Even though Jo is surprised not to see Saïd in the days following Garance’s party, she’s not really worried. It’s summer, there’s that heavy bag of clothes at the end of her bed and Garance trying to call her, but she won’t answer. The prospect of term starting at the lycée and the languor of an August that stretches out, clammy. It’s only when the gendarmes turn up at the housing development that things start to stir and questions arise.

They’re not exactly frantic in the beginning. Saïd’s mother has reported him missing and since he’s over eighteen, the police are almost doing her a favour by looking into it. So many people go missing every year, go far away and are forgotten. But the police ask questions anyway. They don’t enquire about his timetable the day he disappeared; they’re strange questions, about Saïd’s childhood, who he kept company with.

But there’s not much to say. Saïd’s never caused any trouble. A local boy who attended the same school as all the other kids here. Collège Paul Gauthier in Cavaillon, Lycée Dumas – the technical, not the general one. A kid who hung around the same places as the kids of the farmers, the builders and the gendarmes. He went through the crappy fetes, the winter lottery, climbed the chateau ruins – above Fontaine-de-Vaucluse – on a day trip with the school sporting union. He’s smoked a few joints, loitered in the village square, flirted clumsily with girls, kicked the same ball as the others at the Taillades football club – better than the Imberts one, and the trainer liked him. In year eight he even went out with Carole, the Cabrières grocer’s daughter. Moreover, when they question the grocer, he is only too happy to tell them what he thinks of Arabs sniffing around his daughter, and this one in particular. He’s bound to have left to do jihad, the way he’d look at pork chops on the barbecue. Besides, a man who vanishes like that, so unexpectedly, that’s weird, isn’t it?

So all of a sudden there’s a bit of a commotion, a surge in energy, a paradoxical excitement at the thought that here, too, they have Arabs who go to Syria. Because the gendarmes already have their theory and would quite like to have it confirmed. It creates a kind of self-conscious joy, helps people talk freely. Saïd’s mother knows he would never have done this, but all mothers say that, don’t they?

So the police take over from the gendarmes and question more closely, and go into houses that are more welcoming than when it’s about a tractor being stolen, poaching, or the rape of a local girl. People offer a drink, sometimes two, and bring out the pistachios.