The restaurant owner personally brought out the lamb shoulder and carved it for us. After a mouthful or two, Pianelli continued his lecture. “Obviously, all this went right over her head. I can’t pretend that I knew her better than you did, but behind that façade, she was pretty dull, wasn’t she?”

When I did not respond, he taunted me: “You idealize her because she disappeared when she was nineteen. But just suppose that the two of you had gotten married back then. Can you imagine what things would be like now? You’d have three kids, she’d be fat with saggy tits, and—”

“Shut up, Stéphane!”

I had raised my voice. He backpedaled and apologized, and we spent the next five minutes polishing off the lamb and the salad without talking. In the end, I was the one who broke the silence.

“Do you know who took this photo?” I asked, nodding at the cover.

Pianelli frowned and his face froze, as though I had caught him out. “I, um…” He checked the copyright credit. “I suppose it’s part of the Nice-Matin archives from way back.”

“Could you check?”

He took out his phone and began tapping. “I’ll text Claude Angevin. He was the journalist who worked on the story back in 1992.”

“Does he still work for the paper?”

“Are you joking? The guy’s seventy! These days, he’s sunning himself down in Portugal. Why do you want to know who took the photo?”

I ignored the question. “Speaking of photographs, I read in your article that the kids who found the hundred grand in a rusty old locker posted photos on social media.”

“Yeah, but the cops made them take them down.”

“Surely you kept copies.”

“You know me so well.”

“Could you send them to me?”

He looked for the photos on his phone. “I thought you weren’t interested in the story,” he said sarcastically.

“Of course I’m interested, Stéphane.”

“What’s your e-mail?”

As I gave it to him, something became clear to me. I no longer had any contacts in the area, while Pianelli had lived here all his life, so if I wanted to find out what had happened to Vinca and who was threatening me and Maxime, my only option was to team up with him.

“Would you be interested in collaborating on something?”

“What do you have in mind, Mr. Potboiler?”

“We do a little investigating into Vinca’s disappearance and pool our findings.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t play fair.”

I had expected his response. To earn his trust, I decided to take a risk. “Okay, to prove I mean it, I’ll tell you something that no one knows.”

I sensed his every muscle strain. I knew I was walking a tightrope, but then I felt as though I had lived my whole life on a high wire. “Vinca was pregnant by Alexis when she disappeared.”