‘How did you hear this?’ Theo asked. ‘Did you listen at the keyhole?’

Suzie looked at him witheringly, to make him realise that he had misjudged their level of skill as spies. ‘Several times we hid in the gallery when they had dinner in the salon bleu. Madame Ariane never ate, but the major used to make her cut up his food. He had a false hand, you know. I think he could have probably cut up his own food; he just pretended he couldn’t, to make Madame Ariane do it for him. He was like that. He liked to feel he had power over people. We once heard him tell how he denounced a Jew whom he recognised. That was in Germany, not France.’

‘We saw them …’

Suzie thought Sabine was going to say, ‘We saw them … fuck’, but at the last moment awe of her father prevented her.

‘… together.’ She was twisting a piece of the jigsaw to force it into position. ‘In the winepress.’ She wrenched it out and tried a new place for it.

‘We discovered a way into the winepress by accident,’ Suzie explained. ‘It’s a hole in the ground all covered by trees and brambles. We climbed down it and found ourselves in the loft in the winepress. From there you could see everything and no one knew you were there.’

The children concentrated on their jigsaw in silence, as if there was nothing more to be said on the subject.

Theo watched them. This was the moment he had searched and waited for. He was being offered proof, the evidence of eyewitnesses, of what had happened between his wife and the German. He had only to ask and he would be given it. Even as he recognised the opportunity, he knew he was going to turn away from it. He imagined what Sabine meant when she said ‘together’, and rejected the evidence.

‘Were you watching the night the major was killed?’ he asked.

Both children were scrabbling among the pieces, searching, not finding.

‘Suzie, have you seen a piece with a cross-bar going like this?’

‘No.’

They continued to seek for the elusive piece. ‘But we’re building it up quite well on that side,’ Suzie added encouragingly.

They were not going to answer any more questions, Theo realised. They looked so vulnerable, Sabine with her jaggedly cropped hair and bruised face, Suzie with her evasively hesitant expression, locked in a world of childish play. They probably knew more than anyone else about what had happened, but did not know that they knew. The information was coiled into their games and fantasies in a form unusable and unrecognisable to him.

‘Henri should have asked us to help him,’ Suzie remarked a few minutes later. ‘We would have been able to tell him a lot of things.’

‘He wanted to protect you. Too much knowledge was dangerous.’ The children did not respond. It was as if he had not spoken.

‘If Madame Ariane saw the major and she was working for the Resistance …’ Although she did not lift her head, Suzie seemed to address Sabine. Long pauses separated each of their utterances. Theo listened.