He loved music. He loved beauty. He learned how to sing, to play the violin, he painted seascapes, skies, pale with washed-out colours, in a studio run by a retired watercolourist. Hermann was an only son. He liked to make a world that was all his own, build a universe from treasures assembled at random; he hadn’t hung posters of tennis-players, singers or Formula 1 drivers on the walls of his room, but dozens of pages from a herbarium that he constantly enriched, month after month. At the age of ten, he’d had the idea to create a magnificent collection: a collection of stars, all the ones he could find, starfish, gilded Christmas-tree decorations, sheriff’s badges, stars photographed at night, in the depths of the forest, stars printed on flags, posters, and novels. Hermann had been a brilliant student, he had been accepted into the Polytechnische Schule in Munich, to study Applied Arts. Hermann was both an artist and a craftsman. He was interested in the way things worked, in physics and mechanics, but above all he was attracted by beauty, by the material existence of beauty, convinced that nature was the greatest creative genius the earth had ever known, and that it alone attained the ultimate harmony and perfection; that men should merely admire it, and draw inspiration and nourishment from it.

Hermann was a simple, straightforward creature.

Often alone. Shy, secretive, misunderstood, but a stranger to lies. Unaware of evil. It was the others who had taught him that. The ones his own age. Hermann didn’t understand their codes. Hermann was too fragile. Hermann wanted only to be like them, to be accepted for a summer. He didn’t know about their cruelty. Without all that, Hermann would never have sabotaged the steering of that car, the car that Maria-Chjara and Nicolas were going to get into. Hermann had never planned to kill them, he just wanted to take his revenge; he only wanted their attempt to run off together to fail, he wanted to make the car impossible to drive in the middle of the night so that they would end up on foot, and Nicolas would have to shed his arrogance and Maria wouldn’t give herself to him. He just wanted to frighten them, to teach them a lesson. He had never known a girl in the true sense. He didn’t want Nicolas’s hands to sully all that beauty, the grace, the perfection of that face, that body with which he was obsessed, the body of that little whore Maria-Chjara.

Jakob Schreiber stared at the rocks that tumbled into the Mediterranean, and slowed down once more.