And what about the drop I’d made in Arles? The negative film I’d taken. Who picked that up? I slammed the heel of my hand on the steering wheel and felt a dull shame flush through me. My broken nose throbbed, but the pain of it didn’t come close to the pain of knowing.

He’d fed me to them. Piece by piece.

Did you think, André, that I would never notice that bits of me were missing? And what about Mickey Ashton? You led me to believe he was the source of the leak from the air base and Piquet says the same, but what if he was murdered because he’d danced with your sister? The sister that the CIA believes is a Soviet agent.

There are too many what ifs, André. What if you hadn’t lied to me? What if you hadn’t told me that Bertin and Piquet were enemy agents? I was seeing it all from the wrong end of the telescope, wasn’t I?

‘André!’

I screamed his name at the top of my lungs to get it out of me, to let it be snatched away by the wind and torn to shreds. Tears were streaming down my face, but I dashed them away with the back of my hand. I wanted no part of them. No part of his name. No trace of it in my lungs. If I could have taken my father’s garden shears and sliced through the bond that bound me to him and him to me, I would have.

When I reached the turn-off that led towards Mas Caussade I put my foot down and shot past. I had to speak to him. Of course I did, of course I needed to. So bad the need made me ache. But first I drove to the only place on earth I wanted to be.

*

I was allowed in only because I was a Caussade and the colonel was grateful for Caussade land. A smart salute and a polite greeting, but I was escorted at all times. The Dumoulin Air Base was on high alert. It made sense, because three townspeople had died here yesterday and, whatever the rights and wrongs, the Americans now saw us all as a threat.

I walked down the long corridor lined with oil paintings of aircraft into the white-painted ward with its men and beds that I didn’t even see. It was as if the paint had white-washed them all out as well and only left one bed in shiny military grey. I walked over. Léon was engrossed in a thick pile of paperwork, seated in the chair beside the bed and wearing a navy-blue dressing gown made of some silky material that made him look faintly dissolute. I never thought I would ever say that Léon Roussel looked dissolute. They were two words that didn’t fit together.