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moments Camille sees a new and utterly unfamiliar expression, one he saw on Armand’s face in the weeks before he died: the incredulous shock that things have come to this. Incomprehension. Injustice.
    Hardly has he recovered from the upset than the nurse comes to tell him visiting hours are over. She is self-effacing, but she waits for him to leave. She wears a name-tag that reads “ FLORENCE ”. She keeps her hands clasped behind her back, at once determined and respectful, her compassionate smile rendered utterly artificial by collagen or hyaluronic acid. Camille wants to stay until Anne can tell him everything, he is frantic to know what happened. But all he can do is wait. Leave. Anne needs to rest. Camille leaves.
    It will be twenty-four hours before he begins to understand.
    And twenty-four hours is much more time than a man like Camille might need to lay to waste the whole earth.
    Emerging from the hospital, Camille knows only those few details given him over the telephone and later, here, at the hospital. In fact, aside from broad strokes, no-one knows anything; it has so far been impossible to retrace the precise sequence of events. Camille’s only piece of evidence is Anne’s disfigured face, a harrowing image that merely serves to fuel the anger of a man inclined to strong emotions.
    By the time he has reached the exit, Camille is seething.
    He wants to know everything, to know it now, to know it before everyone else, he wants . . .
    Camille is not a vengeful man by nature, although, like anyone, there have been moments when he was tempted. But Philippe Buisson, the man who killed his first wife, is still very much alive, despite the fact that, given his contacts, it would have been a simple matter for Camille to have ordered a hit on him in prison.
    And this time, seeing the attack on Anne, he is not motivated by a desire for revenge. It is as though what has happened threatens his own life. He needs to act, to do something, because he cannot grasp the magnitude of this incident that has almost destroyed his relationship with Anne, the only thing since Irène’s death that has given it meaning.
    What to others might seem like pompous platitudes sound very different to someone who already feels responsible for the death of a loved one. Such things change a man.
    As he dashes down the steps of the hospital, he sees Anne’s face again, the yellow rings around her eyes, the livid bruising, the swollen flesh.
    He has just pictured her dead.
    He does not yet know how or why, but someone has tried to kill her.
    It is this sense of déjà vu that panics him. After Irène was murdered . . . The circumstances are completely different. Irène was personally targeted by her killer whereas Anne simply ran into the wrong man at the wrong time, but in the moment, Camille is incapable of untangling his emotions.
    But he is also incapable of letting things take their course without doing something.
    Without trying to do something.
    In fact, though he does not realise it, he instinctively began to act from the moment he received the telephone call. Anne had “sustained injuries”, he was told by the woman from the Préfecture de Police, having been involved in an “altercation” during an armed robbery in the 8th arrondissement. “Altercation” is one of Camille’s favourite words. Everyone on the force loves it. Police officers are also fond of “perpetrator” and “stipulate”, but “altercation” is particularly practical since in four syllables it covers everything from a heated argument to a vicious beating, leaving the other party to infer whatever they please.
    “What kind of ‘altercation’?”
    The officer did not know, she was probably reading from a report, Camille could not help but wonder whether she even understood what she was saying.
    “Armed robbery. Shots fired. Madame Forestier did not sustain gunshot wounds, but she was injured during an altercation. She has been taken to the nearest