‘Why on earth would they carry a flag around if it’s meant to be secret?’

‘Oh, they can’t resist it. The symbolism. The field of blood. The hammer and sickle for the workman and the peasantry. Workers unite. Destroy the hated oppressor. They would pin up the flag at their meetings the way your father pins up his champion bull rosettes. To remind them why they’re there.’

She stood up abruptly, scraping back her chair and catching Léon by surprise. She prowled back and forth across the small office, then threw herself back into her chair with a sibilant hiss.

‘A Communist cell, you think?’ she said.

‘It’s a strong possibility, yes.’

‘And the radio?’

‘To communicate with other members. Other cells and sections.’

She sat stiff and awkward in the chair, her scar bone-white. ‘Isaac,’ she whispered.

‘It’s possible he’s involved, yes. He knows the area very well.’

‘You think they’ve been meeting in the cottage that was burned?’

Léon leaned back and pulled open the cupboard behind his desk. From inside he extracted an opened bottle of wine and two glasses. Without a word he poured the rich burgundy wine and placed a glass in front of her.

‘Now, Eloïse, time for the truth. Tell me why you lied in your statement. Why you lied to the American.’

She lowered her eyes, dark lashes shutting him out, so he sipped his wine to hide his impatience and let her think. Whatever it is that has you scared, you must tell me. Don’t you know that? Let me help. Remember? But he sat in silence while she remembered.

When she raised her eyes again, something had shifted. Her full lips curved in a smile of sorts. ‘You are too sharp, Léon.’

He raised his glass to her. ‘To sharpness.’

She lifted her wine and drank almost half of it. ‘To staying alive.’

‘Who was on the motorcycle? You stated that you didn’t recognise him, but you did, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was he?’

‘A man called Maurice Piquet.’

Léon frowned, trawling through his prodigious memory for names. It rang no bells.

‘He is Gilles Bertin’s sidekick,’ she explained. ‘Another Soviet agent. This one likes to play rough. He was inside the garden shed.’

She said it calmly, as if saying the colour of his eyes. No mention of the fact that she clearly believed he was here to kill her, but her hand flicked across her forehead as if to ward off a bullet. Léon rose to his feet to rid himself of the desk between them. He stood by the window instead – any closer to her and he would have found himself plucking the strand of charred straw from the back of her hair or brushing the smudge of soot from her neck.

‘We’ll do this together, Eloïse. Tell me how you know Maurice Piquet.’

*