Unless it was the other way around, she thought all of a sudden. Unless this injured stranger hadn’t climbed up to the cabin, but had come down from it. It didn’t matter, the more she followed the trail of blood, the more convinced she became that it would lead her to that clearing where she had found herself three days earlier. The place where Orsu had left her, and Franck had joined her; her husband knew the way too, although she didn’t understand why or how. She hadn’t managed to contact him at all that morning, in spite of her constant calls.

Interminable ringing.

Voicemail.

Please, Franck, call me back.

Call me back.

Call me back.

Later, ask those questions later.

Campa sempre.

It was all that mattered. She had to keep going. She remembered some details now, a gentler slope, a thinning maquis, a big cork oak. She walked another few metres, and the traces of blood that guided her came closer and closer together. Suddenly the maquis opened up and the shepherd’s cabin appeared.

Clotilde’s heart nearly exploded.

My God!

Her stomach lurched, she gulped, and she resisted the desire to turn around, to run away. Hop o’my Thumb was there, lying on the ground, and he hadn’t cut his wrists to guide her.

He had been stabbed. A huge brown stain covered his right flank.

He was dead, and probably had been for a while, lying among the faded petals of mauve and white cistus. If Clotilde hadn’t followed his bloody trail, she might have thought he was asleep.

She walked over. She hesitated to bend down. Hesitated to speak.

‘Pacha?’

There was a harpoon sticking out of the Labrador’s neck. The dog who had the same name as another one, the dog of her childhood. As if someone had wanted to deprive her of him for a second time.

*

The cabin door was open.

Wasps buzzed around the corpse, already inviting themselves to the carrion picnic. Clotilde walked towards the stone building. At night, she hadn’t had time to notice the thick bolt that barred the wooden door, the metal lock of the medieval dungeon, as impregnable as the bars on the only window, flanked also by a massive and imposing oak shutter.

The stone prison was inhabited. There was someone inside. Someone weeping.

Was it her mother hiding in there? Walled in? Alive?

Trembling, Clotilde went inside.

This whole scene, everything she had been experiencing for the last five days, defied the imagination. She discovered a bed. A wooden table. Some dried flowers. A radio. Books, dozens of books, piled up on the wooden shelves, lying on the floor, reducing the size of the room almost by half.

And in a corner, with her back to her, an old woman crouching on a stool.