As soon as Jakob opened the door of his mobile home, he set down his pétanque balls and turned on his transistor radio. He had time to prepare himself, the radio was still broadcasting advertisements, the twelfth question wouldn’t be asked for another nine minutes. He sat down at the sitting-room table and turned on his laptop. He clicked distractedly on the file Summer ’89, thinking about questions 9, 10 and 11, which he had answered with an ease that even he had found disconcerting. In the seven years he had been listening to this programme, he had never got past the tenth … Might little Clotilde Idrissi have brought him some luck? With the tenth question, he had won a twenty-four-volume Brockhaus encyclopaedia, of which he now had three copies, or seventy-two sizeable volumes to store at his house, and he had seriously considered bringing one of the sets here, to his cramped second home.

The twelfth question corresponded to the third level, the level reached by less than one player in a million according to the statistics provided by the website. You didn’t get any money, but you did get a VIP entrance pass to the Pinakothek, the monumental assembly of museums in Munich, with a visit to corridors normally forbidden to the public, access to restoration studios. Above all, before you left, a bust of you would be created by a sculptor which was then exhibited in a special room. So far only seventeen Germans, their heads crammed with facts, had entered into posterity like that.

Jakob was just one question away from becoming the eighteenth.

Distractedly, he flicked through the photographs of the summer of ’89. His memory of the faces remained amazingly precise. He easily recognised little Clotilde, Nicolas Idrissi, Maria-Chjara Giordano, Aurélia Garcia, Cervone Spinello; slightly less the ones who had spent only that summer here, but some names came back to him – Estefan, Magnus, Filip. He sped through photographs of landscapes, adults and scenes of everyday life, concentrating solely on the teenagers.

He was worried about why his pictures had been stolen, because they had been stolen, there was no doubt about that. There was clearly some connection to Clotilde Idrissi coming back to the island, even if he couldn’t tell what it was. One thing at a time, he told himself, just now he had to concentrate on the competition. He would examine the photographs properly after that.

Concentrating harder than ever.

Concentrating too hard to hear the crunch of gravel outside his mobile home.

The radio presenter announced that he would be asking the famous twelfth question in less than a minute. Jakob’s right hand gripped his mobile phone, his left hand trembling slightly. To calm the tremors, he clenched the mouse and clicked on the slide-show to keep it going.