So what choice did he have now? The theft of the wallet from the safe of their bungalow hadn’t given him anything either, apart from letting him find out a bit more about Cassanu’s granddaughter. What choice did he have apart from getting rid of her too? Except that while his brain was quite capable of dropping a teenage girl in the water, ordering the murder of some cats, or even whacking a senile old German in the temple with a pétanque ball almost by accident, becoming a cold-blooded murderer was another thing entirely. All that nonsense that was said about Corsicans, about vendettas and murders, omertà enforced by bullets from a Beretta, that propensity for violence that was supposed to flow in the islanders’ veins – what bullshit! For each Cassanu Idrissi, cold and determined, there were ninety-nine people between Calvi and Ajaccio incapable of shooting anything other than a wild boar or a woodcock. Still, he had to find a way to deal with this nosy lawyer.

He turned to look outside the building. Orsu appeared to have vanished. Had he already gone off cat-hunting? Cervone Spinello bent over the diving suits; that dickhead of an instructor hadn’t put anything away properly, not the neoprene suits, nor the masks, nor the snorkels. Even the harpoon-guns were all over the place. Anyone could have grabbed one.

The campsite manager methodically put all the equipment back in the boxes or on the pegs, sorted it, counted it. He had a complete set of underwater fishing equipment for eight adult divers.

But something was missing …

Eight suits, eight compressors, eight lead belts, but seven harpoon guns. He bent down again, searched under the table, under the cupboard.

Nothing.

‘What are you looking for?’

Of course. Cervone recognised the voice. A moment later, he also recognised the missing harpoon gun.

Aimed at his heart.

‘You should tidy up your things, Cervone. You should also treat your staff better. And share your secrets a little more. It’s risky to keep a treasure like that all to yourself.’

It lasted three minutes. One for Cervone to decide to talk, almost two for him to admit the unthinkable, then less than a second of silence after his confession while he hoped for a pardon.

Yet the moment he finished, he understood that his honesty wasn’t going to save him. The last image that passed through his mind was that of Anika, the first time he had seen her in Recisa Bay. She was twenty-three, reading Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig; she was as beautiful as a flower that you didn’t dare pluck. But he had dared to do just that. Everything else, everything he had done since then, everything he had tried and failed to do, had been to impress her.

The finger pulled the trigger.

Would Anika miss him, at least?

The harpoon pierced Cervone’s heart.

49