She rose, stumbling, and he put his hand round her neck, his thumb painfully caressing her windpipe.

‘I’ll meet you down there, say two o’clock tonight. I should be through by then. If I’m not there, wait for me.’

He was gone. She heard a car manoeuvring in the courtyard, then driving off. By the noise of the engine she knew that he had driven away in her car. He would take it later for good, she was sure. Nothing would induce him to abandon that particular piece of booty.

Florence was in the farmyard, watching him depart.

They went out together, cautiously, not knowing what to expect. Under the trees the evening light lay almost horizontal, the shadows striping the track like corduroy. With a superstitious fear that it might not come to pass, she said nothing to Florence of the news she had just received, even when they passed the entrance to the field where the Germans parked their vehicles. She could see that the guards were busy piling boxes outside the storerooms that they had used as their quarters.

Florence remarked, ‘They’re up to something. I can tell.’

The road climbed steeply and on the crest Ariane saw a line of light from the setting sun touching a low branch, its end leaf already tinged with gold, flaring like the match in the major’s fingers. The next instant they saw below them one of the German cars half off the road, its door open, its windscreen shattered. For a sudden, bewildered moment she thought that it had just happened. He’d just been killed; they would find his body slouched beside his driver’s. Then she realised that this was the wrong car and it was facing the wrong way, up the hill, towards Bonnemort. This was the result of the firefight that they had heard earlier.

She began to run down the hill, but before she reached the car Florence’s cry halted her. The man she had found was dead. He wasn’t a local. They didn’t know his name, didn’t even recognise him, but they knew at once that he was French. Not until they reached the car and discovered Philippe Boysse handcuffed to the wheel did the dread turn into reality: it was Group Rainbow that had been involved.

In the failing light they ran, bowed, through the bracken, frantically searching for the living. The next body they found was that of the garage mechanic from Montfefoul, a stout man in his fifties who had been picked up by the police at the same time as Henri a year earlier, and released soon afterwards. He had been shot through the head and the blood that had soaked from his eye socket had already darkened, the flies settling on his face. Florence was crying, quietly. Ariane could hear her saying over and over again, ‘Mother Mary, not Claude; Mother Mary, not Claude.’ A string of mucus swung from her nostrils, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. When they came upon their fourth corpse, the extent of the tragedy struck home to them. They assembled the dead, carrying the bodies between them, laying them in a line on the verge. At one point Florence said, ‘We need help. Well have to get help.’