At first light the next morning they had crept out of their houses to find the Germans gone and the corpses of the seven dead Resistance fighters to be dealt with. Henri was lying in the square where he had been shot; Pierre and the others, their feet dangling only half a metre from the ground, hanging from the oak tree. The villagers had left them there the night before when they had finished burying the German dead in the cemetery, thankfully accepting a curfew as the worst that was to happen for the time being. Many of them, wakeful in their beds, had heard the sounds of vehicles moving in the darkness and when day came their hopes were confirmed. The German troops and the French Milice had gone.

In the square the mayor was busy with the removal of the bodies to the church. In the Gendarmerie, when the phone rang and Petignat heard the voice of Henri’s daughter, it came to him that, out there at Bonnemort, they didn’t know what had happened. So he didn’t wait to discover what she wanted, half-hysterical as she sounded. He rushed out to find the mayor to tell him he had to go up there and break the news. But Gargaud rubbed his neck and said in that tentative way which meant that his mind was completely made up, ‘You know, we’ve never got on, them and me. Why don’t you go and see what’s up. You can tell them about Henri while you’re about it.’

Even before he arrived at Bonnemort he’d found seven men dead, lying bizarrely neatly arranged beside the track. They were men from Henri’s group, he reckoned, and this must have been where the firelight took place, where the five Germans had been killed, which had made the SS major so mad with rage that he’d executed his prisoners. Who had laid the bodies out like that, he wondered. Their companions from group Rainbow who had escaped and then returned to the scene of battle? The major had probably turned straight round with Henri and his other captives, taking them back to Lepech Perdrissou to hang them in front of the whole population as a warning.

A little further on he came across a German staff car, all shot up, and recognised Philippe Boysse from St Saud lying dead, handcuffed to the steering wheel. The SS must have taken him prisoner in Lepech during the afternoon clash and had been bringing him back to Bonnemort to question him. Perhaps Henri was making a rescue attempt when he himself was captured. This made sense, but why was Philippe driving the German car? He couldn’t make that out.

He counted up the deaths: five resistants had been killed in the afternoon in the village, then seven from group Rainbow here and Boysse too, then Henri and six others executed in the square last night, not to mention the five German soldiers that they’d had to bury. What more was to come?