She didn’t want to talk to Franck about the childhood postcards sent to her by her mother which she sometimes reread; the folders of signed and annotated correspondence that she had kept since school; the old photographs with words written on the back. Those phantoms that left only scratches. She merely murmured between her teeth:

‘My whole life is a dark room. One big … dark … room …’

Franck came and stood in front of her, his chest dripping. The sun shone through his fine fair hair. Everything about Franck was the opposite of night, of darkness, of shadow. Some years ago, that was what she had liked best about him. That he took her towards the light.

He pulled up a plastic chair and sat down facing her, his eyes fixed on hers.

‘OK, Clo. OK … You’ve told me, I haven’t forgotten. You were a fan of that actress when you were fifteen, you dressed like her, like a Gothic hedgehog, you behaved like the worst kind of ungrateful child towards your parents. You made me watch that film, Beetlejuice, when we met, do you remember? You paused the film when we came to that part where the teenage girl says, “My whole life is a dark room”, and you even smiled at me and said that the two of us would repaint it in all the colours of the rainbow.’

Franck remembered that?

‘I think your Winona Ryder must have stayed like that, a frozen statue on the screen, for almost two hours, watching us make love on the sofa.’

So he did remember …

‘Clo, whoever sent you this letter is playing a terrible joke on you.’

A joke? Had Franck really said ‘a joke’?

Clotilde reread the words that troubled her the most.

Tomorrow, when you visit Arcanu Farm to see Cassanu and Lisabetta, please go and stand for a few minutes beneath the holm oak, before night falls, so that I can see you.

I will recognise you, I hope.

I would like your daughter to be there too.

I ask nothing else of you. Nothing at all.

The visit to her paternal grandparents was scheduled for the following evening. Franck was still trying to explain something completely unexplainable.

‘Yes, Clo. Someone’s playing a awful joke on you. I have no idea who it is, or why they’re doing it, but …’

‘But what?’

This time Franck rested a hand on Clotilde’s knee before looking into her eyes again. The accomplice had disappeared, and now once again it was the preacher who was talking, the giver of lessons with his rosary of morals and his unanswerable arguments. A patient teacher faced with a pupil of limited intelligence. She couldn’t bear his smugness any longer.

‘OK, Clo, let me put it another way. On the evening of the accident, 23 August 1989, you are absolutely sure that all four of you were in the car; you, your father, your mother and Nicolas.’

‘Yes, of course.’