And so it was, for four months. I was certain that the ruse would be immediately exposed. It never was. What really stayed with me was the insouciance of my superiors. As if this sort of thing was nothing new. As if it happened all the time.

My point, such as it is, is that all interviews are acts of intrusion. Whether it’s a sleeve-grabbing ten-word vox pop, or a lavish 5,000-word New Yorker piece, intrusion is the art, the craft of it. Social boundaries will be crossed. It’s inevitable. Done well, no one is unhappy. No – not quite, not always. If an interviewee is delighted with an interview, if they think it’s the most marvellous piece of writing ever, the interviewer is left feeling a little sore. A little cheated. It’s even worse if the subject’s PRs are ecstatic. Because you could have gone further. No boundaries were pushed.

You don’t want the subject to be happy. You don’t want them furious, either – Quin-level furious, editor-phoning furious. You want them to be grudgingly pleased, with maybe just an aftertaste of having been used. You want them to use words like ‘fair’ and ‘close to the knuckle’.

There’s an acceptable level of intrusion. An acceptable level of truth-telling. There’s even an acceptable level of treachery. Think about that. An extent to which you can misuse a subject’s trust without losing their cooperation and gratitude entirely.

And there’s an acceptable level of snooping. That’s what the interviewee consents to when they invite the journalist into their home – a certain amount of bookshelf-browsing, furniture-price-deducing and family-photo-studying, in return for a little more obligation and sympathy.

It’s a deal, a contract. And you broker it as you go along, mostly, without very much being explicit. There are parts to show and parts to hide. There are comfort zones, and they are not bounded by neat, hard lines but by fertile zones of possibility. The discomfort zones, the border areas before one reaches the no-man’s-land of broken trust and inexcusable breaches, are where the interviewer does business.

Pierce had brought a loaded gun to the negotiation. The contract with him was truly, uniquely, symmetrical: if I revealed anything he didn’t like, he would reveal some truths about me. He had hacked the deal.

A line from Quin floated into my mind: ‘People know they shouldn’t feed so much information into their apps. But they do it anyway. Because they like the way it feels. They like to trust. And they know, the more we know about them, the more we can help them.’

Where had I heard that? Was it from the interview, a line only just bubbling to the surface now? Or had it come from somewhere else? Everything Quin said was TED-toned, rehearsed, audience-ready. No beta utterances. But this felt like something he had said to me in person, face to face. Where? When?