So why did I break it? Why did I pause outside the barn on my way to tend Cosette and bend to pet the feral cat? It was automatic, unthinking, a triggered response when the little striped animal curled itself around my ankles. As I straightened up, the crack of a rifle shot ripped through the silence. I felt the bullet lift my loose hair as it whistled past the side of my neck and heard it smack into the side of the barn. I stood a finger’s breadth away from death.

A second shot from somewhere in the distant fields followed in less than a heartbeat. The cat fell limp and lifeless at my feet. I leaped into the barn, mind spinning, my heart clattering in my chest, and snatched at a billhook lying against a pile of wood.

If you’ve never been shot at, you don’t know what it does to you. Believe me. It alters who you are. It cuts you loose from the things that bind you to being a civilised human being. If the person wielding the rifle had walked into the barn right then, I would have cleaved his skull in two with the billhook. I know that sounds inhuman. But it’s not. It is the essence of humanity. It is what makes the human race survive, that white fear, that naked panic, that burning desire to live.

I pressed myself tight to the inside of the barn wall. Peered around the edge of the door, scanning the horizon, searching the fields for the position of the rifle. For any sign of a figure. Approaching. Or fleeing.

A third shot crashed through the yard. But this time it came from the house. I jerked round to look. André was in his upstairs bedroom, window wide open, a rifle levelled at his shoulder and aimed at a spot where a clump of tamarisk trees had spread into each other like a dense fortress. He pulled the trigger again. The shot ripped into the small copse, sending up a grey wave of wood pigeons that wheeled around the sky, their wings heavy with alarm.

‘There,’ André shouted, ‘there, beyond the stream.’

I tightened my grip on the billhook and ran.

*

Blood glistened on the slender leaves of a mimosa. A lady-bird had dragged its feet through it, leaving threads of scarlet cotton, and the glasswort was trampled underfoot. But there was no sign of the gunman. The murdering bastard had fled.

I widened my search, billhook at the ready.

But I found no one, no trace. Except a few spots of blood leading in a zigzag direction away from the house. From here the Mas Caussade yard looked far away, at least five hundred metres, so whoever fired at me was good. Very good. A shudder clawed its way through me and my breath raced in and out of my throat.