‘She’s been dying of worry for sixty years.’

She smiled.

‘I have some questions to ask you.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

Clotilde’s gaze wandered seven hundred metres below. The coast was merely a sequence of peninsulas, like grey tentacles covered with moss that a god seemed to have allowed to proliferate to increase the number of secret inlets, watering holes, paths. A corrupt god who would have understood the profit to be drawn from them one day.

Before she began, Clotilde’s eyes turned due east, towards the sea. From here you could make out the bungalows of the Euproctes campsite, the foundations of the Roc e Mare marina, the shadow of the Tropi-Kalliste beach hut on Oscelluccia beach.

‘The last time we both sat here, there was nothing, Cassanu, nothing but olive trees to pitch your tent under, a track to take you down to the beach, a fisherman’s boat moored in the sea and, in Revellata Bay, some dolphins. How is that you’ve allowed Cervone Spinello to develop his business? All his ambition, his concrete. He’s telling everyone that he has the all-powerful Idrissi eating out of his hand.’

Cassanu didn’t take offence.

‘It’s complicated, little one. Everything changed years ago, a great deal. But I suppose you can sum it all up in one word. Five letters. Money, Clotilde, money.’

‘I don’t believe you! You don’t care about money. So tell me something else. Find some other way of explaining to me why Cervone’s shack hasn’t burned down. Why the foundations of his hotel haven’t been blown up.’

Plainly Cassanu couldn’t find anything.

He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

Clotilde checked that her phone was working all the way up here, that she had no more messages, and most importantly that she could dial 15 if she had to. It would take a helicopter less than five minutes to get here from Calvi. Saving hikers lost in the mountains was a daily occurrence for the Corsican emergency services. Reassured, she continued to interrogate her grandfather, as if twenty-seven seconds had passed rather than the twenty-seven years since they’d first had this same conversation. On this very spot.

‘Cassanu, why did you choose that pig Cervone’s projects over Natale Angeli’s dolphin sanctuary? You virtually promised me. You almost said yes. What made you change your mind? Because Natale was in love with my mother? Because by getting close to your son’s wife he was violating the family’s honour?’

‘Honour, Clotilde, is what remains when you’ve lost everything.’

Clotilde looked out over the vast terrain in front of them, the eighty hectares of land that belonged to the Idrissi family.

‘Lost everything? I think there’s some left over, isn’t there? But you haven’t answered me, Cassanu. In the Idrissi family a woman doesn’t cheat on her husband, is that it? While a man …’