‘Only one person, the only one who had to know. Your grandfather, Clotilde. I gave a copy of the entire file to Cassanu Idrissi.’

She bit her lips until they bled.

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing, Clotilde. Nothing at all. He didn’t react. It was as if he’d known all along. That was what I thought at the time. That he’d known all along.’

The sergeant didn’t add anything else. He took an infinity to do up his dressing gown, observed the filthy surface of his pool, then slowly made his way over to the net resting against the fence. He turned to Clotilde one last time.

‘Do call in and see Aurélia, she’d be delighted.’

Go and see that bitch? The very idea!

‘She isn’t far away. You’ll remember the way. She lives at Punta Rossa, below the Revellata lighthouse.’

The words became a blur, caught in a whirlwind.

That bitch Aurélia.

Punta Rossa.

Revellata lighthouse.

Cesareu took off his cap and stared intently into Clotilde’s eyes.

‘I thought you’d be surprised, my lovely one. I was too. If they’d told me that twenty-seven years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it either. But yes, that’s where Aurélia lives, it’s where she’s been living all this time. You know what that means, my pretty, I don’t need to put it in writing.’ He gave Clotilde a moment to sort out the tangle of her memories. ‘Aurélia lives with Natale.’

Clotilde swayed above the concrete pool. She had fallen into that bottomless well for the second time in less than a few minutes. And that second time left her even more breathless than the first.

Was more painful.

Oh, so much more painful.

19

Wednesday, 16 August 1989, tenth day of the holidays
Fairy-blue sky

Once upon a time …

Once upon a time there was a little Calabrian princess.

Maria-Chjara Giordano.

This story starts like a fairy tale because Maria-Chjara is a real princess. She was born three years before me, the same year as my brother, in 1971, in the little village of Pianopoli, near Catanzano in Italy.

Her father runs the biggest broccoli business in Calabria, apparently that’s the speciality down there, very green broccoli. He’s already sixty years old, with sixty million lire in the bank when she was born; her father is handsome, a handsome old thing, as they say, which is to say that the only handsome things about him now are his brown eyes and his curly silver hair. Her mother is nineteen years younger than her husband and nineteen centimetres taller in heels; she’s a model for Ungaro and has acted in B-movies made at Cinecittà, none of which have ever been shown in France. I’ve been keeping an eye out, believe me.

Better watered than my Papa’s cauliflowers, Maria-Chjara grew quickly.