There was Mathilde, looking sad and fat but really quite pretty underneath; and Claude talking to me without the slightest bit of a stammer; and Monsieur Gestin with a funny, unexpected look, as if he was trying to look stern when actually he was laughing inside; and then some pictures of the chocolaterie that Jean-Loup hadn’t downloaded yet, that he flicked through too fast to see.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that Maman?’

It was, with Rosette. I thought she looked old, and Rosette had moved, so that you couldn’t really see her face. And now I could see Zozie at her side – not looking like herself at all, with her mouth turned down, and an odd kind of something in the eyes—

‘Come on! We’ll be late!’ he said.

And then we were running for the bus, and off to the cemetery as usual, to feed the cats and to stroll in the lanes under the trees with the brown leaves falling and the ghosts all around.

It was getting dark by the time we got there, with the tombs just shapes against the sky. Not much good for photographs – unless you use flash, which Jean-Loup calls ‘lame’ – but weird and gorgeous all the same with the Christmas lights further up the Butte strung out in a spider’s web of stars.

‘Most people never see all this.’

He was taking pictures of the sky, yellow and grey with the tombs against it like hulks in a derelict boatyard.

‘That’s why I like it now,’ he went on. ‘When it’s nearly dark, and folk have gone home, and you can really see that it’s a cemetery, and not just a park filled with famous people.’

‘They’ll close the gates pretty soon,’ I said.

They do that, you know, to stop vagrants sleeping there. Some still do, though. They climb the wall, or they hide away where the gardien doesn’t see them.

That’s what I thought he was, at first. A vagrant, getting ready to bunk down for the night, just a shadow behind one of the tombs, wearing one of those big overcoats and a woolly hat pulled over his hair. I touched Jean-Loup’s arm. He nodded at me.

‘Get ready to run.’

Not that I was really scared, or anything. I don’t think you’re in any more danger from a homeless person than from someone with a regular house. But no one knew where we were; it was dark; and I knew Jean-Loup’s mother would have a fit if she knew where he went after school most nights.

She thinks he goes to the chess club.

I don’t think she really knows him at all.

So anyway. There we were, ready to run if the man showed any sign of coming at us. And then he turned and I saw his face—

Roux?