It was Hildegarde who got me into legal reprographics, ten years ago now. Ten, that’s how old my daughter is too, and it was precisely then that I drew a veil over my Icarian ambitions and the precariousness that went with them. In other words, when Juliette was born I stopped living any old how and got a real job. For her part, Hildegarde had been in reprographics forever and a day. Unlike me, she hadn’t completed any studies and thought repro would be the ideal day job because the only thing in life that had ever interested her was her battle against animal cruelty and her dedication to the animal rights organisation L214. To hell with everything else. You could say she’s built of unusually stern stuff to be able to cope with the unbearable cruelty of abattoirs and intensive farming, but when you know her well you’re just struck by the extreme consistency of her temperament with her choices.

The work was on the list of so-called reserved jobs – that is, jobs reserved for the disabled, so donkey work – but it still needed to be performed with a high degree of conscientiousness given what was involved. Practically speaking, it consisted of scanning all documentation, page by page, relating to every major and minor indictable offence committed in the capital, apart from political or military crimes. I loved the work. I had the protected status of a civil servant, the salary wasn’t terrible, and you could work at your own pace. And there was such a jolly atmosphere of freaks with a great sense of community, along the lines of Appoint some disabled people, it’s such a laugh seeing them work!

The bulk of the work would arrive straight from police stations and the rest of it from the chambers of examining magistrates. All the questioning, the records of police searches and seizures, transcripts of phone intercepts, pinging and triangulation, DNA expert reports, autopsies, Facebook page captures, records from listening devices in cars, letters rogatory of every kind: these piles of police paperwork appeared in our office to be digitised and stored on CD-ROM for the lawyers so they could prepare their clients’ defence.

A few months before the start of this saga, I was promoted to team manager and I only had to manage the data and dispatch the work. I was based on the Île de la Cité, where they handled indictable offences, and every now and then I would drop in to Boulevard des Italiens to visit my friend Hildegarde, who was assigned to white-collar offences.