A month later she filed her first column and I didn’t think a lot more about her identity until a diarist phoned and asked if Belle was a journalist called Toby Young. “Er, no.” “But why does she want to be anonymous?” “Maybe because she doesn’t want her mum to know she’s a prostitute.” Soon almost anyone who had ever walked inside The Erotic Review office was fingered as Belle, and I was described as “a leading contender”, alongside Alastair Campbell. In January of this year the literary agent Patrick Walsh phoned me and asked if I’d heard about her blog Frankly, I hadn’t even heard of blogging. He had “worked the whole thing out” and told me Belle was actually a vicar’s son called Chris Hart, a client of Patrick’s and past winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award (always the hallmark of a convincing hooker). “Yes.” “So, it’s true to say that you specialise in con men and prostitutes?”Then we all started being harassed by a bumptious puppy from The Sunday Times, who established his credentials by asking a colleague if she was “capable of taking down a phone number”.

Some wag phoned Patrick’s agency, Conville and Walsh, and asked if they represented Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre, as well as Belle. Or that she should use a term such as “serif font”, which, according to The Mail on Sunday, is “certainly not the lingua franca of prostitutes”. No, tarts spend their whole time going, “wanna go jiggy-jiggy, mister?” Never mind that grandes horizontales throughout history have been amongst the most celebrated of saloniers and writers. Harriet Wilson and Liane de Pougy’s diaries are still in print. The fact that both women employed a certain amount of artistic licence in their memoirs didn’t mean that they never turned tricks for cash.
Before you think I believe in fairies (I do!), I should tell you that I’ve actually met Belle.

Because Belle has just started writing a column for The Erotic Review, a couple of Mensa aspirants have concluded that she must be: me or one of my colleagues. These sleuths have not yet explained why – if so – it’s taken us seven months to think of putting this material into the magazine. I mean, I always urge writers to save their best work for unpaid web diaries, which are only read by caffeine-freaks with no friends. This aside, I am astonished by the almost universal conclusion that Belle must be a previously published author and quite possibly a man. They point to her wit and highbrow literary taste as evidence that she cannot be a call-girl Heaven forbid that an escort should read Samuel Pepys.