The evening we first met, Patrick was having dinner with his family while imagining that he would soon be unemployed. This was what had happened to Lambert, one of Patrick’s colleagues: one day he’d had a job, the next day he had nothing. The company was downsizing. ‘Don’t worry,’ everyone had told Lambert. ‘You’re young, you don’t have any children, you’ll bounce back easily.’ But nothing was easy these days, least of all bouncing back. Patrick had bumped into Lambert two weeks earlier and had noticed that he was looking rather gaunt. Lambert had pretended everything was fine, but the look on his face said otherwise. Patrick, in turn, had pretended to believe what Lambert was telling him, so as not to embarrass him, but now he felt bad about this. He should have said: ‘Listen, I can see that you’re not okay. Let’s go for a coffee and see what we can work out.’ Instead he’d kept silent. He’d watched as Lambert disappeared into a metro entrance, swallowed up by the crowd.

Patrick had tried to call him but there was only an automated message stating that the number was no longer in service. Why would that have happened? Everybody kept their phone number. It was the motto of our age: always be reachable. Lambert must have been unable to pay his bills and so his line had been cancelled. There was no other explanation. So now Patrick had no way of contacting him; there was no possibility that they would ever have more than one of those superficial conversations between two excolleagues who bump into each other in the street and tell lies with forced smiles. These were Patrick’s thoughts on the evening of our first encounter. In three days’ time, it would perhaps be his turn. Perhaps he too would lose his phone number and nobody would be able to contact him any more. In three days’ time, that ghoul Desjoyaux would explain why it was imperative that they meet.

Obviously, some of these details were given to me later by Patrick. But during that dinner, he did eventually get quite a lot off his chest. Valérie seemed surprised, particularly since the early part of the evening had given no clue as to what was coming. Clearly I had underestimated the need that every person felt to confide in a stranger, to express all that they had been bottling up prior to the moment an outsider offered a sympathetic ear. My role was not to make any comment or give advice, at least not yet. I simply nodded understandingly while maintaining the detachment necessary to transcribe all of this without being overly affected by it. It was probably this attitude that led Patrick to ask me: ‘Are you really interested in all this stuff about Desjoyaux?’

‘Yes, really. And I think my readers will be too. We all know a Desjoyaux,’ I said earnestly.

I genuinely believed this. Not that we all have a psychopathic boss but, for me, all stories echo one another. I am often surprised by the degree to which readers find themselves in books, even those books with the strangest, most disturbing plots. We see reflections of our private reality everywhere we look. So, yes, I was certain that this Desjoyaux character would resonate as a symbol of the mistreatment that everyone has suffered at one time or another in their life. Surely, too, people would empathise with Patrick, this insecure man trying to stand firm in the face of deliberate humiliation. That was how I felt anyway.