48

23 August 2016, 8 a.m.

Cervone Spinello liked to get up early, walk around the campsite before the tourists woke up, stroll along the deserted alleys, listen to the snores from the tents, sometimes the sighs, count the empty wine bottles under the cold barbecues, pass silently by the campers wrapped in their sleeping-bags. He imagined himself as a landowner surveying his domain, greeting people, his peasants, assessing the harvest that was about to come; ensuring order and harmony simply by his presence.

Cervone liked to get up early, but not too early.

The alarm at 7.30; jumping out of bed at 7.45.

Anika, his wife, went to work a good hour before he did every morning, and stood at reception settling the accounts, managing supplies, recording arrivals and departures; a ritual which meant that from daybreak she was entirely at the disposal of the first campers who came to claim their breakfast, their morning paper, or to ask for ideas for that day’s outing.

Perfect.

Anika didn’t look up from her Excel spreadsheet when Cervone passed in front of her with his coffee. Cervone was aware that behind his back people were asking questions. Anika had just turned forty, and she had the energy of a twenty-year-old summer-camp instructor – bossy and hard-headed with suppliers, tender and patient with the children, laughing and flirtatious with the men, affable and chatty with the women, and fluent in six European languages including Corsican and Catalan. Anika was a former windsurfer, who had come from Montenegro one summer and settled in Recisa Bay. Cervone had stolen her from her boyfriend, a nouveau-riche Kosovan who had disappeared again all by himself in his 4x4 Chevrolet. Quite reasonably people wondered, what was such a charming, competent, intelligent woman doing with such an idiot?

I.e. him.

To be honest, Cervone asked himself the same question every morning. That he might have seduced her twenty years ago, when she was on a beach far from home, fair enough. But that she stayed? Over time, it must have dawned on her that he was a liar, that he was calculating, a bit of a smooth-talker. And you had to admit that even the most perfect women could only love damaged, tormented, broken men. A bit like billionaires doing charity work. Perhaps Anika stayed with him out of pity.

‘My God,’ Anika suddenly said without taking her eyes off the screen.

Amongst her other morning tasks, she had developed the habit of reading through all the local news.

‘What?’

‘They’ve identified that man who drowned in Crovani Bay. It’s as everyone feared. It’s Jakob Schreiber.’

Cervone pulled a face.

‘Shit … Do they know what happened?’

‘No idea, it’s just a three-line story on the Corse-Matin website.’