Come on, keep on climbing. There were two hundred metres of slope to go before she could rest her bum under the Arcanu oak-tree. Yet she kept looking back at the red car and met the old woman’s eyes once more. They seemed to be imploring her, pleading with her, trying to express a message that her lips could not utter. There was no one else around them. Only the buzzing of the evening insects. The silence suddenly disturbed her.

‘Shit,’ Valentine whispered to reassure herself, ‘what was the name of that car? The one from the accident that Maman’s always going on about.’

‘A Fuego,’ said the voice behind her.

58

23 August 2016, midday

Cassanu Idrissi refused the hand that the woman extended to help him down from the ambulance, handed a 20-euro note to Giovanni the driver before he set off again, and rejected with still greater irritation the cane that was proffered.

‘It’s fine, Lisa, I’ve still got two legs.’

He climbed the step into the farm and observed the laid table, the cutlery, the plates, the glasses. Set for four.

It was only at that moment that he turned and noticed Clotilde.

‘We have a guest,’ Lisabetta said quietly.

Speranza had returned to the stove. Nothing seemed more important than the cooking of the meal. Had she already forgotten everything else? Saint Rose’s night, her daughter’s death, the last words that the old witch had spat at Clotilde?

She ran away, my little darling. She slit Pacha’s throat, and she ran away.

No!

Clotilde couldn’t bring herself to accept it. That her mother would have waited twenty-seven years, all alone in the middle of the maquis, only to make her escape on the very day when her daughter came looking for her, at the exact time when her daughter was climbing towards the refuge? After sending letters with an explicit invitation?

It didn’t add up.

‘A guest,’ Cassanu mused. ‘When the children were here, with all the friends and cousins passing through or staying, when family still meant something, I never knew this table to have less than ten people sitting around it.’

Lisa was twisting her fingers.

‘She … she got away …’

Cassanu gave her a strange look but didn’t say anything.

‘She ran away,’ Speranza repeated. ‘She killed Pacha and then she ran away. And … Orsu …’

‘Orsu is in jail,’ the old Corsican cut in, ‘I’m aware of that. Giovanni told me everything on the way here. The police say he murdered Cervone.’

He drained the glass of Clos Columbu, and placed his knife on the table between his plate and his napkin. Just as Cassanu was about to pull out his chair, giving the impression that this information had nothing to do with him, or that his orders had already been given, Clotilde grabbed her grandfather’s sleeve and erupted at him.