“They were Vinca Rockwell’s.”

I blinked several times as I took this in; I tried to work out what it might mean, but my mind was a blank. “So what do you figure, Stéphane?”

“I figure that I was right all along!” Pianelli said triumphantly.

Aside from politics, the subject that most obsessed Stéphane Pianelli was the Vinca Rockwell affair. About fifteen years ago, he’d even written a book about it, Death and the Maiden, the title a nod to Schubert. It was a meticulous, exhaustive investigation, but it contained no stunning revelations about the disappearance of Vinca and her lover.

“If Vinca really did run away with Alexis Clément, she would have taken the money with her. At the very least, she’d have come back for it!” he said.

I wasn’t convinced. “Who’s to say it was hers?” I said. “Just because her fingerprints were on the bag doesn’t mean the money belonged to her.”

He nodded. “Yeah, but you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty crazy. Where did all this cash come from? A hundred thousand francs! That was a fortune in those days.”

I’d never really worked out what his theory about the Vinca Rockwell case was, but he didn’t accept the idea that she’d run off. Though he had no concrete proof, Pianelli believed that there had been no word of Vinca since then because she was dead, and he thought that Alexis Clément had probably killed her.

“What does that mean in terms of criminal charges?”

“No idea,” he said, making a face.

“But the investigation into Vinca’s disappearance was closed years ago. Whatever they find now, surely it’s past the statute of limitations?”

He thoughtfully rubbed his beard with the back of his hand. “Not necessarily. There’s quite a lot of complex case law on the subject. These days, there are cases where the statute of limitations doesn’t depend on when the crime was committed but on when the body was discovered.”

He stared at me and I held his gaze. Pianelli was constantly looking for a scoop, but I’d often wondered what lay behind his fascination with this particular case. From what I remembered, he and Vinca had never been close. They’d never spent time together, and they had almost nothing in common.