Ariane, in every way the least probable killer, was the most likely suspect. She had been present at Bonnemort; she had motive and ability. Petignat had assumed that the major had been kidnapped somewhere on the road and his body returned to Bonnemort. It was more likely that he had been killed at Bonnemort and his body dragged to its final position in the courtyard. The actual killing place would have been obvious, but Petignat had made no effort to search the area to discover the scene of the murder. She had been given all the time she needed to clean it up. There was no doubt that a woman, or women, could have done the killing, once they had stunned their victim.

The image of Ariane and Florence in the farmyard, their concerted power in hoisting the sack into the barrow, came back to him. Of course, he thought, they were all in it, all the women, Micheline as well as Florence. He could even imagine the aunts covering up, perjuring themselves if necessary, to save Ariane. His conviction that she had killed the major had revolutionised his understanding of what had happened here. Vernhes had locked her into a relationship with the major; she had been trapped in a situation with no escape.

He stopped for a moment, and she halted too. The trees stretched in every direction, their lines and rows perfectly accurate, adapting themselves to the folds of the land. The symmetry of the plantations, the wide avenues between the trees, had always pleased him as a child, the imposition of human control on the wildness of the landscape. The spring ploughing beneath the trees had started and ahead he could see where Franco, the Spanish labourer, was turning the oxen at the end of a furrow.

‘What sort of person was he, the major?’ he asked.

‘In what way?’

‘What did he look like, what was he like, as a man?’

‘He was like … He was a Nazi. Physically, he was not a little runt like Hitler; he was one of the Aryans. Tall, well-built, athletic.’

Theo heard Petignat echoing and confirming her, ‘… a fine man.’

‘… but damaged. He’d lost a hand fighting in Russia and been wounded there as well. As for his psychology, it’s hard to know whether it was his war experiences that affected him, or whether he was always like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Cruel. He had a passion for power. When he arrived, Aunt Odette wanted to believe that he was like the German officers of the First World War. She thought that the French and German officer corps had the same ideals, came from the same backgrounds. She wanted to think that the major was just like you, only German. But he wasn’t. His family lost their estates in Poland in 1918, so he said. His father, who had been wounded in the trenches and was not fit, became a minor bureaucrat in the police service in Bavaria. The son fell for Hitler at school, joined the SS, went to the SS officer school at Bad Tolz and fought in every campaign since 1939: Poland, France, Russia.’