‘Leonie, it’ll be all right, I promise you. It’ll all come right.’ Once she had started to weep, they had both known how it would end. He came round to her side of the bed, to hold her and let her cry and then make love to her. He’d never admitted anything, but she knew, just as if he’d spoken.

And now here was Theo de Cazalle sitting in her kitchen with an assumed face of sorrow listening to her story. Things had come all right for him, as they always did for people like that. She would make good and sure that any glory due to Lucien wasn’t shared with his b— of a wife. She would make Cazalle see that Lucien got his posthumous medals and she got her pension. She would be the widow of an acknowledged Resistance hero. She would play the part and exalt his memory. It was ironic that, if only the Marshal had not been misled by his ministers, like that nasty Laval, then Lucien would still have been the disgraced figure he had been during the year before the liberation.

He’d certainly been betrayed. In September 1943 they’d been waiting for him in a village thirty kilometres away. A few days later, Henri Menesplier had been picked up too. The French took them, but that didn’t mean anything since the Germans had occupied the southern zone. The police had come to search their house. She was terrified of what they might find, but knew no more than they did where to look in order to destroy whatever it was. Nothing was discovered, thank God. Lucien had at least had that much care for her, keeping nothing incriminating at home. She went to the Prefecture to ask for news. She was told that he would probably have been taken to Paris, or sent to a camp at Fresnes, or Compiegne, or if he had been handed over to the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, he might be sent to a camp in Germany. If he wasn’t shot, of course.

After the liberation she heard from a fellow prisoner that he had got no further than Bordeaux. Lucien had been flung into his cell there in the early hours of the morning in December ’43, three months after his arrest. His ribs had been crushed and one had pierced a lung; his fingernails had been pulled out; his body was covered in burns. The following night he was taken away for another session and returned a few hours later, his spine smashed, his legs paralysed. He died there a few hours later.

He hadn’t talked, the man told her, as if she cared, in spite of the degree of pressure applied.

Theo watched her tell her tale, sitting opposite him, her hands balled in her lap, pressed between her thighs. He listened to what she said in her bare recital, and what she didn’t say, in the tone of her voice and the turn of her head. She had still not forgiven Lucien. For her he was not a hero of his country, but a traitor to her and her children. He knew, too, that she must hold him responsible, and that he had only added to her resentment by arriving unexpectedly, catching her unprepared. He could see no means to put any of it right. He had never bothered to charm Lucien’s boring little wife in the past, and it was too late now.