Clotilde focused once more and pushed open the door, passed through two rooms that were as tiny as they were cluttered, a musty kitchen that smelled of grilled figatelli sausage and a sitting room that was occupied almost entirely by a convertible bed so battered that it looked as if it couldn’t be folded back into a sofa. Torn curtains floated over the door to the garden at the end of the room. Clotilde parted them tentatively, the way you might touch a cobweb spun on a condemned piece of furniture.

‘Come on in, Clotilde.’

Clotilde lowered her eyes towards a voice that seemed to be emerging from a manhole.

The garden, even smaller than the room she had just left, was reduced to not much more than a stretch of concrete, surrounded on three sides by a fence, and reached by three steps. Cut into the cement was a hole around a metre in diameter, the size of a well. And soaking in that well was Cesareu. All that could be seen of him was his bull-like shoulders, his thick neck and his head in a swimming cap bearing the words Tour de Corse 97.

His swimming pool?

More like a hippopotamus stuck in a dried-up swamphole.

‘Come on over. Pull up a chair, Clotilde. I’m not coming out of my waterhole before that bloody sun has gone down behind the garden walls.’

She sat down on a plastic chair.

‘I’m like a big whale,’ the policeman continued. ‘A beached whale. As soon as the temperature gets above twenty-five degrees, I need to be in the water. And to move as little as possible, or else I’ll die!’

Clotilde looked at him in disbelief. Cesareu ran his finger around the concrete rim.

‘Made to measure, my love … Dug as a precise match for my waist size. Oh yes, pretty one, Sergeant Garcia has put on some weight since the last time you saw him.’

She merely smiled. Yes, she remembered. Of course, everyone around here had always called Cesareu Garcia ‘Sergeant’, no one had ever called him by his real rank. Was it Captain? Lieutenant? Deputy?

‘I’m glad you came.’

‘I don’t know …’

‘Nor do I, I suppose.’

Good start. Cesareu went quiet; he seemed to be gently going to sleep in his bath. Unless it was an old sea-elephant’s trick. Letting her come to him so that he didn’t have to break through the ice.

If that was what he was waiting for …

‘How is your daughter, Cesareu? It would be strange to see her again. In my mind, Aurélia is still seventeen, but she must be over forty now? She’s two years older than me.’

‘She’s fine, Clotilde. Fine. She’s married, you know. Has been for years.’

‘Married?’

Who would have agreed to share their life with such a killjoy?

And for years? Poor man!

‘Any children?’

The beached whale poured water over his red face.