‘Your brother is the person you should be asking that question.’

‘What? André?’

‘No. Your younger brother, Isaac. The one in Marseille.’

Smooth as silk. He poured hot oil in my ear, smooth as silk. I shot to my feet. I had to get out of there.

‘I have taken up enough of your time, monsieur.’

But he was ahead of me. He strode across his grand room and reached for the ornate brass handle, but paused. ‘How is your brother?’ he asked me. ‘How is André?’

There was something in the way he said it, in the deliberate lightness of his words. I had the odd feeling that this – this question – was why I was here. This was the reason I had been allowed into his inner sanctum.

‘André is not well,’ I told him flatly. No need for more.

‘I hear that his legs are bad.’

I said nothing.

‘And severe pain in the head, they say,’ he added.

‘Who are they?’

‘Just the town gossips.’

‘Old men warming their wine in the sun.’

‘Is your brother able to walk better now?’

He was taking too much interest. I put out a hand to open the door and he smiled courteously. ‘Will you tell him something from me, Eloïse? Tell André that as Mayor of Serriac I send him my best wishes for a total recovery very soon. Before the accident we used to see him regularly in the town’s bars, most weekends. We miss him.’

I took three quick breaths. ‘I will pass on your message, Monsieur le Maire.’

My fingers uncurled from the fist they had formed, I opened the door and walked out. It took an effort of will not to run into the blinding sunlight that drenched the street outside, as far away from Charles Durand as I could get.

In the town’s bars. Most weekends.

While living in Paris? Someone was lying to my face. Was it Charles Durand?

Or André?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Serriac is a town that does not believe in change. In the four years I’d been gone, it had scarcely blinked. I knew this town like I knew each creamy strand in my Cosette’s mane. I knew the glow of Serriac’s peach-tinged pantiles and its ancient olive shutters shedding flakes like sunburned skin. I had roamed each street and alleyway. Learned its hidden corners and its hairpin bends, climbed over its twisted stone steps and its Roman archway. I knew this town.

I walked through it now in the placid heat, and I was greeted as if I’d never left by women who were shelling peas or washing babies on the doorstep with gentle hands, and by men fixing unidentifiable pieces of machinery. I stopped, exchanged words and smiles. Time and again the same question arose: How is your brother André?