He climbed down again. The hook now hung vertical, still swivelling a little under its own impetus. Theo stood beneath it. The hook was on a level with his eyebrows; he noted that the major must have been about his own height. Even though he knew it was there, and it was not propelled towards him at speed, his eye did not pick it up immediately. He put his hand up to hold it and tap it against his forehead.

‘The children,’ he said. ‘You said the children’s clothes were covered in blood.’

Ariane stepped forward tentatively. ‘The children?’

‘You found him here at two in the morning and you ran back to the house. How did the children come into it?’

‘About the children. I didn’t tell you because … I don’t know why …’ She halted, began again. ‘Everything else I can account for. I may not like what happened, what I did myself or what others did, but I understood what was going on. Yet this I can’t explain.’

‘What is it?’

‘I told you, I found him lying here. When I realised what had happened, I just ran. I didn’t stop until I was in the house. But when I reached my room, I began to consider what I should do.’

It was some time after she had reached her room that her heart ceased to pound sufficiently for her to think straight and take decisions. She was sure that her first impulse was correct. She must not find him; that must be for someone else. For a while she thought of trying to move his body away from Bonnemort, but only a little reflection showed that it could not be done before the morning, even with Florence’s help. And the lieutenant and his men might return at any time, searching for him. It must look, rather, as if he had been killed somewhere else and then brought back here, as if the killing was nothing to do with Bonnemort. It was only then that the question came to her of who really had killed him, but she dismissed it as irrelevant to the immediate problem.

No one would find him in the winepress. No one normally went there for days on end; that was why he had chosen it for their meetings in the first place. She wished that she could just leave him there, and forget about him, but she knew that if the soldiers came back and instituted a proper search, they would discover his body in half an hour. So he had to be put somewhere more obvious, where Florence or Micheline would find him at first light.

After an hour, when she had calmed down and steeled herself, she made up her mind to go back to the winepress. She intended to pull the body out onto the path perhaps, or, it she could manage it, to haul it up towards the courtyard and leave it there where she knew that Florence would see it as soon as she emerged to feed the animals. She changed into trousers and went out again into the starlit darkness.