Long grey hair fell to her waist, like a wise old grandmother who’d taken the ribbon from her hair to reveal how beautiful she once was; unveiling it to her mirror, her grandchildren, a former lover.

There was nothing of the sort in this small room.

The old woman, almost kneeling, was confiding with a corner of the cold stone walls. Like a child who was being punished, that was the image that came to Clotilde. A child forgotten for a lifetime, who would never be rescued, but who would stay there, who would grow old there, because she was obedient and had been ordered not to move.

‘Maman?’

Slowly the old woman got up.

Her hands, her arms, her neck were stained with blood.

‘Maman?’

Clotilde’s heart was almost bursting in her chest. Was it even possible? Another image appeared before her eyes, the one that had obsessed her for all these years – of her mother’s body, twenty-seven years earlier, also drenched in blood. Being crushed by a rock. And yet her mother was standing here in front of her, alive, in spite of appearances and despite all the evidence.

At last the old woman turned round.

Clotilde knew, she felt, that it was her.

Maman?

But this time the words stuck in her throat.

The old woman looking at her with pleading eyes, begging her forgiveness, was over eighty years old, but still beautiful, dignified and proud. How she had suffered for all those years.

But this old woman was not her mother.

III

Sempre giovanu

55

23 August 2016

They were like twin brothers who had aged at different speeds. The first wore a polo-neck, and the second had a tattoo of a snake on his shoulder-blade. The first had the thick glasses of a short-sighted person on his nose, and the second a silver piercing in his nostril. The first wore a threadbare bottle-green corduroy suit, the second a red-and-white tracksuit, the colours of Ajaccio, a little too tight.

Castani Brothers, second-hand and parts, it said in the advertisement.

The one in the polo-neck had come in the truck, the one with the tattoo in the red car.

The one in the polo-neck counted the banknotes, the one with the tattoo lifted the dented bonnet.

‘1,500 euros,’ he said, wiping his hands on his immaculate tracksuit, ‘but don’t expect to drive across the continent in it.’

The customer wasn’t chatty, but he paid cash. He had asked for a discreet meeting, in the car park of the reservoir on the edge of the Bocca Serria forest. In the end, his intention hadn’t been to put the Castani brothers out: no technical checks, no registration document, just a few banknotes in exchange for an antique that was barely roadworthy.

The one in the polo-neck slipped the banknotes into his pocket.

‘Be careful … That car’s been asleep in a shed for years, and I don’t want you to come a cropper.’