‘Never,’ Clotilde cut in. ‘My parents never read the paper on holiday. Except once. Just once. Papa went out to get a copy of Le Monde from the newsagent in Calvi, and brought it back before Maman even woke up. He slipped it on to her chair. It was the first breakfast we’d had together. The last meal with the four of us at the table. The next day, Papa went off sailing for three days with some cousins to the Îles Sanguinaires, and he didn’t come back until the twenty-third, the day of the accident.’

Franck studied the paper on the armchair.

‘On 19 August 1989, the Hungarians opened up the Iron Curtain for the first time. At Sopron, on the Austrian border, my mother’s birthplace. For the first time in my life, Maman read the newspaper at breakfast, the newspaper my father had bought for her. The paper dated the nineteenth of August, Franck, the nineteenth, the same day as today. It can’t be a coincidence! And yet …’

‘And yet what?’

For a moment Clotilde had a sense that Franck was playing a trick on her, that he must know everything, that no one but him could have laid this table without waking her up. She chased the idea from her mind and went on.

‘And yet no one else could have known. No one but Nicolas, Maman, Papa and me. It was a family thing, a meaningless anecdote. Papa bought the paper without planning to, Maman read the article in five minutes, half a page, and then she put the paper on the barbecue and we burned it at lunchtime. No one could have known that detail. No one apart from the four of us. Do you understand, Franck? Whoever put that newspaper on my mother’s chair has to be one of us four. One of the four, and still alive.’

‘That isn’t your mother’s chair, Clo.’

Yes it is, Clotilde was about to reply. Yes, she was going to scream.

Valou got in before her.

‘Are you done yelling at each other?’

She was standing there, wrapped in a Betty Boop dressing-gown, her hair tousled and her expression drawn. She sat down at the table, on the seat belonging to Nicolas’s ghost. She reached out one arm to pick up the paper, another to bring the coffee to her lips, then pulled a face.

‘Ugh, it’s cold!’

Clotilde watched her, annoyed.

‘They’ll have to take fingerprints, Franck.’

He sighed. He gazed lovingly at his daughter, and then looked at his wife as if she were mad. As if one had definitely taken the place of the other – her youth, her beauty, her joie de vivre, her reasoning.