Mireille Day

And the bank manager insisted on following him.

And so in the middle of the Champs-Élysées,

Hervé stops.

He doesn't go all the way to the office, which is down the other end of the Champs-Élysées.

He stops in the middle of the road, gets out of the car, much to the astonishment of the bank manager who's in another car, goes round to the boot, opens the boot.

heaves out these two really heavy bags.

I mean, the first one he had to have a couple of goes at getting out, but I imagine he was so drenched with adrenaline, you know, he was Superman, lifted up the bags, crossed the road and disappeared into an arcade.

There was a hire car waiting.

So I think what he was going to do was not go through the arcade, of course, but to drive around...

to where the hire car was waiting, drive it out, put his own car in that parking spot and head off.

He'd been compiling this dossier of...

illegal transactions and bribes, et cetera, that had been taken place over a number of years.

And he thought that was their passport to safety.

So the plan was get the money, go to the hire car and drive to an appointed place where the four partners in crime, Hervé and Jean and their two girlfriends, would then rendezvous and Hervé would phone, of course it had to be a public phone, there were no mobiles then, would phone Dassault and say, don't follow me, I've compiled a dossier.

And Dassault would automatically understand what that meant, that he had evidence of all these shady dealings.

But of course, when they got to the place where they were making the phone call, and ironically enough, it was in Orly Airport where Jean had done the hijacking.

Perhaps he felt better on familiar terrain.

Hervé made the phone call to Dassault's home.

Dassault was home sick that day, but too sick to come to the phone.

So he gave the wife a message and he had to repeat it a couple of times.