Paupaul pretends indifference. He’s older than his friend, and his style is less exuberant. In fact he rarely speaks at all, but stands at his easel in the corner of the square, scowling furiously at the paper and occasionally scratching at it with frightening intensity. He has an intimidating moustache, and makes his patrons sit at length, while he scowls and scratches and mutters violently to himself before producing a work of such bizarre proportions that his customers are awed into paying up.

Jean-Louis was still sketching me as I made my way between the tables. ‘I’m warning you. I charge,’ I said.

‘Consider the lilies,’ said Jean-Louis airily. ‘They do not toil, neither do they demand a sitter’s fee.’

‘Lilies don’t have bills to pay.’

This morning I called in at the bank. I’ve been doing it every day this week. To withdraw twenty-five thousand euros in cash would certainly bring me the wrong kind of attention, but several withdrawals of modest size – a thousand here, two hundred there – are barely remembered from one day to the next.

Still, it never pays to be complacent.

And so I went in, not as Zozie, but as the colleague in whose name I opened the account – Barbara Beauchamp, a secretary with a hitherto unblemished record of trust. I made myself drab for the occasion; although true invisibility is impossible (besides being far too conspicuous), drabness is open to anyone, and a nondescript woman in a woolly hat and gloves can pass almost unseen anywhere.

Which is why I sensed it immediately. An odd sensation of scrutiny as I stood at the counter; an unprecedented alertness in their colours; a request to wait as they processed my cash; the scent and sound of something not quite right.

I did not wait for confirmation. I left the bank as soon as the cashier was out of sight, then slipped the cheque-book and card into an envelope and posted it in the nearest letter-box. The address was fictitious; the incriminating items will spend three months passing from one post office to the next until they end up in the dead-letter depot, never to be found. If I ever need to dispose of a body, I’ll do the same; sending parcelled hands and feet and bits of torso to blurry addresses across Europe and back, while police search in vain for the shallow grave.

Not that murder was ever my taste. Still, you should never completely dismiss any possibility. I found a convenient clothes store in which to change back from Madame Beauchamp to Zozie de l’Alba, and, with an eye for anything out of the ordinary, returned by a roundabout route to my bed-and-breakfast in lower Montmartre and contemplated the future.

Damn.