‘Pierre? Pierre, have you come back?’ said the old girl, happily. ‘Pierre, come and say hello to maman . . .’

It was full on.

I didn’t pursue the matter. I retrieved my ID and stood up before anybody was tempted to throw me out.

‘I’ll sue the pants off you! You’ll get nothing, not a cent!’ I heard her yell after me.

When I got to the front steps, I asked the parking valet to point out Madame’s car, saying I was worried I had forgotten something on the back seat. He gestured to an enormous Bentley. I went over to it, pretending to peer inside, noted down the number plate and took a discreet photo of the car with my phone.

Because, more than anything, I cannot stand being treated badly, and I wanted to teach that horrible woman a lesson.

Back at work, the minute one of the court clerks had her back turned, I consulted the records of Marianne de Rigny on CASSIOPEE, the digital platform used by police, prosecutors and judges to store information about an accused. As I had suspected, she was a regular at what we like to call the muscadet hearings. She had been sentenced seven times for driving under the influence, receiving a three-month suspended sentence for the second to last one and, for the most recent one, a three-month custodial sentence but with no warrant for detention, which still didn’t stop her driving while she was pissed.

The next one would be the one.

I asked Dioulou, the guy who ran my team of couriers and the only one with a residence permit, to follow her on his bike when she emerged from the Club and to fake an accident, and then to hail the police at the top of his lungs.

Twenty-four hours later, she was brought before the courts for summary trial, where, in full delirium tremens, she rained insults on the chief magistrate.

I was sitting at the back of the court and when she caught sight of me, she let out a sort of telluric bawling sound, something that seemed to emerge from the depths of time to fill the space, and which indicated to me that she had understood. Understood what exactly, I couldn’t say, but she must have taken it damned poorly, because when added to the death of her daughter, the six-month custodial sentence she had just been served as well as the revocation of the three-month suspended sentence and detention order for her prior three-month custodial, she hanged herself in her cell using her Hermès belt, which a cop who was either negligent or simply terrified had forgotten to remove from her.

When I suddenly saw the journalists abandon their positions outside a media-friendly trial to run in a tight huddle towards the entrance to the cells, I said to myself that the only pure truths were life and death. The rest was just subjective crap, waffle, blather.