Despite the facts and figures that were occupying his mind, he seemed to sense me, as though he could smell the scent of my skin before I’d even reached his bed. He raised his head and instantly threw his paperwork on the blankets, pushing himself awkwardly to his feet. He opened his arms, murmuring my name, and I walked into them.

We stood there holding each other close and not a sound entered our world. Not a cough nor the clatter of a mug nor the shout of ‘Cheat!’ in a game of cards on the next bed. Nothing touched us. At one point he pulled back his head and studied my face, his grey eyes gleaming, the way the evening sun hits the flat steeliness of the marsh pools on a summer’s evening and sets fire to them.

We stood there holding each other close for a long time.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

LÉON ROUSSEL

‘André is a double agent.’

‘Slow down, Eloïse. Piquet might be lying,’ Léon pointed out. ‘We don’t know for certain yet. We have only one man’s word.’

‘Spoken like a true policeman.’

Léon knew she was right, of course, and he was proud to be one, but it was also spoken like someone who didn’t want to see her hurt. Or to wrong his boyhood friend.

‘We have to guard against their lies or we lose our grasp of the truth,’ he told her. ‘They buy control with their lies, these people who live in the shadows with their secrets and their threats and their guns.’

Eloïse leaned against him, her arm warm through his shirt. They were seated on the edge of his hospital bed. He’d managed to dress himself in a hurry but his shoes and socks on the floor might as well have been in the Caussade bull-yard for all the hope he had of picking them up. His back felt as if it had been ripped into by one of Goliath’s horns again.

‘That’s not what André has been telling me, Léon.’

He kissed the side of her head. ‘So which one is lying?’

A faint moan escaped her and she lowered herself to the floor on her knees. Her hand gently lifted one of his feet. ‘I must speak to André,’ she said.

But he could hear the reluctance in her words, spoken in an undertone, her head down, her silky curtain of hair swinging forward across her cheek. He understood. She didn’t want her love for her brother blown apart, and he didn’t blame her, but she’d have to do it. If she didn’t, he would. She handled his feet as though they were fragile and carefully eased on first one sock, then the other, smoothing them with tender touches while he looked down on the sheen of her dark head.

‘Do you think your father is involved?’