No, of course, Hermann didn’t intend to kill Maria and Nicolas. Nicolas was supposed to borrow his parents’ car that evening to go to the Camargue, that damned nightclub, with Aurélia, Cervone and himself; Nicolas had promised them all. But during that day, Hermann had followed them. And a few hours later, after they had parked at the campsite, he had heard Maria-Chjara agreeing to go with Nicolas, but without anyone else, all those idiots from the campsite … A trip for the two of them. Which would be cut short, Hermann had imagined as he lay down under the car. How could he have anticipated the change of plan? That it would be Paul Idrissi who found himself at the wheel, with his wife and children? That he would cause the deaths of an entire family? That he would find himself wearing the skin of a murderer, when he wasn’t even eighteen years old?

8.56 p.m.

Arrival time 9.02 p.m.

These days, Jakob Schreiber thought, you could plan your death to the minute.

Hermann had said nothing. The police had concluded that it was an accident.

But Hermann had never got over it. He was responsible for the deaths of three innocent people.

Hermann had spent a term being unable to set foot inside the Polytechnische Schule, cloistered away in his room, with his herbarium and his stars. It had taken almost thirty therapy sessions before Hermann confessed to them, before he told them everything – everything that Anke and he had already understood since that day in August 1989.

Hermann continued to see the therapist. He took up the violin again. He went back to collecting plants and observing the stars. Jakob had found a new college for him, less prestigious than the Polytechnische Schule, but a private school that specialised in marketing, where you could take year-long courses; he got him a job at the company, less to make him work than to keep him busy.

Hermann was better, Jakob believed, wanted to believe, tried to convince himself.

On 23 February 1991, exactly eighteen months after the accident at Petra Coda, Hermann got too close to a vat of lye on the production line he was supervising. His body was devoured by the substance, like some horrific scene from a science-fiction film in which a body is reduced to a smoking broth before disappearing. Jakob wanted to believe that it was an accident, just an accident. But ten workers, in studio B3 of line 07 in the factory, had seen Hermann deliberately toppling the vat and pouring it over himself.