‘Mon Dieu, of course, there are always fights over girls.’ She laughed and waved to one of the Americans she knew and he loped over, his friend in tow. They pulled up chairs and offered cigarettes. Both looked as if they’d stepped right off a farm, all straw and freckles, but I’d got it wrong.

‘Eloïse, this is Mickey.’

‘Hello, Mickey.’

‘He’s a mechanic from Chicago, and this handsome fellow here is Calvin. He was one of those tough lumberjacks out West before he joined up.’ She smiled, flicked her dazzlingly sleek blonde hair at him and accepted a light for her Lucky Strike. She raised an eyebrow speculatively at me and at Mickey. Mickey shifted his chair closer to mine and I saw his gaze linger on my scar.

‘Hello, Eloïse.’

I didn’t look away. I didn’t shrug a dark wing of my hair over it. I hadn’t dated anyone since the crash and I feared that the hard defensive ridge of scar tissue might not just be on the outside, but on the inside as well. I drank my glass of smoky red wine, while I listened to Mickey in his crisp khaki uniform telling me about the skyscrapers that literally scraped the sky in Chicago. And then I leaned my elbows on the little table, my chin cupped in my hand, my breasts pushing against my black dress.

‘Tell me, Mickey from Chicago, do you ever hold dances on that American air base of yours?’

His eyes lit up as if I’d put a match to them and his smile was wide enough to swallow Serriac whole. ‘There’s one on Saturday night.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Someone was messing with my car. A man with a pale shirt and dark hat. I could only see his back because he was bent over my 2CV’s windscreen and I shouted out. Broke into a run.

‘You!’

A horse-drawn cart piled high with crates of chickens, their yellow beaks panting in the afternoon heat, nudged its way between me and the corner where my car was parked. By the time it had trundled past, the man was gone. I scanned the car and spotted nothing amiss, but a piece of folded paper was tucked under the wiper-blade. I snatched it up.

I flicked it open. Three lines, handwritten, printed in capital letters.

YOU WANT ME TO KILL YOU?

LIKE GOLIATH. ALONE. IN THE DARK.

GO BACK TO PARIS. NOW.

Quickly, I spun on the spot where I stood and inspected every inch of the town square, but too late, far too late. There was no pale shirt nor dark hat on view in the doorway of the pharmacy, closed for the afternoon behind a metal grille. Nor behind the pockmarked limestone columns of the tiny concert hall. Nor tucked away among the scarlets and lavenders of the flower stall where the pigeons were chasing each other in the shade.