‘And had the German been tortured?’

‘No,’ Petignat said. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that such terrible things did happen that this wasn’t such a big deal. So they cut his throat. Perhaps they’d run out of ammunition, who knows? They’d hit him a blow.

‘They’d hit on his forehead, plumb in the middle. You wonder how they got him like that, why he didn’t see it coming. His ankles had been strapped together to drag him along. There were score marks all down his back.’

‘And why was he left where he was, do you think? Had they been disturbed and abandoned him?’

‘Oh, no. It was deliberate. He was … arranged.’

‘So, why there?’

‘It was defiance, I think. You know, that place was the German HQ. They were saying, nowhere’s safe for you.’

‘But the Germans had gone.’

‘But no one knew that until that morning.’

‘And what would have happened if the Germans had still been there?’

‘Oh, God, reprisals. It would have been a bloodbath.’

‘Talking of bloodbaths, where was he killed? There would have been a hell of a lot of blood after a throat-cutting.’

‘I don’t know. It could have been anywhere in the forests. They must have caught him on the road and killed him. Then they could have taken him there in a lorry. Who knows?’

‘You didn’t search the house and grounds to find the place of death?’

Petignat looked surprised. ‘No, I didn’t. I thought that if they had found a sea of blood somewhere, they would have told me, Micheline and Madame de Cazalle. That’s why I thought it must have been done elsewhere and that he was taken there.’

It was hard to describe what it was like to someone who wasn’t there. And the colonel hadn’t been in France during the Occupation, he couldn’t understand anything. The first thing to realise was how what was right and wrong changed. In 1940 there was no question; to follow the Marshal was the right thing to do, no one doubted it, so a gendarme’s job was clear. But bit by bit, in ways you didn’t notice at the time, things went downhill so that by ’44 the Germans were demanding things that a good Frenchman couldn’t support, like sending the forced labourers to Germany, for example. People started acting against the government, until at the final stage in June, July, it was outright anarchy, and what was a loyal man to do? The only thing was to try to keep order.

That night, the one the colonel wanted to talk about, 17 August, it was. It was impossible to describe what they’d all been through in the village. In the afternoon the Resistance had entered Lepech. Henri had told the gendarmes what to expect and they had been lying low, pretending not to see or hear what was going on. So when the Germans turned up unexpectedly, they’d treated the gendarmes as enemies, like the rest of the town. He’d often thanked God since then that the Germans hadn’t called on them, the gendarmes, to help. That had saved them the next day, the Saturday, when the Germans had gone and the maquis took over and went mad in Montfefoul. They’d left Lepech alone, even though Gargaud, the mayor, was Petainist, because of the terrible things that had happened there.