She turned the wheel sharply as the Passat got too close to the edge, brushing for several metres against the stone parapet that separated them from the precipice.

‘I think … I think she was taken.’

The phone rang. The tyres squealed.

Natale?

Franck?

Clotilde picked up as the car headed straight towards the void.

‘Bend to the right,’ Cassanu said gently. ‘Two hundred metres, a hundred and twenty degrees.’

She turned hard. At last the old man might be useful to her. He knew every inch of this road by heart, a more effective co-pilot than the most experienced rally-driver on the Tour de Corse.

‘Clotilde? It’s Maria-Chjara!’

She was so surprised that she nearly drove the Passat straight into the stone wall in front of her. She just missed a little floral shrine, a Virgin with a cross and three plastic flowers; the memory of another car, another life that had been extinguished here one day, one night?

‘Bend to your left, a hundred and fifty metres, hairpin.’

‘Maria?’

‘I was thinking about our conversation again. Cervone Spinello’s lies. That story about the sabotaged steering column.’

‘Yes?’

‘Bend to the right, very tight, one hundred metres, one hundred and sixty degrees.’

‘Cervone didn’t really invent that story.’

Lightning flashed through Clotilde’s brain. Maria-Chjara was going back on her statement. Cervone, the ideal culprit, was first murdered then cleared. Lightning followed by a thunderclap. If Cervone had been cleared, did that mean her brother Nicolas was now the guilty one?’

‘You assured me that …’

‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked. Trying to remember every minute of that day, every word, every gesture …’

‘A slight chicane to the left, a hundred and fifty metres. Eighty degrees.’

‘Every gesture, Maria? So long after it all happened?’

‘Listen to me, Clotilde, listen. For all these years, I’ve been sure that the death of Nicolas and your parents was an accident. But if you need to look for a murderer, if someone did sabotage the car that your brother and I were supposed to borrow that evening, if someone wanted to kill us both, it couldn’t have been Cervone. He wasn’t the one who was dying of jealousy.’

‘Chicane to the left!’ Cassanu yelled.

Clotilde turned at the last moment without letting go of the telephone, the car clinging to the edge of the road, throwing up gravel and a rain of yellow sparks as it skidded through the sea of giant fennel that grew in the hollows by the roadside. Sweat pearled on her forehead.