a stupid effort to save his own corrupt arse, and that was the beginning of the whole hijacking of my life and Lily’s by these absurd people. So I am wary.

      He looked at me under his sad eyebrows. ‘Have you ever heard of obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty?’ he said.

      ‘Have you ever heard of taking the trouble to gain a witness’s trust before expecting them to tell you all their business?’

      He squinted at me.

      ‘Or aren’t I a witness?’ I said. The food mixer went again in my belly. ‘All I want to know,’ I said, tetchily, ‘is what this is about.’ Not quite true. What I really wanted was for it not to be happening.

      ‘How many things have you got going on in Cairo that might be of interest to the police then?’ he replied.

      I wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not unless he told me first. As I can’t remember which country and western