It’s a game of strategy, of course. Like so many games of strategy, it’s based on putting the pieces in place without letting the opponent suspect what’s happening, then deciding which pieces to sacrifice in order to emerge the winner. After that, it’s one-on-one – a battle of wills between Yanne and me – and I have to say I’m looking forward to it even more than I could have imagined. To face her at last in the final round, knowing what’s at stake for both of us—

Now that will be a game worth playing.

Let’s recap the moves so far. Between my other interests, I have been working very hard on the contents of Yanne’s piñata, and I have discovered a number of things.

One, she is not Yanne Charbonneau.

Well, we already knew that, of course. But more interestingly, she is not Vianne Rocher – or so the contents of her box would suggest. I knew there was something important I’d missed, and the other day, when she was out, I eventually found what I’d been looking for.

Actually, I’d seen it before, and overlooked its importance as I focused on Vianne Rocher. But it’s there in the box, tied with a piece of faded red ribbon: a silver charm that might equally have come from a cheap bracelet or a Christmas cracker; shaped like a cat and blackened with time. It’s there in Vianne’s shoe-box, with a packet of sandalwood and some Tarot cards that have seen better days.

Like myself, Vianne travels light. Nothing she keeps is trivial. Every item in this box has been kept for a reason, and none less so than this silver charm. It’s mentioned in the newspaper clipping, so brittle and brown that I’d not dared to unfold it completely: the account of the disappearance of eighteen-month-old Sylviane Caillou from outside a chemist’s, more than thirty years ago.

Did she ever try to go back? Instinct tells me she did not. You choose your family, as she says, and that girl, her mother, whose name does not even appear in the clipping – is nothing to her but DNA. To me, however—

Call me curious. I looked her up on the internet. It took a little time – children vanish every day, and this was an old case, long since closed and without great interest – but I found it at last, and with it the name of Sylviane’s mother, twenty-one when the baby was taken, now forty-nine according to her school reunion website; divorced, no kids, still living in Paris near Père Lachaise and managing a little hotel.