“Two or three months before she disappeared, Vinca asked me to take some photos of her. I thought she wanted to be a model and was trying to put together a portfolio like a couple of my daughters’ friends, but she told me that the photos were for her boyfriend.”

He reached over, grabbed the mouse, and opened up a browser.

“We did two really good sessions. Soft-core—what they used to call glamour shots.”

“Did you keep copies?”

“No. That was part of the deal, and I didn’t insist. But the strange thing is that they showed up online a couple of weeks ago.”

He turned the monitor toward me. It was the Instagram page for the Heterodites, the feminist club at Saint-Ex obsessed with Vinca. The girls had uploaded about twenty photographs from the sessions Dalanegra had been discussing.

“How did they get hold of the pictures?”

Dalanegra turned up his palms in a helpless gesture.

“My agent got in touch because there were copyright issues. The girls claim they were sent to them anonymously.”

I studied the previously unpublished pictures, feeling a swell of emotion. It was a hymn to beauty. Everything that made Vinca so attractive was there. Nothing about Vinca was perfect. Her singular beauty was made up of a collection of tiny imperfections that, together, created a poised, graceful unity, proving the old maxim that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Behind her smile, behind her faintly arrogant mask, I could make out an anguish I had not noticed at the time, an insecurity that confirmed something I had later experienced with other women: beauty was not simply physical, it was an intellectual experience, a nebulous power—it was sometimes unclear whether you were using it or it was using you.

“Later, Vinca asked me to take more photos,” Dalanegra went on, “trashy photos, almost porn. I refused because I got the impression that her boyfriend wanted her to do it, but she wasn’t really happy about it.”

“By her boyfriend, you mean Alexis Clément?”

“I assume. These days, stuff like that is banal, but back then it was pretty shady. I didn’t want to get involved. Especially since…” He trailed off, groping for words.

“Especially since what?”

“It’s not easy to explain. One day, Vinca would be radiant, and the next, she’d look exhausted or wasted. I thought she was pretty unstable. And then she asked me to do something that made my blood run cold—she asked me to follow her and take photos she could use to blackmail an older guy. It was sleazy and—”

Dalanegra was interrupted by a ping announcing the arrival of an e-mail.

“Ah, it’s from Yuko,” he said, glancing at the computer screen.

He double-clicked the e-mail, which contained about fifty photographs taken at the winter dance. He put on his half-moon glasses and quickly spotted the picture of Vinca and Alexis Clément dancing.