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wouldn’t make the mistake of arriving so late the following day.
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    The major had slept very badly. A group of partygoers had been carousing under his window in the middle of the night and he hadn’t managed to get back to sleep afterwards. He kept thinking about Morlac, about his refusal to grab at the lines he’d thrown him. Why wouldn’t he agree to say he’d been drunk? Why not admit he harbored a real passion for his dog and that was why he’d momentarily lost his head? He’d get a light sentence and no one would say any more about it.
    All the same, without understanding why, Lantier was grateful to him for not backing down. Since his appointment as a military investigator, he’d seen a lot of straightforward cases: utterly guilty or truly innocent. It wasn’t very interesting and, with these cases, he’d put all his energy into making them more complicated, trying to find the element of idealism in a culprit or the darker side of an innocent man.
    With Morlac, he felt he was dealing with a more complex defendant, in whom there was a combination of good and bad. It was irritating, appalling even, when he came to think about it. But at least there was a mystery to solve.
    He got up before dawn. The ground floor of the hotel was shrouded in darkness but there was light coming through the glazed door to the staff area. Georgette, the hotel’s aging cook, was riddling the fire in the stove. She sat him down on the corner of the table covered in chinaware where she was laying out dishes.
    â€œDo you know the village of Vallenay?”
    â€œIt’s a couple of miles away, on the Saint-Amand road.”
    â€œWould someone be able to take me there this morning?”
    â€œWhat time would you be coming back?”
    â€œFor lunch.”
    â€œIn that case, take the bicycle in the courtyard. Madame lends it out occasionally to customers who want to visit the area.”
    When Lantier set off, the sun was sifting through the hedgerows creating a dazzling pincushion of light. Beyond the station he was straight out in the country and there were more signs of life than in town. Carts traveled along the road, harnessed horses were starting work in the fields. He could hear the farm laborers clicking their tongues to keep them moving. Swallows flew in delirious circles through the still-cool sky.
    After a long rise, the road dropped down toward a wide plain dotted with ponds. The water flowed from one to the other. In winter they made the area even damper. Willows grew along their banks, and the surrounding fields were striped with the tall stems of bulrushes because they were flooded for six months of the year. But in this oppressive heat, the place was cool, shady, and not as dry as the town.
    After asking an old carter for directions, Lantier had no trouble finding the house where Valentine lived. You had to follow a path that ran alongside the last of the ponds. Even in the height of summer, parts of the path dove down into thick, black mud, and you had hop over on stones that had been thrown into it. Lantier hid the bicycle in a thicket of hawthorn and continued on foot.
    Valentine was in her vegetable garden, a large square of land she’d been turning over by hand for years now. It had given her gnarled fingers with black-edged nails. She never spoke to anyone without crossing her hands behind her back to hide them.
    When she saw the officer coming up the path toward her home, she let go of her basket, stood up and clasped her hands in the small of her back.
    Lantier du Grez stopped three paces away from her and doffed his forage cap. In the sunlight his uniform looked worn and felt almost violent, it was so out of place to be dressed like that in such heat. It could only be due to an unpleasant wish to stand out from other people and incarnate a sense of authority. Now that the war was over it was mostly ridiculous.
    â€œYou must be . . .