‘It’s them, Maman! Orophin and Idril and Galdor and Tatië. Your dolphins!’

Clotilde was startled, and wondered for a moment how her daughter knew those names from her childhood, before she understood. Her notebook, of course, the notebook from the summer of ’89 that her daughter had read when she was bound and gagged in the Fuego.

‘I’m almost sure of it, Maman! It’s obvious. They’ve recognised the Aryon.’

Was her daughter, normally so serious, really capable of imagining something like that? Would the dolphins really recognise the noise of the engine of the same boat, twenty-seven years on?

‘A dolphin lives for over fifty years,’ Valentine insisted, ‘and they have an incredible memory, you remember, you told me, Maman. You once said they’re capable of recognising a partner more than twenty years later.’

Clotilde studied the horizon, but she couldn’t see any fins.

‘Too late,’ Valou said after a moment, ‘I can’t see them any more.’

Had her daughter, through the miracle of reading her notebook, learned how to bluff? Valou continued, as if she hadn’t put everything on the table. She lowered her eyes towards the rocks overlooking Oscelluccia beach.

‘Now that Cervone is dead, what will become of the Roc e Mare marina?’

‘I don’t know, Valou. It’ll probably stay like that for years.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Why is it a shame?’

Valentine turned towards her grandmother, then back towards the crypt, examining every name engraved on the marble, not only those of her uncle and her grandfather, but those of all her ancestors for the last three hundred years.

‘It’s a shame that my name isn’t Idrissi.’

A silence. This time it was Palma who filled it.

‘What would you do … with the name … Idrissi?’

Valentine stared at her. She seemed to be looking behind her grandmother’s wrinkled features, trying to find the seductive woman described in her mother’s notebook.

‘Were you an architect, Grandma?’

‘Yes.’

Silence again. Clotilde picked up the baton and repeated her mother’s question.

‘What good would it do you, Valou, to have the Idrissi name?’

Valou stared at the crypt again, then at the spot in the sea where she had claimed to see the dolphins, and then the Roc e Mare marina.

‘Not to let all of that go to ruin!’

Twenty-seven years later

‘Mamy, can we play in the swimming-pool?’

Mamy said yes, with a complicit smile at her grandchildren. She, not their mother, was still the one they went to if they wanted permission to do something. Their mother wouldn’t let them. Their mother always said no, about swimming and everything else.

Too cold, too hot, too wet, too dangerous.

Their mother was a bit of a bore.

‘Thanks, Mamy Clo!’