André edged forward on his seat to be closer to me. ‘Yes, it’s true. I realise now that I should never have got you involved, but you were so eager and you could be so useful. But after the van crash, I knew the only way I could keep you alive was through ignorance. I tried to send you back to Paris so many times for your own safety but you wouldn’t go. You just kept digging to find out who the informants were at Dumoulin Air Base. When that airman was stabbed, you just had to find out what other leaks were coming out of there, didn’t you? You sank your teeth in and wouldn’t let go.’

I turned away from him. It hurt too much to look at him.

‘Listen to me, Eloïse,’ he insisted. ‘I had to keep you away from the CIA men because if she,’ the word was filled with disgust, ‘thought for one second that you were in contact with them, she’d have killed you without hesitation.’ He raised tormented eyes to her. ‘Isn’t that so, Clarisse?’

She smiled at me with such sorrow. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

Something bad wrenched loose inside me. ‘So it was all about maintaining your network to get top-secret information out of Dumoulin?’

‘Of course it was,’ snapped Joel Dirke. ‘And you came and started tearing it apart.’

‘You are betraying your country,’ I said to Clarisse. ‘You are a traitor and you will be executed.’

She came over, sat on the bench next to me and draped an affectionate arm around my shoulders. I shook it off roughly. She winced and rubbed her ribs, pulling a face at André. ‘Your bloody bullet at the farm came close to ending it for me after I shot the wretched cat. You scraped my ribs raw. Don’t shudder, chérie.’ She kissed my cheek. ‘It was all working so well till you came.’

‘Do you really think no one else will realise what you are doing?’ I said. ‘I’ve already found out that you’ – I pointed at Joel – ‘and Mickey Ashton were handing stolen secret documents to my brother in the bars of Serriac on a Saturday night. He then took them to Paris. With Mayor Durand playing middleman.’

‘That foolish mayor,’ Clarisse said with a sigh of annoyance, ‘was getting too greedy. Always wanting more and more money for every scrap of information, however small. I had to teach him a lesson.’

‘A lesson?’

A lesson? Abruptly I made the connection and it sent a chill through me. What kind of evil person was she, this woman who’d been my friend? ‘You killed Bertin,’ I said. ‘With the mayor’s gun.’