She stepped towards the viewing platform above the rocks of Punta Rossa, taking care not to be spotted by the few tourists standing by the lighthouse. She had told Franck she was going to see the police in Calvi, to ask Captain Cadenat if he had any news about her wallet. And it was only half a lie, after all, since a policeman’s daughter lived here, at least when she wasn’t reporting for duty at the Balagne Medical Emergency Unit. Aurélia Garcia had become a nurse at the Unit’s hospital complex in Calvi, she started early and wouldn’t be home before midday.

Natale had offered her a coffee. Clotilde had accepted.

Natale was taking his time.

It would take some time to break the ice.

Clotilde let the wind ruffle her hair. She was fine out here, on the terrace. She had no desire to go back inside the villa. Normally, she thought, houses are a bit ordinary on the outside, boxes on standardised plots, almost identical, even in the most affluent areas. But hidden behind the boring façades were naked intimacies, rooms in which every trinket on every surface, every frame hung on every wall, every book on every shelf revealed an identity. A person with a particular taste, a soul.

The very opposite of Punta Rossa.

The strange chalet set down on the red rocks, constructed entirely of wood and glass, had been built by Natale, plank by plank, window after window, when he was barely twenty years old; it could only have been inhabited by some exceptional individual, at least in the eyes of the hikers who spotted the building at the top of the customs path. Every detail had been conceived with the greatest originality, from the shells built into the pillars to the dolphins sculpted in the beams. The Punta Rossa villa had been photographed, googled and facebooked thousands of times, as Clotilde had discovered through all those years of tapping its name into a search engine and dreaming, fantasising about the architectural marvel … and the person who built it. And yet, which hiker could have imagined that the house contained the most banal, the most kitsch interior decoration? Above IKEA cubes arranged in a wide variety of shapes – bookcases, television table, side table, stools, coffee table – a few posters attempted to bring some colour to the lacquered whiteness of the furniture: Klimt kisses, Renoir piano lessons, Monet water-lilies.

‘Your coffee, Clotilde.’

Natale had told her he was in a bit of a hurry. He started work at eleven o’clock. He was in charge of the fish counter at the Super U supermarket in Lumio.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Clotilde.’

‘Like what?’

‘As if I’ve disappointed you. With all this. With the person I am.’

‘Why? Why would I be disappointed?’

‘Don’t make it worse.’