‘I don’t understand,’ Jakob kept saying, over and over again.

A jingle on the radio seemed to pull him out of his obsessive cul-de-sac: Who Wants to Make a Million? was about to start again.

The tenth question.

Jakob suddenly froze. The presenter asked something incomprehensible, in a slightly surreal voice, and then, even faster, listed the four options:

A, Goethe, B, Mann, D, Kafka, D, Musil.

Ein, zwei, drei …

A ding burst from Jakob’s phone.

‘Ja, Antwort B, only Thomas Mann stayed at Davos sanatorium, there’s no doubt about it!’

He was in a state of euphoria for a few more moments, before the box at his feet brought him back to the sad reality.

‘Maybe I’m losing my marbles, Mademoiselle Idrissi. I spend my days organising these damned files, and the one day someone asks to see one of them …’

‘It doesn’t matter, Monsieur Schreiber. As you said, it’s just nostalgia.’

‘I must be going mad. But as you have seen, Fräulein, I do still have that verdammte memory of mine.’

On the radio, the presenter confirmed, Antwort B, Thomas Mann, followed by another endless tunnel of advertising.

Clotilde got up. She’d hit another dead end. She still needed to question Maria-Chjara and Cassanu. Go back and question Sergeant Cesareu Garcia as well or, even better, have a conversation with Aurélia, his daughter.

Ding.

This time the message came from Clotilde’s phone.

Natale.

She felt herself blushing and, like a young girl caught talking to her lover, she turned off her phone. She would read his message later. Perhaps in the Cave of the Sea-Calves.

‘Let me say it again, it doesn’t matter, Monsieur Schreiber.’

The German scratched what few grey hairs he had left on his head.

‘If you aren’t in too much of a hurry, I could find everything you’re looking for in the cloud.’

‘The what?’

‘The cloud. It’s a kind of backup space on the internet. It’s taken me years but I’ve scanned all the photographs since 1961 and stored them in that virtual bunker. Can you imagine what would happen if my Landhaus caught fire, or was carried off by a storm? In the cloud, the files are archived for all eternity, like a plot paid for in perpetuity in a graveyard. I just need a good wi-fi connection, a USB drive, and I should be able to find it all for you.’

Clotilde didn’t know much about computers, but it seemed hard to imagine that the invisible ghost could climb into the clouds and steal files guarded by angels.

Her hope returned.