I opened the book and began to leaf through it. It was full of information. Pianelli had had access to police files. He had personally corroborated the statements given by witnesses. I had read the book when it first came out and had conducted my own investigation, interviewing every imaginable witness. I spent twenty minutes skimming through the book. The various memories of different witnesses all told the same story, the one that, over time, had become the official version: Vinca and Alexis had left Saint-Ex in the Alpine, the “young woman with flame-red hair” on the train to Paris next to the older man “wearing a German soccer cap with some unpronounceable name on it”; they’d checked in at the hotel on the rue de Saint-Simon and later “the young lady phoned down to ask for Cherry Coke”; the chambermaid had glimpsed them in the corridor the following morning; and then they’d disappeared—“When the receptionist came to take over from the night watchman, the room keys were lying on the front desk.” The book asked questions and highlighted a number of gray areas but offered no compelling evidence for a credible alternative theory. I had an advantage over Pianelli; while he simply had a hunch that the official story was false, I knew it was. Clément was dead. He could not have spent those two days with Vinca. She had run away with another man, with a ghost I had spent twenty-five years vainly trying to track down.

3.

“I see you’ve finally decided to read a good book!” Pianelli said as he took the chair opposite.

I looked up, still a little dazed from wandering through my labyrinthine past. “Did you know your book’s been banned by the Saint-Ex library?”

Stéphane speared a black olive from the little bowl. “Yeah, by that old bat Zélie! Not that it stops people who want to read it from downloading the PDF and passing it around.”

“How do you explain the current students’ obsession with Vinca?”

“Just look at her!” he said, flipping to the photo section of the book.

I did not even look down. I didn’t need to see the photographs to know exactly what Vinca had looked like. The almond eyes, her stylishly tousled hair, her pouting lips, her mischievous expressions that flickered between ladylike and lascivious.

“Vinca created a very distinct image,” Pianelli said. “She embodied what people used to call French chic, somewhere between Brigitte Bardot and Laetitia Casta. Most of all, she symbolized freedom.” He poured himself a glass of water. “If Vinca were twenty years old today, she’d be an It girl with six million followers on Instagram.”