I didn’t know what the fireman had said to Rowan, I didn’t know much French, but at the same time I knew. Against my will, against every fibre of my being, I knew what we would find. Ahead of me, Rowan was already sobbing softly, her shoulders hitching up and down as she walked, arms crossed tight over her chest. Seeing her, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. My tears started when we were halfway down into the gorge and by the time we reached the bottom I was sobbing too.

The youngest of the firemen was there, his hat in both hands in front of him. He couldn’t have been much more than eighteen, his face ghost-pale. He looked close to tears himself.

He cast his eyes down and stepped aside as we approached.

‘Madames,’ he said, his voice choked.

She was there. Arms outstretched against smooth rock, at the foot of the cliff.

Motionless.

Izzy.

Chapter 70

70

She lay on her back, her head encircled by a dark halo of blood.

Her eyes were open, staring up at nothing. One leg was tucked under the other, both arms flung out to the side, on one of the flat slabs of rock that formed the bottom of the gorge. Blood dripped slowly from the back of her head, down the edge of the rock and into the stream gurgling below, deep red drops diluting and mixing and disappearing, carried away downstream by the mountain water. A fly buzzed around her, settling next to the blood dripping down her grotesquely bent arm until I waved it angrily away, swatting at more flies circling her head.

Rowan spoke to Lepine in rapid, urgent tones, staccato questions one after the other. But he simply looked at her and shook his head slowly, apologetically. Izzy was gone.

Alistair stood back, his face frozen in shock. Rowan and I approached her body slowly, arm in arm, not wanting to see. To see would make it real. Make it permanent.

Our friend.

‘Oh God.’ My voice sounded weird, disembodied, not my own. ‘Oh no.’

Rowan was shaking in disbelief, a hand over her mouth, deep, racking sobs that echoed off the walls of the gorge. I hugged her and we held on to each other for a few minutes, crying and trying to give comfort even though we both knew there was none to be had. Not any more.

‘How could . . .’ Rowan started through her sobs. ‘How could she have fallen?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t believe she’s . . .’

I couldn’t finish the sentence. It felt as if I was floating above the scene, not part of it. I’d seen dead bodies before in the course of my job – it was an occasional but inevitable part of what I did – but never anyone I knew. Never anyone who had meant so much to me, shared so much of my own history, my own past. My own life.