Rafa was right; the photograph had been cropped. Seen in its original size, the snapshot looked very different. Vinca and Clément were not dancing together—she was dancing by herself and staring at someone else, a man with his back to the camera, a blurred figure in the foreground.

“Shit!”

“What?”

“Your photo is a lie.”

“As are all photos,” he said coolly.

I grabbed a pencil and pointed to the blurred figure.

“I want to know who this guy here is. He might have had something to do with Vinca’s disappearance.”

“Let’s look through the rest of the photos.”

I pulled my chair closer to the computer, right beside Dalanegra, so we could go through the pictures together. Most of the shots were of his daughters, but in some of them, you could make out other people. Maxime’s face in the background, Fanny’s, some of the alumni I had met this morning, like Éric Lafitte, Hervé Lesage (Nigel from This Is Spinal Tap), and the brilliant Kathy Laneau. There was even a shot of me, although I had no memory of that night. I looked uncomfortable, wearing the same old blue shirt and blazer I usually wore. The teachers were always grouped in the same configuration: N’Dong, the sadistic math teacher who took a twisted pleasure in humiliating students at the blackboard; Lehmann, the manic-depressive physics teacher; and the most twisted of them all, Madame Fontana, who was utterly incapable of keeping order in class but relished settling scores in the cruelest way imaginable during staff meetings. On the other side, the more humane teachers: Miss DeVille, the pretty English teacher known for her wit—with a quote from Shakespeare or Epictetus, she could shut up any disruptive student—and Monsieur Graff, my former tutor, the brilliant French teacher who had taught me in my last two years at the lycée.

“Shit! All the shots are from the same angle,” I fumed as we reached the last of the images. I knew that I had come within inches of a revelation.

“It is pretty annoying,” Dalanegra said, finishing his smoothie.

I hadn’t even touched mine, I simply couldn’t face it. The light in the room had waned. Designed to heighten the play of light, the translucent concrete transformed the house into a chamber where the slightest shift in daylight created flickering shadows that glided like ghosts.

I thanked Dalanegra for his help and before I left asked if he could e-mail me the complete set of pictures, which he did there and then.

“Do you know whether anyone else was taking photos that night?” I said as I reached the door.

“A couple of the students, maybe,” he said. “But this was before digital cameras came along, and people were careful about wasting film in those days.”

In those days…these last words echoed in the vast, vaulted room and suddenly I felt terribly old.

3.