She opened the drawers, ran her hand along the highest shelves, peered under the bed, the chairs and the various pieces of furniture.

Nothing.

Nothing in the roofbox, nothing in the glove compartment.

Franck and Valou were silent now.

Clotilde went back to the safe.

‘I put them in this stupid impregnable tin can. Someone must have taken them.’

‘Listen, Clo, there’s a key, a code, and there’s nobody here but us …’

‘I know! I know! I KNOW!’

~

Clotilde didn’t like Cervone Spinello’s smile. She had never liked it. She remembered hating Cervone when he was a child, an adolescent, always trying to take charge of their gang on the grounds that his father owned the campsite.

Liar. Boastful. Calculating.

A few years later, with the power he had accrued, eighty shaded hectares with a sea view, he became something else:

Obsequious. Pretentious. Lecherous.

Quite the opposite of Basile, his father.

‘I’m so sorry, Clotilde,’ Cervone said defensively. ‘I haven’t had time to come and visit you. We’ll have to find a moment to …’

She interrupted his suggestion of an aperitif, tearful tributes to his parents and twenty-seven-year-old reminiscences, explaining that her wallet had disappeared, and as far as she was concerned, that could only be explained by a theft.

Cervone frowned with his large black eyebrows.

Annoyed. Already …

He picked up a bunch of keys and, leaving the reception, hailed a large man who was busy watering a flower bed.

‘Orsu, come with me.’

Cervone’s order was accompanied by a hand gesture, a finger pointed towards the alley, as if marking his authority over an obedient animal. The gesture of a little Napoleon. The other man didn’t hesitate, and went to follow him. Clotilde took a step back when he turned around.

Orsu was over one metre ninety tall. A big unkempt beard and long thick curly hair covered his face, but not enough to hide the deformity that marked his entire left side: a staring eye, an atrophied, almost hollow cheek, sagging skin from chin to neck, a twisted shoulder, an arm that dangled from his body like an empty sleeve on to which someone had sewn a pink plastic glove, a stiff leg.

For some reason, Clotilde was more troubled than frightened. At first she took her reaction towards this giant to be a form of pity, perhaps an occupational hazard, but something else disturbed her, a feeling she couldn’t quite identify. As Orsu walked three metres ahead of them, Cervone whispered in Clotilde’s ear:

‘I don’t think you’ll remember him. Orsu was only three months old that terrible August. He’s had no luck since then. We’ve kept him, that’s how we do things here, we don’t abandon our three-legged goats. He takes care of pretty much everything at the Euproctes, and people call him Hagrid. He’s kind, not dangerous.’

Everything about Cervone’s statement disturbed Clotilde.