She made Suzie get up and dress. They arranged pillows in their bed to give the appearance, at a cursory glance in the dark, that they were asleep, and slipped down the stairs and into the farmyard. They climbed down into the winepress through the funnel and waited.

As they crouched together in the darkness, Sabine holding the looped-back rope, nursing the heavy hook in her hand, Suzie suddenly knew what she had to do. If she shortened the rope, it would hang too high. When Sabine launched her lethal pendulum, it would pass harmlessly over Madame Ariane’s head, just as it had missed hers. She inched herself over to where the rope was secured, and with infinite care began to pull in the slack sufficiently to twist it one more time around the pegs.

‘She always comes first,’ Sabine whispered, ‘so the instant the door opens, I’ll do it. You must take the knife,’ she instructed Suzie. ‘You must hide down there behind the bench.’

Without protest, Suzie slithered down the ladder. She was feeling sick and her hands trembled as she unrolled the cloth with its pockets full of knives and chose one of medium length, with a slender blade. She crouched down behind the slaughter bench and silence settled around her. She was suddenly at peace. While she held the knife Sabine would not have it and Madame Ariane would come to no harm. She felt comforted in the way that, at the last moment, these ideas had come to her. It made her feel that God, some God, the Jewish one that Opa used to visit in the synagogue with his prayer shawl on, or Madame Ariane’s invisible Protestant God, or Sabine’s Catholic infant, with his mother and his dove and his admiring saints, was watching over them, saving them all, Madame Ariane and Sabine and her.

She had the odd sensation that she had left her body and she, Rahel, was above the physical Suzie, watching over her. She felt no surge of fear when she heard the tug at the door and when the tall figure stepped inside, she recognised it at once, almost as if she had been expecting him.

He had made three strides into the winepress when Sabine, in the gods, launched her missile, and the hook, too high to have touched Madame Ariane, hit him squarely in the middle of his forehead and toppled him like a toy soldier.

Rahel maintained her watch. Neither she nor Sabine stirred, frozen by the shock of their success. The doors opened again. Rahel realised that in all their planning they had entirely discounted the other half of the couple. If they had hit Madame Ariane, the major would have been there immediately afterwards. They had in fact struck the major and Madame Ariane had arrived. She heard a movement in the loft, as though Sabine was startled by Madame Ariane’s appearance, as if she had not understood whom she had hit. The noise was abruptly stilled.