‘I didn’t expect him to,’ Sabine said.

‘So what shall we do?’

‘Nothing. There’s nothing to be done.’ Her voice was resigned. The defiance of the old Sabine had disappeared.

‘What will you do? He might …’

‘You heard what my father said. I’ll go back to Paris with you. When the war’s over you’ll go off to live with your parents and I’ll have to stay with them.’

They had worked on the puzzle for some time in silence.

‘Is that so bad?’ Suzie asked eventually. ‘I mean Madame Ariane … You were wrong about her. Isn’t that all over now?’

‘I don’t have any choice. I’d rather stay here with the aunts, but they don’t want me.’ Self-pity crept into Sabine’s voice.

Suzie said nothing more, but the problem remained with her. Could you just leave what had happened to Sabine like that? Walk away from it? The major had met a just end, terrible but satisfying. She had stood with the aunts and Micheline and Florence in the courtyard looking at his naked corpse and had been filled with awe. He had terrorised them all and now had come to this.

She lay awake that night, watching the moonlight on the wall, wondering whether Madame Ariane would be the person to confide in, and then put the idea aside. She had not been able to save herself or them last summer. And the problem was how to tell. She and Sabine understood one another. When the subject did not have to be expressed, it was possible to talk. But to begin at the beginning, to describe and explain, was out of the question.

She had hardly used a bicycle since she left Bonnemort in September and her legs ached from the effort of pedalling. It seemed much longer than six months since she had last ridden along this road to Lepech to go to mass. She didn’t go to mass any more in Paris and she missed it, in some odd way. Madame Ariane had found a religious study class at the synagogue and insisted that she attend, even though she had protested that Maman and Papa had never made her go. She reached the climb to the village and halfway up she was forced to dismount. She did not know what she was going to do or say. She simply knew that if she confronted him, something would happen, or an idea would come to her.

As she had hoped, she had timed her arrival so that the school was emptying as she arrived in the square. She propped her bicycle against the outer wall of the playground and waited until the last pair of children had dawdled out into the street. She did not know her way around the building, nor whether the schoolmaster would still be there, so she wandered from the entrance hall along the corridor and peered into the classroom. The board on its easel was wiped clean, the chalks lined up in their tray. All the seats were raised, the desk tops closed and bare. Walking down the aisle between the double desks, she looked out of the windows set so high that only the tops of the trees and the sky, darkening now, were visible. She heard footsteps and stood waiting for the door to open.