‘If she had done that, the police would already be here. No, my darling, your mother hasn’t run to the station to tell them her outlandish story. Locked up for years in a shepherd’s cabin? She hasn’t gone to report us, and yet that’s what any hostage would have done, don’t you agree? Yet more evidence, Clotilde, yet more evidence of her guilt.’ His eyes darted around. ‘We’ll look for her, and we’ll find her. You’ll be able to talk to her. A Corsican can disappear into the maquis for an age, but not a foreigner, not a foreigner who hasn’t set foot outdoors for twenty-seven years.’

For a moment, as their eyes met, Clotilde imagined that they were thinking the same thing. Perhaps Palma had simply set off again, as she had on 23 August 1989, to the place she had never reached, in the same direction, towards the same house, to find the man who lived there.

Natale Angeli.

After all, he still lived in Punta Rossa.

‘Come on,’ Cassanu said, ‘let’s get back to Arcanu.’

They walked back in silence, past the hanging tree, the Federate Rock, respecting a moment of silence that Cassanu probably calculated would give her time to admit the inadmissible, to believe the unimaginable. Images paraded through Clotilde’s head. Her mother imprisoned, the friendship that grew little by little between her and Orsu, the silent boy assigned the task of delivering her food. The puppy that was born, and which she had named. Scraps of conversations that she must have caught, a few words exchanged with Lisabetta, perhaps, and after all those years of life in her dark room, lit only by Betelgeuse on certain evenings, she suddenly learned that her daughter was coming back to Corsica; she used Orsu as her messenger, she entrusted him with some scribbled words, enough to give her daughter proof that she was alive, then told him to lay a breakfast table identical to the one from twenty-seven years ago, then to lead her, at midnight, to her prison. To see her, just to see her, not to put her in any danger.

What danger?

What secret was her mother hiding?

Her mother would never have slit Pacha’s throat. She would never have run away just as she was about to be found. She would never have touched the steering of that car. She could never have put the lives of her children in danger, or killed them, even by accident. Only one piece of information counted among all the others, each crazier than the last, that had been thrown at her today.

Her mother was alive!

Campa sempre.

Now it was Clotilde’s turn to gamble. It was her job.

To prove her mother’s innocence.

Cassanu slowed down, perhaps because the path was sloping gently towards Arcanu, or because he had eased his conscience and was now contemplating the figatellu that awaited him.