But one time, in the middle of the night, one of these miscreants went a step too far, carrying off Defence of the Home after crudely knocking it from its plinth with a chisel.

The next day, unable to bear this wound to his narcissism, my father bought the notorious .357 Magnum from one of his spook friends, complete with silencer so he could shoot intruders without waking us up. He killed the first one when I was eight years old, and buried him at the bottom of the garden, in the place where we burned the dead leaves in autumn. I remember firing a few questions at my father that day, having spotted him crossing the lawn at high speed with a body falling over the edge of a wheelbarrow. He replied that if these guys didn’t want to be shot, all they had to do was not break into The Estate after nightfall — because he had the law on his side. It was called legitimate self-defence. And anyway, no colonial settler who ever lived in a house surrounded by walls would behave any differently.

I don’t know how many he killed in all, because generally it happened at night, and at a time in my life when I wasn’t paying too much attention to things, but I do know there’s a veritable mass grave down there in the leaf-covered pit. It was our poor manservant who assumed the onerous task of burying the bodies — he told me himself one day, after asking me to come with him to the pharmacy to buy a girdle for his back. What’s more, my father must have lent his pit to others or used it for activities related to Mondiale, because when I cleared out the house after he’d died, I found twenty-odd identity cards in a shoe box. All men aged between twenty and forty years old. I put them in an envelope addressed to the local police station which produced not the slightest consequence, not even a brief article in the newspapers.

During the time my parents lived there, The Estate was like a giant clam whose shell, from time to time, would close over some nameless fish in the silence of the ocean.

When my father died, my mother swiftly sold it and everything in it for next to nothing. The guy who bought it was an arrogant arsehole — a despot for whom The Estate was the perfect cover for his villainous tyranny over the family he would keep confined behind the walls and isolated by the deafening noise of the motorway. While signing the contract, he threw a salacious glance at his three daughters and confided that he had been quite taken by the place . . . They were choice recruits — I’d sensed it as soon as I set eyes on them — for the People of the Road.