At first she thought it was slowing down. She was seized for a moment by a flicker of hope that went out as quickly as a match in a gale. The Fuego suddenly accelerated again, along the long straight line that finished with the deadly bend above Petra Coda.

Clotilde did the same, barely braking now. There were only four bends to take and she clung to the hope that she could still make it, that she could confront the red car, cut it off, crash into it, catapulting her own car into the ravine that she had survived long ago. It wouldn’t matter, if the crash saved her mother. Her daughter.

The Fuego was continually gaining speed like a rocket on a ramp.

The parapet had been raised, Clotilde remembered, she had noticed that when they left the bunches of wild thyme by the roadside. The wooden fence had been replaced by a small stone wall half a metre high. A vehicle, even going at speed, would bounce off the parapet, go into a spin, it might even flip, or carry on along the road, bouncing between the wall and the mountain like a mad ball in a gulley, but without toppling over the edge.

Two last bends, barely three hundred metres.

Too late.

In a second the Fuego would crash at full speed into the wall that separated it from a twenty-metre drop, bristling with thousands of rocks, red with blood, and anxious to quench a twenty-seven-year thirst.

Clotilde closed her eyes.

The Fuego was still there, behind her eyelids. In the sky, her father took a hand that she had thought was her mother’s, Nicolas chose to smile, to die smiling.

Cassanu cried out, gripped the wheel of the Passat and wrenched it to the left. The car bumped against the slope, beheading some branches of giant fennel that smashed in drops of gold against the windscreen, but it didn’t stop, it barely slowed down.

9.02 p.m.

The Passat was jumping about too much, still going at full speed, as the tyres struck the hollows and pebbles of the hillside. Despite herself, Clotilde opened her eyes.

She saw the Fuego deviate slightly from its trajectory, as if to avoid crashing straight into the stone wall above the precipice. For a moment, she thought the vehicle was merely going to skid along the wall, scraping against the stone, to lose a wing, or a door, but then slow down, brake, stop.

But no. She hadn’t understood. Jakob Schreiber must have photographed that turning a hundred times, studying it, taking a survey for his final moment.

The German didn’t crash against the parapet as her father once had; he threw the Fuego at an area just beside it, wooden logs that overlooked not the rocky slope, but an even steeper inlet.

The tree-trunks exploded. For one unreal moment the Fuego hung weightless in the sky.

Clotilde knew that her mother was inside.