Theo walked to the window to conceal his rage that anyone should do this to a child. He stood looking at the view of the garden that rose steeply behind the house. The box trees, unkempt, marching up the hill in pairs, were rimed with frost so that they looked like balls of stone. He glanced back at his daughter and felt a stirring of guilt for having abandoned her for five years, for longer, ever since her mother died. Her brown eyes met his gaze crookedly through her swollen lids, fully comprehending. He saw something accusingly resentful and despairing in their expression.

What he required was facts, precise accounts of actions and deeds. For that he would go this morning to the doctor, the police, to men who would be able to answer his questions.

When he returned from his morning’s enquiries and joined his family for lunch, no one asked what he had discovered. The aunts could only deal with the inexplicable by treating it as if it were normal. Sabine was ill, had had an accident, must be encouraged and helped to get better. The conversation was about the farm, about food supplies, the urgent subjects of the day.

The morning had been overcast, cold seeping rain falling relentlessly. Now it had stopped and he and Ariane went into the garden together. The clouds had lifted so that the view over the ranges of hills had re-emerged in layers of grey, paler in the distance, darker nearby, like a Chinese painting. The garden dripped. In answer to her queries, he admitted that he had learned nothing that she had not encapsulated for him in one sentence last night. The doctor had given him an account of Sabine’s injuries: a broken humerus, multiple lacerations, concussion, inflicted by a club.

‘We used to see such wounds on victims of the Milice, or the Gestapo. They used a special cosh, but you could get the same result with a heavy stick of some kind,’ the doctor had told him.

‘Does she speak?’ Theo asked before he left. ‘Can she understand? She hasn’t said a word to me yet.’

‘That’s something separate from the physical injuries. There is no reason why she should not speak, although she has not spoken to me or to the police, I understand. She is traumatised, or afraid. You may find that the psychological recovery needs more time than the physical one.’

Ariane walked with him along the terrace. He took her hand and held it on his arm. She stopped to examine the clumps of grape hyacinths under the bay tree. Facts had got him nowhere.

‘And you? Did you learn anything?’

‘A lot,’ she said, ‘but not much in answer to your questions. Micheline, Florence, the aunts, all told me things separately, things they can’t bear to talk about openly. Sabine has lost an enormous amount of weight since I last saw her in September. Florence admits that she eats almost nothing. I can’t understand it. She always had a very healthy appetite before, much more than Suzie. And she used to long for sweet things.’