“You’re not going to be happy about this, but I’m writing a book telling the truth about the death of Vinca Rockwell,” Pianelli calmly announced one evening in late June as we were sitting at the bar in a pub in Antibes, where he’d invited me for a drink.

“What truth?”

“The only truth,” Pianelli said coolly. “People have a right to know what happened to Vinca Rockwell and Alexis Clément. Parents of students at Saint-Ex have the right to know they’re sending their kids to a school where two corpses have been walled up for twenty-five years.”

“You realize that if you do that, you’re as good as throwing me, Fanny, and Maxime in jail?”

“Veritas omnia vincit!” he declared, slapping the bar. “Truth conquers all!”

To muddy the waters, he launched into a long tirade about a cashier who’d lost her job because her till was a few bucks short and how this compared to the leniency of the judicial system when dealing with politicians or employers. He then segued into his predictable speech—the one he had been giving since high school—about class struggle and capitalism, a system of slavery in the service of shareholders.

“For God’s sake, Stéphane, what the hell has all that got to do with us?”

He stared at me with a mixture of gravity and glee, as though, from the very first, he had been hoping to find himself in this position. And, for the first time, I realized the extent of Pianelli’s visceral hatred for everything that we represented.

“You killed two people. You have to pay.”

I sipped my beer and tried to seem offhand.

“I don’t believe you. You’ll never write that book.”

He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a contract with a publisher in Paris for a nonfiction book titled A Curious Affair: The Truth About the Vinca Rockwell Case.

“You haven’t got a shred of evidence for any of this, you idiot. All you’re going to do is destroy your credibility as a journalist.”

“The proof is the gym.” Pianelli sniggered. “When the book is published, I’ll rally the students’ parents. There’ll be so much pressure that the school will have no choice but to knock down the wall.”

I knew the publishers who had offered him the contract. They weren’t particularly prestigious or particularly rigorous, but they would make sure that the book got a lot of publicity. If Pianelli ever did publish this book, it would have dramatic repercussions.

“I don’t understand why you’d betray us, Stéphane. For fifteen minutes of fame? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“And your job is to betray your friends?”

“My job is being a journalist, and we were never friends.”