The tall, plain girl had added that Lili, their dead friend, a fabulous, sweet, intelligent, generous girl – can we just leave it at that, I said to myself – would have dearly wanted her ashes to be scattered into the sea from the island’s cliffs. So, even if they didn’t have any ash to scatter, seeing as she had been – and I quote – ‘buried by force’, they had come to throw her favourite stuffed toys into the water instead!

‘With any luck a seal will choke to death on a teddy bear,’ Roger Orion had felt obliged to conclude.

I decided I’d listened to enough crap for one evening, so I finished my glass and went home to bed. But sleep wouldn’t come; it was as if there were something crawling through my mind, preventing me from relaxing. A feeling of Unheimlichkeit, something strangely troubling. And when I finally did manage to fall asleep, I was woken almost immediately by an appalling nightmare.

Feeling hyper-anxious, I fumbled around for my smartphone to see what time it was, and because I had nothing better to do since I couldn’t get back to sleep, I typed the following words into Google: earthquake Nepal death member of parliament and brought up dozens of hits: Alice de Rigny, daughter of former MP and businessman Philippe de Rigny, had died 40 kilometres outside Kathmandu in horrific circumstances.

Alice de Rigny . . . Philippe de Rigny . . . Blanche de Rigny . . . Suddenly I was wide awake.

I continued my search. Philippe de Rigny headed up oil trading company Oilofina. His son, Pierre-Alexandre, had just been arrested at Abidjan airport as he was about to board his private jet. He had been investigated for corruption in 2014 in relation to a matter involving the contamination of several city tips through the dumping of toxic waste. Super Prick was thus not a name that had been given to him lightly.

I got up and frantically started rummaging through Granny Soize’s papers, hunting for any references to my family on my father’s side. All I found was the photo of my grandmother and her sweet husband, which I knew about already, but this time I looked at it with fresh eyes. I had never appreciated, for example, how showy yet still somehow moving the image was: this tall, proud woman in her traditional dress alongside her old husband perched on his barrel, both of their chests festooned with medals, a pair of improbable butterflies pinned into their velvet case.

I was startled by Granny Soize.

‘Do you get up this early in Paris too?’

‘Tell me, did you know my grandfather?’