The screen showed a miniature, stylised version of the landscape opening up before them. An electric-blue sky, a khaki mountain, a café-au-lait sky.

A depiction that was both drab and gaudy, as ugly, Jakob Schreiber thought, as the reality was sublime. In front of him was the Revellata Peninsula, the lighthouse, the Calvi citadel, blushing in the setting sun, like a girl whose shyness made her all the more pretty. He slowed down a little to enjoy the view for a few seconds. So much for his precise adherence to the Satnav; he would catch up on lost time by accelerating after Punta di Cantatelli. The landscape would surely be the only thing in this world that he would miss.

The road turned towards the mountain again, past a dry patch of maquis and some thin cows. He speeded up. Basically, thinking about regrets over the next few minutes, before the great leap, was stupid. Even if Clotilde Idrissi hadn’t turned up at his bungalow five days ago, reopening old wounds that had barely closed over, this summer would have been his last. In any case, the oldest resident of the Euproctes campsite would always have preferred to bid farewell to the world here, in Corsica, rather than fade away slowly in the clinic back home in Germany. You might as well crash in a setting that looked like paradise, since no one could be sure that there was one after death.

Nine months maximum, his doctor had told him.

The first alert, the first tumour, had slipped in just above his liver eight years before. They had cleaned out his oesophagus the way you unblock a gutter with a high-pressure hose, but the acid rain had continued to fall – on his pancreas, his lungs, his stomach. The tumour had won. He even thought it would triumph sooner; he had always thought he wouldn’t survive retirement for more than five years, when the accountant from the company for which he worked had told him he’d be getting a bonus of 300 marks a month as soon as he left, for the fact that, throughout his whole career, he’d been exposed to hazardous products, solvents and pollutants. He had stuck with them for over fifteen years, he’d been an executive, he’d kept an eye on the production lines through the screen of a computer. Luckily for the company, the workers employed to handle the products and clean the vats were less expensive to the company, when they retired, than he was.