We didn’t know that such beauty burns anyone who approaches it, that such beauty lies, that it escapes anyone who wants to touch it.

We hadn’t taught Hermann. That you could damn yourself by coveting it.

Hermann was too pure, too different.

They couldn’t bear it.

They killed him.

I am going to join Anke. Join Hermann.

On 23 August, at 9.02 p.m.

In a red Fuego.

At Petra Coda, on the Revellata Peninsula.

A man, a woman, a fifteen-year-old girl.

Three corpses.

And all will be concluded.

In beauty.

64

23 August 2016, 9.01 p.m.

Just over a minute.

Her eyes filled with tears, Clotilde continued to accelerate.

She had thrown her mobile on to the dashboard, it was only making her lose precious seconds. The Revellata Peninsula stretched in front of them, but she had to drive around the edge of it, climb to the middle and then back down again, about fifty metres of descent, twenty short bends.

She wouldn’t make it.

Unless Jakob Schreiber was late. Unless his watch, the clock in his car, his telephone weren’t all synchronised to the same universal clock, even a few seconds might be enough.

On the passenger seat, Papé Cassanu said nothing.

The landscape closed in on them for the duration of a few turnings that snaked along the foot of the peninsula, with the campsite to the south and the lighthouse to the north. Clotilde took them at speed, driving in the middle of the road, not worrying that a car might suddenly appear in front of her. The white line was now nothing more than a ribbon, preventing the Passat from taking off, like an adhesive strip to which the car was glued.

The car now climbed again, sending up a cloud of dust as they passed some vehicles parked in the car park. Tourists taking pictures of the view cursed the girl racer as she sped by without noticing them. The road was clear for almost a kilometre. After the ten bends leading down the hill they could make out the corniche of Petra Coda.

Clotilde spotted him.

She felt Cassanu’s wrinkled hand gripping his seatbelt as she recklessly pressed down on the accelerator.

The red Fuego had only just appeared a kilometre further down, emerging from the Port’Agro cove, driving smoothly towards them. It was now only a few hundred metres away from Petra Coda.

Taking the first turning in fourth, at over eighty kilometres per hour, Clotilde felt as if the two wheels on the left were about to lift off, as if the Passat was going to flip over; she counter-steered at the last minute, too much, losing more seconds, but less than if she’d slowed down. Her foot came down again on the pedal. She had to concentrate on the road, not stare at the red dot coming towards them in the distance.

It was impossible, however. Her daughter and her mother were inside that dot.