Even Françoise Lavery, who, with her background, must have caught a glimpse of it at the end, was still unable to grasp the elegance of it all; the way that her life had been neatly reclaimed and repackaged . . .

She’d always been a bit unstable. Like my mother, a mousy type – natural prey to one such as myself. She was a teacher of classical history, living in a flat off Place de la Sorbonne, and she’d taken to me (as most people do) the day we met, not quite by chance, in a lecture at the Institut Catholique.

She was thirty-two; overweight; a borderline depressive, friendless in Paris, plus she’d recently split up with her boyfriend and was looking for a female flatmate in town.

It sounded perfect – I got the job. Under the name of Mercedes Desmoines I became her protector, her confidante. I shared her affection for Sylvia Plath. I sympathized with her over the stupidity of men, and took an interest in her very dull thesis on the role of women in pre-Christian mysticism. It’s what I do best, after all; and little by little I learnt her secrets, nurtured her melancholy tendencies, then when the time came, collected her life.

It wasn’t much of a challenge, of course. There are half a million just like her: milk-faced, mousy-haired girls with neat handwriting and bad dress sense, hiding their disappointments beneath a veil of academia and common sense. You might even say I did her a favour; and when she was ready, I slipped her a dose of something reasonably painless to help her along.

After that, it was just a question of tying up a few loose ends – suicide note, identification, cremation and the like – before I was able to junk Mercedes, gather up what was left of Françoise – bank details, passport, birth certificate – and take her on one of those foreign trips she was always planning, but never booked, while at home, people may have wondered how it could be that a woman could vanish so completely and efficiently, leaving nothing in her wake – no family, no papers, not even a grave.

Some time later, she was to reappear as an English teacher at the Lycée Rousseau. By then, of course, she’d been largely forgotten, lost in a mound of paperwork. The truth is, most people don’t care. Life goes on at such a pace that it’s easier to forget the dead.

I tried, at the end, to make her understand. Hemlock is such a useful drug; so easy to come by in summer, of course, and makes the victim so manageable. Paralysis sets in in a matter of minutes, and after that it’s all good, with plenty of time for discussion and exchange of views – or rather view, in my case, as Françoise seemed incapable of speech.