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inhaled, she stood there looking at Jouvet as if all the bitterness of an unhappy marriage had suddenly been lifted from her.
    You’re enjoying his tobacco, aren’t you?’ seethed the husband.
    She tossed her head and shrugged. ‘It’s not often I get the chance. Since women are denied a ration, you forced me to steal what little I could or barter for it when your back was turned.’
    St-Cyr sucked in his breath impatiently. These two would kill each other if they could. ‘Madame, let us walk a little. Hermann, please accompany this one back to his command post behind his wife’s school. Pry what you can from him and remind him that the Sûreté and the Gestapo require full and accurate answers.’
    Namely, when and where was he on the day of the murder. Kohler knew this was what Louis meant and grinned. But when he had the man alone, he, too, tried to make peace. ‘My two sons are in Russia. They’ve told me how it really is.’
    â€˜Have they? Then did they tell you, please, that it was we of the LVF who were always given the task of guarding the rear and facing the partisans? One could not take a crap or a piss for fear of having his balls shot off or the organ removed with a knife and fed to him as his throat was slit!’
    â€˜I thought it was freezing? I thought it was too cold to … well, wave the wand,’ shrugged Kohler.
    â€˜ It was! ’
    For a man with a bad leg, Jouvet could ignore pain when he wanted. Deft with his stick, and by throwing his right side forward, he adopted a twisting gait that soon took them through the graveyard to ruined walls and beyond. Domme had lots of open spaces, the houses often being situated around irregularly shaped quadrangles, and everywhere behind them there were gardens that had been turned over to sustenance. Pigs, goats, beans, potatoes, artichokes.… Mentally the farmboy in Kohler ticked them off with appreciation, giving credit where due.
    Jouvet knew the town well, knew every wall and bolt hole. Each house, most of one storey with attic dormers, was of that same soft honey-coloured limestone but often with steeply pitched roofs that were shingled with lauzes — slabs of flat grey limestone. Where the roofs were far less steep, they were covered with the thick flat reddish tiles so common in the Périgord and the South.
    Not on Berlin Time like the Occupied Zone, where 8 a.m. meant 6 a.m., nevertheless the town had long since been up and about. The house, both school and home, was but a stone’s throw from the rampart walk but separated from it by a single row of houses. Here on this side of the street, there was only the school and the gardens; the other three sides of the quadrangle held distant rows of houses. Again there were tethered goats, geese, ducks, rabbits in cages, chickens, people working, men, women, boys and girls.…
    A small schoolyard was to the left of the building. Jouvet went through the boys’ door like a rocket to shriek the kids into silence. No one dared look up from his or her desk. All hands were folded in front — perhaps thirty pairs. A portrait of Pétain hung on the wall dead centre and just below a clock with Roman numerals. There was a stove which, in winter, would always have a pot of water with sweet-smelling herbs simmering in it. A small blackboard, a stack of slates brought back into use due to the shortages, some tired exercise books with a few empty pages … little else met the eye until Kohler noticed the cut-outs rescued from ancient magazines. Fish swam across the imaginary sea of one wall. Pages of sheet music with pictures of symphony orchestras competed to broaden young minds but there were also things from their own world, though everything extra was probably dead against the regulations of the Ministry of Education. A taste of honey in a world of rote memory and annual examinations.
    The silence was penetrating, the wait an