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left neither Albert nor his mother physically untouched. He had too vivid memories of his puny young arms braced against his bedroom door, jarring like shock absorbers against the power of his father’s shoulder as he tried to gain entry, desperately reaching out a foot to hook round a chair so that he could jam it under the handle. And when his father would eventually calm down and Albert could hear him muttering to himself as he stolidly descended the stairs, Albert would then lay himself down carefully on his bed, fold his aching arms across his chest and feel the comforting coolness of the linen pillowcase against his throbbing, bruised face.
    He knew it had never been his father’s fault, but when, in his last year at school, he returned home one day to find an ambulance and two police cars outside the house and was then told by a gruff police inspector that Guillaume Dessuin had locked himself in the attic bedroom and had subsequently taken his own life with the revolver he kept as a souvenir from the last war, Albert’s desolation was tempered by an overwhelming sense of relief. He was now without the violent reaches of the unfortunate man.
    Yet as the months went by thereafter and his mother’s silent chagrin finally lifted from her sad, embittered being, Albert found himself becoming the new and unwitting target for her verbal abuse, now more vitriolic than ever before. And it soon came to him that Guillaume Dessuin, through his actions, had inflicted on his only son a wound more permanent than any received during those regular beatings. He had succeeded in doing something at which Albert himself was forever destined to fail, and that was to rid himself of the very cause of so much misery in his life.
    Abruptly, Albert stood up and strode over to the minibar, the memory of his troubled youth and the matriarchal ball and chain he dragged through his adulthood being too prevalent in his mind. He took out two small bottles of whisky, poured their contents into a glass and drained it in two gulps, feeling his body give out an involuntary shiver at the immediate impact the alcohol had on both his throat and his brain. In that moment, he became aware that no sound was coming from the next-door room. He moved across to the adjoining door and opened it quietly.
    Angélique was lying fast asleep on the bed, her stockinged feet curled up under her bottom and her violin clutched like a comforting teddy bear in her arms. It was a sight that made Albert smile despite his melancholy mood. He had watched that girl grow up, becoming more attached to her than she would ever know, and he knew only too well what that particular instrument meant to her. It was her childhood, her passion, her fairy-tale world to which she used to escape from the impecunious and uncultured lifestyle of her family in Clermont Ferrand. And, over the years he had witnessed it gently coaxing from her one of the most truly remarkable talents he had ever had the pleasure of hearing. Oh, how easy life would be, he thought to himself, if one needed only to take one’s solace from a shapely piece of veneered wood with a few steel strings attached to it.
    Dessuin soundlessly pulled the door closed and turned once more to raid the minibar of its anaesthetizing contents.

FIVE
     
    T he shutters in the drawing room of the house in Clermont Ferrand were always kept closed during the summer months to protect the antique furniture from the sun, especially the lacquered top of the grand piano, which stood at an angle in the large bay window, squatting like a giant toad on its turned-out legs. It was covered with a white lace cloth upon which sat a weighty stack of music scores and the large blue Limoges terrine in which Madame Lafitte always kept an abundant supply of Nestlé’s plain chocolate secreted under its patterned lid.
    So efficient were the shutters that it was always impossible to see anything in that room, even at ten o’clock on a summer’s morning