I had no words. No recriminations. No rage at the woman who now freely admitted she was one of the Soviet handlers of MGB agents, not even when she confessed she had fired a rifle bullet into my hair and into my cat to warn me off staying down here in the Camargue. What good was rage to me now?

‘Why are you doing this, Clarisse?’

‘Didn’t your brother tell you? The CIA suspected I was working for the Soviets but they could find no proof. They were always sniffing around and getting nowhere, so your brother used you. To spy on me. When you were at my detective agency in Paris the CIA agents believed you were working for me in every sense – as a detective and as an espionage operative. You see, Eloïse, you were so damn good at the detective jobs that it enabled me to extract large amounts of cash from some of the richest men in Paris.’

‘What? How do you mean?’

‘Through blackmail, of course. To finance the Communist Party activists in France. All those dirty little secrets you were so adept at digging up for me and yet you never suspected a thing. You helped a lot.’ She smiled but I was not fooled by it this time.

I shook my head vehemently. ‘No! No, that’s not why I did my job for you. Not so you could blackmail them.’

‘Hush, chérie, calm down. I know that, but your charming CIA thugs – Bertin and Piquet – didn’t. I’d recruited your brother to defect to my side and they believed you had defected too. André is a double agent, yes. Handled by us. And yes, he used you. He got his little sister to work for me in Paris, so she could report back to the CIA on what I was doing. But he was very selective. He only gave them sufficient snippets to stop them getting suspicious that he had turned. Oh, chérie, don’t look like that. He was the one who suggested I recruit you that day when you sat in the café with your friend like a little flower waiting to be picked.’

I felt sick. And it was nothing to do with the rolling sea.

‘André? Is it true? I remember you were always asking what cases I was working on.’