‘And you, you were active around here?’

‘I founded a group of FTP and then I worked in the regional HQ.’

The Franc-Tireurs et Partisans were the communist Resistance. The communists had been driven underground in 1940 by Vichy’s hostility, but orders from Stalin had forbidden them to attack the Germans. However, their experience of organising networks of self-protection had meant that when Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, his attack on Russia in June 1941, they were ready to act against the Nazis. They had always been the Resistance grouping least susceptible to pressure from the Free French, least influenced by reprisals by the Germans or hostility by the local population.

The moment of recognition was simultaneous. Theo suddenly recalled the three guerrillas who had stopped him in September 1944 on the road to Bonnemort, the commissar behind his table, who did not give his name. And he could see that the other had just recalled the colonel who had then been so impervious to hints about what had been going on at his home. So now they knew where they were. Or thought they did.

So this was Ariane’s husband. Vernhes had been curious from the start about the man who had brought such an exotic creature to the country. He remembered his astonishment when he first realised what she was, like discovering a zebra in a field of donkeys. It is shaped like a donkey, it eats and moves like a donkey, but its stripes show clearly that it is not a donkey and does not have a donkey’s nature. When he had believed, like everyone else, that Colonel de Cazalle was dead, he had imagined him to have been an army officer in the classic mode, rigid and dashing, who had won her in the drama of the war and whose attraction would have faded rapidly even if he hadn’t got himself killed. After the liberation he had heard that her husband wasn’t dead after all, had resurfaced fighting with the Free French, which had put a different perspective on him, and on his wife. All resistants were exceptions to the norm, he thought complacently, had something that pushed them beyond acceptance of the given situation. What was it in this man? Not much that was visible. He was older than she was; tall, but not as extravagantly so as his leader the president; with smooth, grey-black hair, a long oval face and small mouth. Even in his country clothes, he looked as if he was wearing a uniform.

Was Ariane with him in Paris? He assumed that was where she had gone to hide herself. What, he wondered maliciously, had the brave colonel thought of her shaven head? He could imagine that this man would not enquire too deeply, perfectly content not to see what he did not want to, as long as no public shame was brought on the family.

Theo was putting Vernhes into context. Micheline had said the first runaway they had sheltered at Bonnemort had been a communist.