Someone – a lunatic, a psychopath – was heading towards the Petra Coda ravine so that everything would happen exactly as it had twenty-seven years ago. On the twenty-third of August. Without her, but with another fifteen-year-old girl sitting in the back seat. Her daughter.

She thought again of the coastal road, ten days previously. The bunches of wild thyme. Franck and Valou who hadn’t cared, the cars brushing past them on the narrow road. Now she was sure of it – this mad person would be there at exactly 9.02 p.m. And send the Fuego flying over the parapet.

Go back into the house. Drive straight there. Alert everyone she could contact.

She needed people down there. Before he got there. Before she did.

In exactly eighteen minutes from now.

She barely had time.

The car started to move and she automatically looked in the rear-view mirror. And slammed on the brakes.

Cassanu was standing behind her, white and wrinkled, his stick in the air, his hat pushed back, like a disoriented Gandalf. She had a sense that he had heard everything. Understood everything too.

‘Please move, Papé …’

‘I want to come with you.’

‘Get out of the way. You’ve caused enough trouble already.’

The tyres of the Passat sent the gravel flying. Cassanu barely had time to jump aside as the car reversed. A second later, it disappeared in a cloud of dust. Clotilde took one last glimpse in the mirror. Cassanu was still standing there, as if rooted to the spot, as if he were never going to move again, as if his only hope now was to return to nature, to become a tree, a pebble; to be nothing but a harmless object, as his wife Lisabetta had always been.

The road down to La Revellata, then another few kilometres further on, the corniche of Petra Coda, was just an endless sequence of tight bends. Clotilde cursed the long detour she was going to have to take along the tarmacked road to get away from Arcanu and back down to the main road by the campsite, when as the crow flies, by the path, the distance was only a few hundred metres.

8.46 p.m.

She accelerated along the very short length of straight road then braked too hard as she took the bend.

‘Shit!’ she exclaimed, her eyes fogged with tears. ‘Calm down, calm down. You’ll go faster if you stay calm.’