I’ll stop there for today. I think you know enough about Papa now. I’m wondering whether to join the others at the beach or pick up a book. A book’s good. It ages you, reading a book, I think.

Anywhere … on the beach, on a bench, outside a tent.

It intrigues people.

With only an open book on a towel, you pass from the status of little-idiot-on-her-own-who-has-no-friends-and-is-getting-bored to that of little-rebel-who’s-comfortable-in-her-own-bubble-and-couldn’t-give-a-stuff-about-anyone-else.

You just have to find the right book.

I need to find a cult book, the way I’ve done with my two films, Beetlejuice and The Big Blue. The kind of book you reread a thousand times and recite to the boys you meet to find out if they’re the right one, if they have the same taste.

I’ve packed three novels in my bag.

Three crazy books, apparently.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Dangerous Liaisons

The Never-Ending Story

OK, I know what you’re going to say, all three have already come out in the cinema. It’s true, I admit, I brought them along with me because I liked the films … and once I’ve read them, I’ll still be able to tell people I saw the film AFTERWARDS and was INCREDIBLY DISAPPOINTED by the adaptation. Clever girl, eh?

Now, which of the three shall I read first?

Right, I’ll go to the beach with Dangerous Liaisons under my arm.

Perfect!

Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. They’re irresistible, John Malkovich behaving badly, and little Keanu Reeves …

See you very soon, my reader in the next world.

*

*     *

With his index finger, he wipes away the tear that has welled up in the corner of his eye, before closing the diary.

Even years on, he still couldn’t read that name without being overwhelmed.

That name that lingered around the diary like a ghost. An inoffensive ghost.

That’s what they’d all thought.

8

13 August 2016, 2 p.m.

‘It’s her handwriting!’

Clotilde waited for a response.

Any response.

Nothing.

Franck’s lips were busy sucking on the plastic bottle of Orezza, one litre, about as much liquid as he had just perspired through the pores of his skin. In the end he settled for emptying only three quarters of it, and poured the rest of the mineral water over his bare torso.

Franck had run to the Sémaphore de Cavallo, nine kilometres there and back. Not bad going, especially in thirty-degree heat. He took a moment to hang up his sweat-drenched T-shirt.

‘How can you be sure, Clo?’

‘I just know, that’s all.’

Clotilde was leaning against the twisted trunk of the olive tree. She was still holding the envelope, her eyes fastened on her name.

Clotilde Idrissi.

Bungalow C29, Euproctes campsite.