As he made his way into the bathroom for a drink of water, he caught the impenetrable gaze of the doll standing next to the greasy pizza boxes. He couldn’t remember taking it out of the luggage. Had Anne? Under the bright ceiling light, the nail-studded talisman seemed to thrum feverishly, as painful to look at as the filament in a light bulb. Marc threw the contents of the tooth glass over it and immediately regretted it, as if he had just committed some sacrilegious act. Yet no lightning came to strike him down, and he went peacefully back to sleep as if without a care in the world.

‘You were back late.’

‘Oh. Maybe.’

‘I woke up around four and you weren’t here.’

‘I went for a walk. I couldn’t sleep. Shall we go?’

The hotel lobby felt like a fish tank. The receptionist and a chambermaid had their noses pressed to the glass entrance. Flashing blue lights from outside swept across the walls and ceiling.

‘What’s going on?’

‘The pizza van burned down. The guy was inside it.’

‘Is he …?’

‘Yes. Will you be having breakfast?’

‘No, thank you. Do you know of any doctors nearby?’

‘A doctor, round here? You could try Dr Blanchard on Avenue Foch, but I don’t know if he’s still practising. Turn left at the second roundabout heading back towards the town centre, where they’re building the new stadium. You can’t miss it – it’s the only house still standing.’

At the car park exit, a police officer held them back to let an ambulance screech out onto the ring road ahead of them, sirens blazing. All that remained of the pizza van was a charred, smoking carcass with police and firefighters swarming around it. Marc remembered the baby-faced pizzaiolo.

‘He was young, the pizza guy.’

‘Served him right. His pizzas were disgusting.’

Avenue Foch was nothing more than a giant building site, a no man’s land strewn with rubble and bent metal girders in which a detached millstone house stood miraculously unscathed, a strange vestige of a distant past. A greening copper doorplate testified to the occupant’s noble profession: P. Blanchard, Doctor of Medicine. So Marc hoped. He rang the bell. Cranes wheeled and screeched in the sulphurous yellow sky as enormous machines belched, combing the earth with their steel teeth. Holes, heaps, heaps of holes. Marc had to shout into the intercom to make himself heard. Even with the door closed behind them, the din of the building site shook the walls of the house from the cellar up to the attic. A wash of grey light trickled through the frosted glass window at the top of the narrow, steep staircase. A croaky voice invited them to come up.

Even if you hooked a finger under his chin and lifted it, Dr Blanchard could not have been taller than 5'2". He was old enough to be ageless and, despite being swamped in countless layers of dubious woollens, looked impossibly thin. His left eye squinted up at you aslant, while the right eye, veiled with an opaque spot, ignored you entirely.