He left for Buisseau two days later, as soon as he received the answer, arriving just a few hours after the Sparrowhawk had left the convent.

The next morning, he walked to the bombed hospital site in search of clues, and sat by the river as Ben and Lotti had. As he contemplated the ruined landscape, Albert thought of his son, lying in his nursing home with his gas-damaged lungs, screaming with nightmares every night, and his mind wandered past the scene before him to another river long ago where his son had paddled as a child, and he sighed heavily for all that was lost.

Back in Buisseau, still shaken from his reminiscences, he sat in the café in the southwest corner of the main square, where the waiter who had refused to serve Lotti brought him a cup of coffee. It was Saturday, market day. As Albert drank, he noticed a small crowd gathered around a nun carrying a basket. Curious, he approached to look …

“It was the fault of Delphine!” wailed Sister Monique, back in the convent kitchen. “And of Federico, with the ears! She looks too much like her father! And now the policeman is with the Reverend Mother, and she will tell him everything.”

“You should not have taken Delphine to market,” grumbled Sister Véronique.

“You know how she cries whenever I leave her! She is a tyrant, that one—worse than Napoléon, or my aunt Florence who made everyone take a siesta after lunch every day, even at Christmas. And that policeman, he is clever. I did not think Englishmen were clever like that. The way he interrogated me! Excuse me, Sister, where did you get that puppy?—except in English, I had to ask Monsieur Gautier from the café to translate—and I was not able to lie!”

Sister Monique punched a lump of bread dough.

“Is there any chance,” she wondered, “that the Reverend Mother might lie?”

Sister Véronique just looked at her.

Albert Skinner left the convent for the railway station at St Matthieu, there to catch a train to Armande.

Nobody waved goodbye to him.

Trains being substantially faster than narrowboats, Albert arrived in Armande within a few hours. He took a room in a hotel by the river, with a window overlooking the quayside, from which he could see any boat arriving or departing from town. A swift inquiry confirmed that the Sparrowhawk had not arrived. Satisfied, Albert sent a telegram to Hubert Netherbury, to inform him of what he had discovered.

Hubert Netherbury’s fury on learning that Lotti had absconded from school was nothing compared to his rage when he found out that she was heading to Armande.

He replied to Albert Skinner’s telegram by return.

ON NO ACCOUNT ALLOW CHARLOTTE TO SEE HER GRANDMOTHER … STOP … GRANDMOTHER GRAVE DANGER … STOP … LEAVING IMMEDIATELY … STOP … WILL ARRIVE ARMANDE LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON … STOP … I REPEAT, CHARLOTTE MUST NOT SEE HER GRANDMOTHER …