She laughed again and watched in astonishment while I changed into a black shirt and trousers from the boot of my car and looped a black scarf around my head. I then discarded my red dancing pumps for a pair of sturdy boots. In a small backpack I carried a torch, the High Standard gun and a camera. I didn’t show Marianne the gun because I didn’t want to panic her, and anyway, I didn’t for one moment think I’d need it. I wasn’t going to shoot anybody. Not tonight.

We’d been waiting in the dark for an hour, Marianne in a doze, by the time I spotted the headlights leave the camp and spike their way towards me. The terrain in this part of the wide Rhône valley was as flat as the major’s baseball diamond, so I had no trouble watching the car’s approach.

It was the right one. As it swept past my dogwood hiding place I recognised its green and white colour scheme and when it was half a kilometre down the road to Arles, I started my engine.

*

I hung back most of the time, letting the Chevy get away. There was only one road cutting through the countryside, so he wasn’t going anywhere but straight ahead. At times I lost sight of him, at times I put my foot down and hitched up closer, but he didn’t drive fast as if he were trying to lose me. When the moon popped out and skimmed the fields with a silver sheen, I switched off my headlamps and drove half-blind. That was when I clouted a rock on the side of the road and jolted Marianne awake.

‘Merde,’ she muttered, ‘where’s the car you’re after?’

I pointed to the pinpricks of tail-lights far ahead in the dark bowl of the night.

She leaned her head forward with a pretty frown of concentration. ‘Who is he?’

‘A bastard.’

She accepted that, too sleepy to push for details, and we drove in comfortable silence, each bound up in our own speculations. As we approached the Serriac turn-off I crept up closer but the Chevrolet didn’t take the side road. It shot straight on.

Arles it was, then.

*

The streets of Arles defy logic.

Imagine if you picked up a box of straws, threw them in the air and let them fall at your feet. Criss-cross, higgledy-piggledy, no rhyme nor reason. Designed to confuse. That is the town of Arles.

It does not have streets built for cars.