‘I know what you’re thinking, Clotilde. You’re sure that your mother was already condemned from the start. But you’re wrong. I wanted a proper trial. I wanted the jury to be presented with the evidence, I wanted them to rule on the case in full knowledge of everything that was involved. To deliver their sentence on the basis of the facts and the facts alone. It was the trial for the murder of my son and my grandson. I wasn’t just looking for someone to blame, Clotilde. I was looking for a murderer.’

‘And you found Palma? My mother? Lying under our car and unscrewing a tight bolt? You found ten jurors who’d believe that?’

‘Your mother was an architect, Clotilde, that’s a man’s job, she knew her way around a car, and in any case I’d followed up other lines of enquiry. The Casaspranas, the Pinellis and the other clans assured me that they had nothing to do with it, on their honour, and I believed them. In Corsica, you don’t sort out family quarrels by sabotaging a car and killing the children; you kill your enemy directly, point blank. Think about it, only one thing in that file is certain: someone sabotaged the steering of your father’s car. Someone who knew that the Fuego wouldn’t survive a sharp bend in the road. Then, since it was a premeditated crime, everything comes down to two questions: who had a motive to kill your father; and who could know that he would get into that car? The answer, my darling, was obvious, even if you don’t like it. Only one person. Your mother. It was your mother who had refused to get into the Fuego that night. Your mother who had encouraged her rival to sit there, beside the man who no longer loved her, the man who was going to leave her, the man who was going to take away her children, because he would never have stayed in Corsica, with Salomé and Orsu, without you and Nicolas. The man who, if he asked for a divorce, would make her give up everything, including the Idrissi fortune which he would one day inherit. While if he died in an accident, and they were still married …’

Cassanu looked up at the high branches of the tree where Sampiero Corso had hanged all those people.

‘That night, your mother ordered your father not to take you with him in the car. Not you, or Nicolas. She insisted, twice, and then she left.’