Post Mortem by Kate London

usual file of London immigrants. In his own home he might well be one of those extravagantly courteous and formal North Africans who offered coffee and sweet pastry. But watching him closely like this, she thought that he also had the thinness of a man who was systematically eating himself into a sack of angry bones.
    The solicitor, a young, plump white man wearing trainers, jeans and a shiny Chelsea FC top, caught Lizzie’s eye. Lizzie ran her nail down the groove where the plastic box of the tapes opened. The cellophane wrapper wouldn’t easily break.
    Mehenni had started to speak English. ‘I like this country. I respect this country. This country has given me a home.’
    Lizzie addressed the solicitor quietly. ‘Are you certain that Mr Mehenni needs an interpreter?’
    The solicitor said, ‘I think it’s for the best.’
    He reached across the table and offered her his ballpoint. She jabbed at the cellophane. It puckered and tore like the fine skin of an onion. Mehenni, now back in his mother tongue, was continuing to talk loudly. Lizzie turned to the interpreter, raising her voice over the continuing diatribe.
    â€˜Would you explain to Mr Mehenni that I’m putting the tapes in now? Only then will the interview start.’
    The interpreter was a fat, dark-skinned man with a beard and a plastic name badge hanging from a lanyard round his neck. He had chubby hands with dark hairs on the back of his fingers and thick yellowish nails. He smiled at Lizzie as self-satisfied as theCheshire cat – ‘Of course, Officer’ – and then switched language, speaking forcefully to Mehenni.
    Mehenni stopped talking. He nodded and folded his arms across his chest as if waiting impatiently for an incompetent servant to complete some necessary task.
    The tape emitted its harsh long tone. Lizzie read from the prompt. This interview is being tape-recorded . . .
    There was never any question of a no-comment interview. Mehenni was incandescent. He kept interrupting as she went through the formalities, waving his hand impatiently like a member of the aristocracy who wished to be spared the details. No sooner had she finished the caution than he began to talk again in a ceaseless flow, like angry water tumbling over rapids. His tone was that of a man speaking to minions who had badly disappointed him and were about to be fired.
    â€˜My neighbour has been out to get us ever since we moved in. She doesn’t like us living next door. We waited one year – one year! – in a bed and breakfast. Now she goes to the housing association. I have to sign a contract – a contract for what? For what? We live peacefully next door. All we want is peace. Why does this woman—’
    Lizzie interrupted. ‘Mr Mehenni—’
    Mehenni continued, ignoring her, and Lizzie considered him as if a wall of glass were between them. She had given full disclosure to the solicitor, shown him the photographs, told him she would ask for a caution if Mehenni would make a full and frank admission. The solicitor caught her eye and shrugged. Mehenni was continuing, an uninterrupted stream of invective. He was on to Hadley now.
    â€˜And my name is not Mohammed either, or Bin Laden . . .’
    Without her willing it, an imagining of the accusations came to Lizzie as real as if she had seen the events herself: she out of earshot in the garden with Mehenni’s mother while Hadley was with the girl in the hallway, giving in to a bit of what he wouldprobably consider harmless frankness. She could almost bloody see him, dammit. Farah in her school uniform, smaller than Hadley, awkward and crowded by his bulk in the narrow space. Hadley hitching up that gut of his and saying, ‘All right, Miss Jihadi, can you tell your dad . . . What’s his name now? I forget. Mohammed, is it? Bin Bloody Laden?’ She hadn’t of course heard him say it but that didn’t mean he