The more the mysteries deepened, the more convinced Clotilde became that the solution lay somewhere in her memories, her memories of the summer of 1989, of which she retained only fragments, fleeting impressions, flashes filtered through her nightmares. How could she trust those? She needed more concrete memories, tangible facts, reliable witnesses. She would have given anything to have her diary, the one in which she had recorded every detail that summer. The one she had never got back.

Why?

She needed a starting point, the end of a thread so she could unravel the rest of the tangled knot, the start of a film that was real, so that the rest of the images would follow. She knew where to look.

Clotilde stared at the breakfast table again. A little further down the path, Orsu, with his rake and spade, was watching her as if waiting to clear the table. As if he knew. As if he knew everything, but couldn’t say a word.

That could wait. It wasn’t Orsu who was hiding the evidence. Nor Maria-Chjara. Nor Cassanu.

They could wait too.

Clotilde was furious not to have thought of it before now. Just a short walk away from her, three alleys and three mobile homes away, was the archive of memories for the Euproctes campsite. Every deed and every gesture. All the faces. All the looks.

Fifty years of history.

She would just have to persuade the keeper of the museum to open up his book of magic spells.

27

Saturday, 19 August 1989, thirteenth day of the holidays
Fever-blue sky

Gripping my pencil, O invisible confidant, I’m writing to you for the third time this day. The flurry of excitement over Sopron seems to have subsided, the rattling Iron Curtain has closed again – all the better for the people who stayed on the right side of it – Mama Palma went off to sun herself on the beach as soon as they stopped showing pictures of the Austro-Hungarian hills on the TV (replacing them with a panel of global political experts), and I’ve gone down to the Cave of the Sea-Calves to wait for the sun to set. I haven’t told you this yet, but sea-calves are really just a type of seal but they feel the cold and they like the water to be twenty-five degrees and to tan themselves on the rocks. They were all killed years ago, so I’m squatting in their home. You just have to climb over a few rocks to find this cave, which smells slightly of piss, ashes and salty seaweed, and where the sea comes and licks your feet. From here you can see everything without being seen, apart from the fishermen who come and catch crayfish, lobsters or sea urchins.

I’m a bit like them.

A kind of sea urchin.