I felt as though I were drowning in a torrent of catastrophes. Barely an hour earlier, when I left Aurelia Park, I had been stopped by the police for speeding. Frantic and distraught, I had been doing a hundred and eighty kilometers an hour on the highway. The cops insisted that I take a Breathalyzer, and the cocktails and vodka shots I had drunk earlier that evening meant that they immediately suspended my license. If I was to get anywhere, I had no choice but to call Stéphane Pianelli. He had already heard the news about my mother’s death and said he would drive right over. He picked me up in his Dacia SUV with little Ernesto fast asleep in the back seat. The car smelled of gingerbread and had never seen a car wash in its life. As we drove to the police station, he briefed me, filling me in on the details I had not yet heard from Chief Debruyne. My mother’s body had been found in Cap d’Antibes, on a rocky coastal path. It had been the police, called to the scene by local residents worried that they had heard gunshots, who pronounced her dead.

“I’m really sorry to have to tell you, Thomas, but the circumstances of her death are truly horrible. I’ve never seen the likes of it around here.”

The dome light of the Dacia was still on. I could see that Pianelli was shaking. After all, he knew my parents. I was completely numb. Beyond exhaustion, beyond grief, beyond pain.

“There was a rifle near the crime scene, but Annabelle did not die of a gunshot wound.”

He was reluctant to tell me exactly what had happened. I’d had to insist in order to get the truth.

And this was what I was now trying to explain to the lawyer as I paced up and down outside the precinct: My mother’s face had been beaten to a bloody pulp with a rifle butt. It was clear that my father had not done it. Richard had gone there only because I’d given him the address, and Annabelle had been dead when he arrived. He had broken down in tears on the rocky terrain; his mistake, as he stared at the dead body of his wife, was to sob: “This is my fault!” He had not meant it literally, I explained to the lawyer. It was simply a way of saying that he hadn’t been able to protect her, that he felt responsible. The lawyer accepted this without question and agreed to help us.