‘I have no doubt,’ Maria-Chjara went on. ‘I will never forget those eyes that followed me and Nicolas on the day of the accident, at Oscelluccia beach in the early evening, when everyone had left except him. Then that same look the day after the tragedy, resting only on me. Today I understood. It was … it was because he wanted to kill us … Because he had killed Nicolas.’

‘Straight ahead, four hundred and fifty metres, go on … You can speed up now.’

‘Who, Maria? Whose eyes?’

Clotilde heard laughter on the telephone. The forced laughter of an actress. Maria-Chjara was also ridding herself of all the years she had spent carrying a vague sense of guilt.

She had made someone jealous, jealous enough to turn him into a murderer.

‘You might remember him too, Clotilde, you must remember him. His eyes. Even if more often than not you only saw one of them.’

63

23 August 2016, 8.52 p.m.

The tight bends were coming almost in slow motion now. The Fuego scrupulously stuck to the speed limit, its driver felt the need neither to accelerate nor to slow down, he had programmed the Satnav and he knew that as long as he didn’t exceed the limit, if he followed to the letter the instructions of the robotic voice that was guiding him, the Fuego would reach the first bend at Petra Coda at exactly 9.02 p.m.

In nine minutes, it would all be over.

A little sooner than predicted, as far as he was concerned.

His doctor had given him something closer to nine months.

~

The Passat was approaching the D81. The road was straighter now, a little further from the coast, and Clotilde managed to shift into fifth gear, getting close to a hundred kilometres an hour for a few hundred metres, before she had to slow down again.

She had wedged the mobile phone between her thighs.

‘It’s Hermann!’ Clotilde shouted. ‘That bastard the Cyclops!’

Cassanu turned towards her.

‘Hermann Schreiber?’

Clotilde didn’t take her eyes off the road.

‘Yes, he’s the one who killed them. And he’ll do it all over again in less than ten minutes if we don’t get there in time. He’s kidnapped Valou and Maman.’

‘Impossible.’

8.53 p.m.

‘Oh, no, Papé, it’s not impossible at all. I was talking to that bastard Hermann Schreiber on the phone the other day and …’

Her grandfather rested a hand on her thigh.

‘That’s impossible, Clo, I can assure you. You couldn’t have talked to the German.’ He look a deep breath. ‘Hermann Schreiber died in 1991, eighteen months after your parents’ accident. When he was less than twenty years old.’

~

8.54 p.m.

The Fuego passed by the rock of Capo Cavallo, six kilometres south of La Revellata.

Arrival time 9.02 p.m., said the display on the Satnav stuck to the windscreen.