‘I don’t know.’ He looked suddenly an old man, very tired. ‘It’s … difficult, this business. And so much, I think, depends on you.’

‘On me?’

‘What you decide.’

‘I see.’ I felt a fleeting stab of warmth upon my cheek from the dying sun. ‘Well, I don’t see how I can decide anything. I haven’t heard your side of things.’

‘And do you want to hear?’

‘Of course.’

He looked at me a long moment. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Believe what you like.’

‘No, you’re only saying this because you’re frightened …’

‘Well, of course I’m bloody frightened!’ I shot back, against my best intentions. ‘You’ve killed two people that I know of – maybe you killed your wife too, I don’t know. My God, Armand, I’d be a fool not to be frightened!’ I broke off suddenly, horrified by my outburst. Never antagonise your attacker, that’s what all the advice columns said, and never let him see your fear. My heart sank miserably as I waited for Armand’s reaction.

He was watching his own cigarette glow crimson in the angry wind. He flicked the end and loosed a swirl of sparks that quickly died. ‘I didn’t, as it happens, kill my wife.’ His smile was very tight, and brief. ‘I thought about it, off and on. She was most … irritating, sometimes, and there were days she pushed me almost to my limit, but in the end she died quite naturally – her heart …’ He raised his eyes then, looked away. The hand that held the cigarette was very steady. ‘Then Didier, my loving brother-in-law, he came to me and asked me if I knew about the will. Brigitte’s will. Not the one she’d made when we were married, but the one she’d written out herself the week before her death. Didier, he was a clerk for Brigitte’s lawyer, then – he’d seen the envelope addressed by her one morning in the office post, and being curious he opened it. It was a legal will, he told me, signed and witnessed, everything. Brigitte,’ he said, ‘had left me every cent she owned, on the condition that I turn my house, my land, into an institute for her damned artists. God!’ The word came out with all the bitterness that lingered still within him. ‘Without her money, I was lost – I had so little of my own. And yet, to get the money she would make me give up all I did own. She would have robbed her daughter of the legacy we Valcourts have been born to since before the Revolution. No,’ he said, his voice low and determined, ‘the money, it was Brigitte’s, but the land … the land is mine. It will be Lucie’s land when I am gone, and no one has a right to steal that from her. No one,’ he repeated. I glimpsed a violence in the deep black eyes, a quiet violence, carefully contained, but even as his gaze swung round to lock with mine it vanished like a thing imagined. ‘Didier, he knew how I would feel. He’d counted on it. He had kept the will locked in his desk; the lawyer hadn’t seen it. A little bit of money to destroy it, that’s what he’d been after, and when Brigitte died, well … he knew he could ask for any price, and I would pay it.’

‘But surely, the people who witnessed the will …’

‘Ah yes. Your Monsieur Grantham, he was a witness, did you know? And he asked me, when Brigitte died, what happened to the will. I told him she had changed her mind, and Didier, he told this story also.’

‘But he didn’t keep his promise. To destroy the will.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, looked down again. ‘No, at every turning there it was, that damned will, waved in my face. A most convenient blackmail scheme, I must admit.’

‘You might have gone to the police. Explained what happened. Maybe they could—’

‘No. No, you can’t understand. You don’t have children, Emily,’ he told me softly, accusingly. It was the first time he had called me by my name. ‘Children, they are everything. We owe to them a name they can be proud of, and a future with no shadows in it. Lucie deserves that much from me. I couldn’t risk a scandal.’

I challenged him. ‘Is that why you killed Didier?’

‘It’s cold,’ he said. His cigarette was dead and he reached in his pocket for another. ‘The wind, it’s cold. You must be frozen.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re shaking. Come, let’s sit down.’

The only place I saw to sit was on the broad low wall that jutted from the west face of the Moulin Tower. Beyond that wall the sun had flattened on a purple haze of hills, spilling its brilliance into the darkly flowing river, and the wind had turned electric with the threat of a coming storm. I slowly shook my head, staring at the crumbled wall and thinking of the sheer and plunging drop it masked on the other side. I was thinking, oddly enough, not of Paul being pushed from the cliff but of my mother, years ago on a family trip to Cornwall, chasing me constantly down the sea spray-slicked footpaths and warning me: ‘Don’t go near the edge!’ She would be proud of me, I thought, for finally heeding her advice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to sit down.’ Stay in the open, I told myself, don’t drop your guard.

Armand smiled, tightly. ‘Not on the wall. Just there, beside the tower. By the door.’ There was a sort of trench-like entryway that led up to the Moulin Tower’s wooden door. The leaves lay thick upon the pavement there, unmoving, proof that the ivy-choked walls on either side blocked out the wind with ease, and against one wall, nestled in the ivy, was a narrow concrete bench. It offered shelter, but not safety. Safety lay in staying out upon the lawn, where anyone might see us.