All eyes turned to Jack.

He was pale, He was rubbing his eyes and he seemed tired.

The girl answered in his place.

“He wasn’t really a historian,” she said.

“Just a minute,” said Jack, raising his hand.

He muttered something incomprehensible, then his voice became steadier.

“You’re going too fast,” he said. “You’re forgetting one very important thing: there’s no proof that Théo was guilty. Perhaps he was wrongly accused.”

“We can check,” said the reporter. “We’d just have to read the court records in The Examiner. We’d find out if there was a trial and whether Théo was found guilty.”

Jack looked at his watch. He spoke to the woman with blue-grey hair. “What time do you close?”

“Five o’clock,” she said.

“It’s twenty to,” he told the reporter. “Too late to start digging around today.”

He got to his feet and thanked everybody.

The reporter accompanied them to the door and walked a short distance outside. He had plenty of things to tell them. He said that every time he crossed Independence Square he just had to shut his eyes and he could see the wagons with the teams of oxen, people on foot or horseback, pack-laden mules, children running in the dust, and he could hear the shouting in the shops and taverns and the sound of hammers and anvils in the blacksmiths’, wheelwrights’, harnessmakers’ and saddlers’ shops.

Jack wasn’t listening at all, but the man went on to say that some years, immigrants came to Independence in such great numbers there wasn’t room for everyone and they had to camp outside the town; and then the glow of the campfires burning in the night would be visible from a distance of several kilometres.

THE NEXT MORNING, Jack refused to get up. More precisely, he got up, drank the orange juice La Grande Sauterelle had prepared for him, then pushed away his bowl of cornflakes and lay down again without saying a word.

“What’s wrong?” asked the girl.

He shook his head and, despite the humid heat, wrapped himself in his sleeping bag. After breakfast the girl left a note to say she was going for a walk in Independence Square.

When she returned just before noon, she saw through the window of the Volks that he was still in bed and decided to have lunch at a restaurant. She didn’t come back until six o’clock, but he still hadn’t got up. So then she gently wakened him. She took his temperature: it was normal.

“You don’t have a fever,” she said. “In fact it’s below normal.”

He gave her a wide-eyed, vacant stare.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No.”

“You haven’t eaten a thing since morning. You have to eat something.”

“Why?”

“To stay alive.”

He shrugged and curled up in his sleeping bag. About nine o’clock he got up to go to the bathroom and then, without a word, went back to bed for the night.

Next morning it was raining, and La Grande Sauterelle could-n’t get a word out of him. He stayed in bed and refused to eat. When she tried to talk to him, he turned his face to the plywood wall that held the medicine cabinet.