I settle for the role of silent witness. The one who keeps her mouth shut, who merely ruminates all night when tomorrow she’s getting up at dawn to follow a smooth-talking fisherman who’s made her believe she’s going to swim with dolphins. The witness who knows everything but says nothing, you know, the one in the film whose curiosity gets the better of them, and who eventually gets bumped off.

At the age of fifteen.

I’m too young to go with them, I know. Nicolas told me that without even having to labour the point.

I’m pissed off with him …

I wouldn’t mind if they got caught just before the evening of the twenty-third.

* * *

He shut the notebook and stood up.

He mustn’t lose his concentration. Little by little, Clotilde was getting closer to the truth.

He couldn’t go on simply observing. He had to act.

Do something.

There was someone he had to silence.

30

19 August 2016, 6 p.m.

For the fifth time, Clotilde tried to get an answer from the hospital.

‘Pick up the phone, please! Pick it up!’

She was leaning against an olive tree, tears in her eyes, her back scratched to bits, her heart ready to explode. It took more than ten minutes of cursing at an automatic answering service, tapping 1, then 2, then #, then *, getting put through to the wrong person, insulting a nurse who hadn’t done anything, who didn’t know anything, who was going to try to put her back to reception.

Beep beep beep …

‘Put me through to my daughter, damn it!’

An operator had put her on hold when she saw she had an incoming call.

Franck. At last.

‘Franck? Where are you?’

The tone of her husband’s reply sounded more contemptuous than a top surgeon being consulted about a pimple.

‘At Calvi hospital. With Valentine.’

‘How is she?’

Just answer, damn it, answer me!

‘I’m with Cervone Spinello. He was the one who drove Valou here in the campsite’s 4x4 Touareg. Cervone has been trying to get through to you for almost an hour, but each time he called he got your voicemail. Shit, Clo, why was your phone turned off? You’re irresponsible! I left Valentine with you. Where were you?’

She had spent an hour talking to Jakob Schreiber, forgetting that she had turned off her telephone. It was impossible to get away from the old German, who’d gone on and on about himself and his son Hermann, and how successful he was. The Cyclops had become an engineer working for the medical branch of a chemical company, was married to an opera singer, and had fathered three children who were as fair as every generation of Schreiber offspring since William II. Clotilde had even left with the son’s mobile phone number in her pocket. Hermann was another witness to the summer of ’89.

‘Where were you?’ Franck said again.