‘Wash, wash,’ she said. They were, she realised, the first words she had spoken. ‘Sabine, come here. You must wash yourselves clean.’

The door of Micheline’s cottage opened and Florence and her mother came out. Ariane made no attempt at explanation.

‘Micheline,’ she said. ‘Will you take the girls and wash them and their hair. Florence, I’ll need you to give me a hand.’ She kneeled down and stuffed the dresses, one after the other, into the fire under the boiler, pulling off her own blouse to join them.

She led Florence to the path where the body lay and heard her catch her breath.

‘So they got him in the end,’ she said. ‘Serve the bugger right. What are we going to do with him?’

Ariane explained that she wanted to give the impression, in case the Germans returned, that he had not been killed at Bonnemort.

‘Surely,’ said Florence, ‘we could take him in the pony cart to the forest and dump him somewhere. It could take them weeks to find him.’

‘But we haven’t time.’ The sun was already rising. The eastern sky was turning from grey to pink, streaked with the clearest sea-green. ‘They could be back at any minute. We must make it look as if he was brought here from somewhere else.’

‘We’ll need the barrow,’ said Florence. Between them they hoisted him like a sack of grain in the wheelbarrow and carried him as far as the centre of the courtyard, which seemed as good a place as any to put him. They looked at him for a moment or two and Florence said, ‘Well turn him over. It’s more decent. The ladies’ll be awake very soon.’

They left him face down and untied his ankles. Ariane had lost any capacity to deal with the future, but Florence had now taken charge.

‘If he’d been left here,’ she said, ‘we’d just have found him. So I would phone the village and speak to the Gendarmerie. That’s what I’ll do.’

They were sitting on a ledge of rock on the path outside the winepress. ‘We, that is Micheline and Florence and I and the children, have never spoken about it since.’

‘You all knew what had happened, so there was no need to speak?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did you all assume?’

‘Micheline and Florence probably believe that I killed him, but they’ll never say anything.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think the children did it.’

Chapter Thirty-seven

Suzie opened the doors of the winepress and watched a narrow blade of light slice across the darkness of the floor in front of her. She left the doors ajar and slipped inside, standing for a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the chiaroscuro. So much had happened here that she expected to sense her own lingering fear or hear an echo of Lou Moussou’s screams, but she felt nothing. It was just a rocky space, empty of the past. She crouched on the edge of the loft gazing down at the ridged floor. The pulley rope was for some reason hanging free, dangling from the centre of the roof. She loosened it so that it was long enough for her to reach, then descended to retrieve the end, holding onto it as she climbed back to her hiding place. Without pausing to take aim, she threw it with all her strength at the open doorway.