young Boudiaf with Villanova, and explained why he now believed their dead Arab

war hero had been in the Force Mobile. The Mayor was swiftly convinced, but

agreed the chain of evidence had to be made solid. They sat down and, from

memory, composed a partial list of all the families they knew in St Denis or the

surrounding region who had been part of the Resistance. They could flesh out the

list the next day from the records of the Compagnons de la Résistance in Paris.

‘So the police are now going to start investigating half the families of St

Denis to see which of them might have known that Hamid had been in the Force

Mobile. How the hell do we stop this getting out of hand, Bruno?’

‘I don’t know, Sir. I’m trying to think this through. They’ll question the old

ones first, those who might have recognised Hamid. It could take weeks, a lot of

detectives, and then the media and the politicians get involved. We could have a

national scandal on our hands. We may need all your political connections to get

the people in Paris to realise there can be no winners in this, nothing but a

political nightmare when the right-wingers make hay about French families being

burned out and terrorised by Arabs in German pay. Speaking personally, I’m so

outraged by it I can hardly think straight, Sir.’

‘Stop calling me Sir, Bruno. We’ve been through too much for that and I don’t

know what to do any more than you do. In fact, I trust your instincts on this

better than my own. I’m too much the politician.’

‘Politics may be what we need to get through this. But I have to go and brief

the investigation team.’

‘You haven’t told them yet? So they don’t know anything about the Force Mobile?’

the Mayor demanded, and then paused before continuing thoughtfully, ‘So we have

some time to think how much to tell them.’

‘No time at all, Sir,’ Bruno said briskly. Determined to squash whatever

thoughts might be stirring in the Mayor’s mind, he went on, ‘They know I’m

working on this and Isabelle, the Inspector, has already been delving in the

military archives about Hamid’s mysterious war record. They are close on that

trail, and I have to go.’

Bruno left the Mayor sitting hunched and looking slightly shrunken in the rather

over-decorated sitting room that was his wife’s great pride, and walked out to

his van to call Isabelle. They met in his office at the Mairie where he laid out

the evidence for her. Together they rang

J-J

and agreed to meet in Bordeaux the

next morning. He phoned Christine at her Bordeaux hotel, got from her the mobile

number of the curator of the Jean Moulin archives, and arranged for the next

morning’s visit. He decided it was not his job to alert Tavernier.

J-J

could do

that.

More depressed than he had ever felt, Bruno could not think of food, but

Isabelle took him off to the local pizza restaurant where he ate mechanically

and drank too much wine. Careless of the town’s gossips, she drove him home and

put him to bed. She fed his chickens, undressed and climbed into bed beside him.

He awoke in the early hours, and she pushed him into the shower and put on a pot

of coffee. Then she joined him under the steaming water and they made urgent

love amid the soap suds, ending up passionately on the bathroom floor.

Later she brought the coffee and they went back to bed. There, they turned more

gently to one another and were still engrossed in each other’s bodies when the

cockerel crowed to signal the dawn – which made them both laugh and Bruno

realised he felt human once more. They showered again, and Bruno watered his

garden and fed Gigi, then made fresh coffee while Isabelle went back to her

hotel to dress. She returned with a bag of fresh croissants from Fauquet’s and

they took her car to Périgueux. Bruno kept his hand resting lightly on her thigh

for the entire journey.

‘You’re a very remarkable woman,’ he told her as they reached the new motorway

at Niversac. ‘That makes twice you’ve rescued me. And this time you did it even

after you saw me drunk.’

‘You’re worth it,’ she said, taking his hand, putting it between her thighs and

squeezing it. ‘And there’s another bad moment ahead, when you have to help us

make the arrest. You’d better prepare yourself for that. Whatever Hamid was or

whatever he did, he was unlawfully murdered.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But if it had been your family, your farm, your mother, you

would have killed him yourself. That’s justice.’

‘It may be justice, but it’s not the law,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

Indeed he did know it, and it saddened him. Yet his sadness was of a different

order to the despair that had gripped him the previous evening. That at least

had lifted.

Bruno and Isabelle met

J-J

and a liaison officer from the Bordeaux police on the

steps of the Centre Jean Moulin at nine a.m. Christine was already inside with

the elderly French historian who ran the archives. The Centre was named after

one of the most famous of France’s Resistance leaders, who had sought to unify

Communists, Gaullists and patriots into a common command and had been betrayed

to the Gestapo. It stood in the centre of the city, an elegant neo-classical

building of white stone that hid the dark history within. Best known to the

public as a museum of the Resistance, it contained showcases of domestic

objects: wooden shoes, wedding dresses made of flour sacks, ration cards and

other realities of daily wartime life. Also on show were bicycle-driven dynamos

that produced electricity for clandestine radios, and cars with giant bags on

the roof that contained carbon gas made from charcoal, to use in the absence of

petrol. There were displays of the different contents of the weapons containers

– Sten guns and bazookas, grenades and sticky bombs – dropped by British

aircraft for use by the Resistance. Underground newspapers were laid out to

read. And playing in the background was a discreet but continuous soundtrack of

the songs they sang, from the love songs of Charles Aznavour to the defiant

heroics of the Resistance anthem, Le Chant des Partisans.

But Bruno discovered that the real heart of the Centre Jean Moulin was to be

found on its upper floors, which contained the written and oral archives and the

research staff who worked there, keeping alive the memory of this tortured

period of French history.

Christine and

J-J

sifted through the fragmentary records of the Force Mobile,

and established that Hussein Boudiaf and Massili Barakine had been recruited to

a special unit of the Milice in Marseilles in December 1942. After two months of

basic training, they were assigned to the Force Mobile, a unit of a hundred and

twenty men commanded by a Captain Villanova, which specialised in what were

described as ‘counter-terrorist operations’ in the Marseilles region. In October

of 1943, after the British and Americans had invaded Italy and knocked Hitler’s

ally Mussolini out of the war, the Germans had spread the Occupation into the

previous ‘autonomous’ zone run by the Vichy government, and the Force Mobile

came under Gestapo rule. The outfit was expanded, and Villanova’s unit was

assigned to Périgueux in February 1944, charged with taking ‘punitive measures

against terrorist supporters’.

They found pay slips with Boudiaf’s name, movement orders for Villanova’s unit,

payroll listings that included Boudiaf and Barakine, and requisitions for