That business is the only secret I’ve ever kept from Hildegarde. Well, she’s far from stupid, she got a good view of the CD-ROMs spread out all over the place when she used to just turn up unannounced or when she brought Juliette home. She always sensed there was something not quite right. Once she even picked one up from the floor and grilled me to test my lies, but the restraint she showed in her interrogations always had me believe that she was never doing it to throw me, but just to satisfy herself that my little fictions would hold water, just in case.

It wasn’t that I was scared she would judge me; far from it. If I never said anything to her about the drugs at the time, it was just because I was worried she would hassle me to donate to her animal welfare association all the money I was barely managing to put aside, cent by cent. The fact is there has never been any room in her life for anything except her commitment to that cause, and because of her condition, because her time is limited, she’s not about to waste it prevaricating. In other words, when Hildegarde wants something, she knows how to be very, very annoying.

But then something suddenly happened that threatened . . . I don’t know how best to say it . . . that basically screwed up my daily routine and in the process ruined my plans. The official opening of the new Palais de Justice court building, which nobody ever thought would get off the ground, had just taken place after all, and what they were calling the historic move to Batignolles from the Île de la Cité site as well as from six other locations, with its one thousand three hundred trucks and one hundred thousand boxes had started. They had planned an initial slowing down of activity covered by the jurisdiction in the former Palais de Justice where I used to work. Then there would be a second phase, in which business was supposed to pick up progressively over a fortnight up to 30 per cent at Batignolles, before the third phase where business would be back to 100 per cent, concluding once and for all the separation between the two sites: the Tribunal de Grande Instance, that is, the court of first instance, out in the sticks at the Porte de Clichy, with the Court of Appeal in the centre of Paris.