Two options, and as I’m writing this I can also glimpse a third possibility, even worse than the other two, which is that they involve me and Nicolas in their row. Papa getting really annoyed in turn, going on and on about the family, about getting in touch with our roots, about opening ourselves up to Corsican culture and raging against the bubblegum nonsense on the radio, and singing that chorus he likes so much, turning up the sound of a guitar and the voices of A Filetta.

This may seem like a pointless story, almost comical in its obsession.

But do not laugh, my future reader.

We Idrissis are a stubborn bunch.

The fate of our family will be decided on the evening of the twenty-third of August … and all for something so stupid.

* * *

Something so stupid, he said again.

Four people dead.

Three men and a woman.

Over something stupid.

14

14 August 2016, 7 p.m.

Franck drove slowly. Not because he was afraid of getting lost, given that there was only one road that climbed through the mountains towards the Arcanu farm, but because with each new bend the chasm gnawing at the side of the tarmac became a little deeper.

Clotilde, sitting in the passenger seat, head against the glass, saw neither asphalt nor barrier, just the void. The car door was like a window on to nothingness, a cabin floating in the sky, connected from one peak to the next by an invisible cable. A cable that could break at any moment.

Arcanu Farm was even further up. It could be reached directly by a path, in less than five hundred metres, but the road twisted and turned for almost three kilometres.

‘Keep going,’ Clotilde whispered to Franck. ‘You can’t miss it, it’s the only house.’

Franck drove the car straight on, along the narrow asphalted road, passing the only signpost: Casa di Stella, 800 metres. The wooden sign stood in the middle of a small unpaved car park with several hiking paths leading off it. Valentine had lowered the back window: the car was filled with the scent of pine and the changing smells of the maquis. Thyme, rosemary, wild mint.

Images flooded into Clotilde’s mind, each new bend in the road revealing a new landscape, and yet each one was so familiar: a huge Corsican pine standing almost the height of a man above the other trees, the ruins of an old chestnut mill overlooking a pebbly riverbed, a solitary donkey grazing the grass of an unfenced meadow. Nothing had changed here in thirty years, as if the inhabitants had made a special effort to keep things as they always were. Or had abandoned the place once and for all.

Apart from the Idrissi family.