`It was strange,' the girl later said. `I stopped seeing them as dead bodies. It was as if they'd become something else, parts of the trees themselves.’

Then the explosion, smoke and dust billowing from the church. A moment's silence, as though a vacuum had been created in the world, then screams, followed immediately by machine-gun fire. And when it finally stopped, she could still hear it. Because it wasn't just inside the church: it was in the distance, too.

Prudhomme's barn.

When she was finally found – by people from surrounding villages – she was naked except for a shawl she had found in a trunk. The shawl had belonged to her grandmother, dead the previous year. But she was not alone in escaping the massacre. When the soldiers had opened fire in Prudhomme's barn, they'd aimed low. The first row of men to fall had been wounded in the lower body, and the bodies which fell on them shielded them from further fire.

When straw was strewn over the mound and set alight, they'd waited as long as they could before starting to claw their way out from beneath, expecting at any moment to be shot. Four of them made it, two with their hair and clothes on fire, one dying later from his wounds.

Three men, one teenage girl: the only survivors.

The death toll was never finalised. No one knew how many visitors had been in Villefranche that day, how many refugees could be added to the count. A list was compiled of over seven hundred names, people who had most likely been killed.

Rebus sat at his desk and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The teenage girl was still alive, a pensioner now. The male survivors were all dead. But they'd been alive for the Bordeaux trial in 1953. He had summaries of their evidence. The summaries were in French. A lot of the material sitting on his desk was French, and Rebus didn't speak French. That was why he'd gone to the Modern Languages department at the university and found someone who could. Her name was Kirstin Mede, and she lectured in French, but also had a working knowledge of German, which was handy: the documents which weren't in French were in German. He had a onepage English summary of the trial proceedings, passed on from the Nazi hunters. The trial had opened in February 1953 and lasted just under a month. Of seventy five men identified as having been part of the German force at Villefranche, only fifteen were present – six Germans and nine French Alsatians. Not one of them was an officer. One German received the death sentence, the others jail terms of between four and twelve years, but they were all released as soon as the trial finished. Alsace hadn't been enjoying the trial, and in a bid to unite the nation, the government had passed an amnesty. The Germans, meantime, were said to have already served their sentences.

The survivors of Villefranche had been horrified.

Even more extraordinary to Rebus's mind, the British had apprehended a couple of German officers involved in the massacre, but had refused to hand them over to the French authorities, returning them to Germany instead, where they lived long and prosperous lives. If Linzstek had been captured then, there would have been none of the present commotion.

Politics: it was all down to politics. Rebus looked up and Kirstin Mede was standing there. She was tall, deftly constructed, and immaculately dressed. She wore make-up the way women usually did only in fashion adverts. Today she was wearing a check twopiece, the skirt just touching her knees, and long gold-coloured earrings. She had already opened her briefcase and was pulling out a sheaf of papers.

`Latest translations,' she said.

`Thanks.’ Rebus looked down at a note he'd made to himself `Correze trip necessary??’

Well, the Farmer had said he could have whatever he wanted. He looked up at Kirstin Mede and wondered if the budget would stretch to a tour guide. She was sitting opposite him, putting on half-moon reading glasses.

`Can I get you a coffee?’ he asked.

`I'm a bit pushed today. I just wanted you to see these.’

She laid two sheets of paper on his desk so that they faced him. One sheet was the photocopy of a typed report, in German. The second sheet was her translation. Rebus looked at the German.

`- Der Beginn der Vergeltungsmassnahmen hat ein merkbares Aufatmen hervorgerufen and die Stimmung sehr gunstig beeinflusst.’

`The beginning of reprisals,' he read, `has brought about a marked improvement in morale, with the men now noticeably more relaxed.’

`It's supposed to be from Linzstek to his commander,' she explained.

`But no signature?’

`Just the typed name, underlined.’

`So it doesn't help us identify Linzstek.’

`No, but remember what we were talking about? It gives a reason for the assault.’

`A touch of R amp;R for the lads?’

Her look froze him. `Sorry,' he said, raising his hands. `Far too glib. And you're right, it's almost like the Lieutenant is trying to justify the whole thing in print.’

`For posterity?’

`Maybe. After all, they'd just started being the losing side.’

He looked at the other papers. `Anything else?’

`Some further reports, nothing too exciting. And some of the eyewitness testimony.’

She looked at him with pale grey eyes. `It gets to you after a while, doesn't it?’

Rebus looked at her and nodded.

The female survivor of the massacre lived in Juillac, and had been questioned recently by local police about the man in charge of the German troops. Her story hadn't changed from the one she'd told at the trial: she'd seen his face only for a few seconds, and looking down from the attic of a three storey house. She'd been shown a recent photo of Joseph Lintz, and had shrugged.

`Maybe,' she'd said. `Yes, maybe.’

Which would, Rebus knew, be turfed out by the Procurator Fiscal, who knew damned well what any defence lawyer with half a brain would do with it.

`How's the case coming?’

Kirstin Mede asked. Maybe she'd seen some look cross his face.

`Slowly. The problem is all this stuff.’

He waved towards the strewn desk. `On the one hand I've got all this, and on the other I've got a wee old man from the New Town. The two don't seem to go together.’

`Have you met him?’

`Once or twice.’

`What's he like?’

What was Joseph Lintz like? He was cultured, a linguist. He'd even been a Professor at the university, back in the early 70s. Only for a year or two. His own explanation: `I was filling a vacuum until they could find someone of greater standing'. He'd been Professor of German. He'd lived in Scotland since 1945 or 46 – he was vague about exact dates, blaming his memory. His early life was vague, too. He said papers had been destroyed. The Allies had had to create a duplicate set for him. There was only Lintz's word that these new papers were anything but an official record of lies he'd told and which had been believed. Lintz's story – birth in Alsace; parents and relatives all dead; forced enlistment in the SS. Rebus liked the touch about joining the SS. It was the sort of admission that would make officials decide: he's been honest about his involvement with that, so he's probably being honest about the other details. There was no actual record of a Joseph Lintz serving with any SS regiment, but then the SS had destroyed a lot of their own records once they'd seen the way the war was headed. Lintz's war record was vague, too. He mentioned shell-shock to explain the gaps in his memory. But he was vehement that he had never been called Linzstek and had never served in the Correze region of France.

`I was in the east,' he would say. `That's where the Allies found me, in the east.’

The problem was that there was no convincing explanation as to how Lintz had found himself in the United Kingdom. He said he'd asked if he could go there and start a new life. He didn't want to return to Alsace, wanted to be as far away from the Germans as possible. He wanted water between him and them. Again, there was no documentation to back this up, and meantime the Holocaust investigators had come up with their own `evidence', which pointed to Lintz's involvement in the `Rat Line'.