Once the file digitisation was completed for the week, we might duplicate a few CD-ROMs to read at home on the weekend, like you would a novel. Hildegarde found it more entertaining than television shows like Faites entrer l’accusé or Complément d’enquête. For my part – if the cops transcribing the statements had any sort of artistic sensibility – it would remind me of those nineteenth-century novels I was so fond of and which I’d studied in such detail for my thesis, Social Rancour and the Proletariat of the Quill in the Nineteenth Century. Much like them, they would recount the unremitting effects of greed on the fate of their characters: bankruptcy, jealousy, fraud, unexplained wealth, unlawful acquisition of an interest, misappropriation of public funds, despoliation, tax evasion – all they ever talked about was money.

The author Octave Mirbeau, who at some point in his life had a job similar to mine, had one of his characters say:

I would copy out the registers at the notary’s office and be intrigued by the endless procession of acts of passion, crimes and murders inspired by man’s desire to own a field.

Well, I got the same feeling from reading those scanned proceedings. Dealers would beat each other up over a swiped bar of hash or a territorial dispute; somebody would torture for a credit card PIN or kill for a handbag . . . And the happiness you thought was warranted by the superiority of your spirit was to one day own a Porsche Panamera with all the bells and whistles so you had bragging rights outside your housing block. In the supposedly astute criminality on display at Hildegarde’s office, the violence was perhaps not quite as obvious, but its consequences could prove considerably more devastating, with the shutting down of companies, staff hung out to dry, or millions in VAT fraud. The objectives were still more or less the same: parade around in a Porsche at Gstaad or in the streets of Blanc-Mesnil. I couldn’t tell you which was more vulgar.

Those hungry for sensationalism would immediately conclude that the two of us were making money from the files we got hold of which were making a splash in the media:

Where could the leak have come from? How did journalists get their hands on documents from an investigation that were subject to confidentiality, despite nobody else having had access to it? An enquiry has just been launched by the public prosecutor.

Everybody was open to suspicion – judges, cops, lawyers – but who for a second would have suspected the two halfwits from reprographics? Definitely not the inbred judge with the narrow shoulders covered in dandruff who supervised our department and whom you’d see once a quarter at most. In the unlikely event we were suspected, there would have been nobody better placed than the two of us playing the mentally deficient. It was so unoriginal.