He undid his seatbelt, opened the glove compartment, took out a plastic bag and turned round. Valentine was in the back seat, hands bound, body covered with blood, mouth gagged with a flesh-coloured foam bandage, and eyes rolling furiously as she struggled to contain her panic.

‘I didn’t have time to gift-wrap it, but you can open it, Valentine.’

Clumsily, with her bound hands, the girl pulled from the plastic bag a washed-out notebook with warped and yellowed pages.

‘Youth before beauty? Don’t you agree, Palma? Besides, you’re already familiar with the contents of this diary, aren’t you?’

Palma Idrissi didn’t answer.

‘You can move your wrists, Valentine. Your eyes too. I’m sure you’re going to love this book. We all dream of that, don’t we? Being able to see inside our mother’s mind.’

Your mother when she was your age, he added to himself.

Valentine hesitated, her fingers gripped the notebook, but it was clear that as soon as she lowered her eyes, as soon as she recognised her mother’s handwriting on the cover, she wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to open it. From the first lines she read, she would know that the notebook was Clotilde’s, even though it had been written years before she was born.

After all, she too had the right to know.

To know who her mother was. To know who her grandmother was.

Before plunging.

Before plummeting.

Like everything else – like this car, like this notebook.

Like its three passengers.

60

23 August 2016, 8 p.m.

‘Franck? Franck? Are you still there?’

Clotilde raised her voice. Everything sounded far away, as if her husband were still out on the waves on a sailing boat, answering his phone as he emerged from a diving session; unless it was here, in Arcanu, in the middle of the maquis, that the network coverage was patchy.

‘Franck! No one sent a message to Valou. Not me, Papé, or Mamy. None of us asked her to come up to Arcanu.’

‘Good God!’

‘What does this mean, Franck? Is Valou not with you then?’

‘I went to have a shower, it was barely fifteen minutes. Valentine was upset about the murder of the campsite manager. She wanted to talk to Anika, tell her that she liked Spinello, present her condolences, and so on … She was quite unsettled. By the time I came back she had disappeared. Anika told me about the message so I called you.’

The bench, the oak, the yard and the whole farm seemed to spin. The island drifted from its moorings. The whole mountain slid into the Mediterranean.

‘How long ago was this? Could she be on her way up? Somewhere on the path? Dawdling?’

Her husband’s voice grew quieter. With the constant buffeting of the wind, she could hardly hear him. She had to press the phone to her ear.

‘She isn’t on the path, Clotilde.’

‘How do you know?’