But he’d resisted. Quibbled. Procrastinated. In eight years of police work, he’d discovered the power of intimidation he could exert by presenting his battered left side to the suspects he was interrogating. It spoke of battles survived, pain endured, experience acquired. With a turn of the head, he could trump the villainy of any man he’d confronted across the interview table. ‘You think you’re tough?’ he challenged silently. ‘How tough? As tough as this?’ Men who’d evaded the draft found themselves wrong-footed, fellow soldiers recognized an officer who’d clearly led from the front and accorded him a measure of silent respect.

Joe underlined the effect of the drama he was assessing in his rear-viewing mirror with the cruel grin and slanting flash of white teeth of a music-hall villain. Not quite Ramon Novarro in Scaramouche but, even so—not bad! Not bad at all! He could use that sardonic look at the casino or strolling along the promenade in Nice. He recalled, with a stir of excitement, the words his superior in the War Office had used when encouraging him, for Reasons of State, to undertake this journey to France: ‘I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Sandilands, that female companionship—if that’s what you’re after—is available and of a superior style in France.’ The Brigadier’s remark was uncharacteristically indiscreet, unwittingly arousing. Joe had been surprised, amused and then dismissive but the titillating notion had stayed with him. His foot unconsciously increased its pressure on the accelerator. Yes, he was eager to be down there, sipping his first pastis under a blistering Riviera sun, eyeing pretty women parading about in tennis skirts and swimming costumes. And if they were enticing your ear with a French accent—so much the better.

‘Ah! Bulldog Drummond races south, pistol in his hip pocket, ready for a shoot-out with Le Bossu Masqué,’ commented a lazily teasing voice. Dorcas gave a showy yawn to indicate she was open to conversation. ‘Only one thing wrong. Pulling a face like that, you really ought to be driving a Sports Bentley. You don’t cut much of a dash in a Morris.’

‘Two things wrong. My female companion—that’s you— ought to be bound and gagged and wriggling helplessly on the back seat with her head in a bag.’

‘Le Bossu’s wicked accomplice whom you’ve taken hostage?’

‘Very likely. Female of the species being what she is and all that …’

Dorcas looked about her. ‘Oy! Didn’t I ask you to be sure and tell me when we got to Valence?’

‘I was just about to wake you, though I can’t imagine why I should bother. It’s not much of a place and we’re driving straight by it.’

‘Family tradition! Father always marks our passage through the town by shouting, “A Valence, le Midi commence!” Though at the speed my family plods along in a horse-drawn caravan we have more time to enjoy the moment. Listen, Joe! In a minute or so, if you slow down a bit, you’ll hear them. The cicadas. The sound of Provence.’

Joe smiled. She was right. In a strange way, everything behind them was of the north: green and quiet. The snow-clad Alps still funnelled their cold breath down the valley of the river the road was following. But the land ahead was tilted towards the sun. The atmosphere grew suddenly more brilliant, the rush of air warmer. The vegetation was changing and he welcomed the sight of the first outlying umbrella pines and the narrow dark fingers of cypress trees leaning gently before the wind, beckoning them on. Soon there would be olives fluttering the silvery underside of their leaves at him.

He took his foot off the accelerator and, hearing his first cicada, decided to stand in for her absent father, Orlando. The girl had little enough in the way of family life; the least he could do was reinforce the few happy memories she chose to share with him. ‘Le Midi commence!’ he shouted. ‘Here comes the South!’

Satisfied, the ritual complete, Dorcas breathed in the changing perfumes and asked for the umpteenth time: ‘Are we nearly there, Joe?’ to annoy him.

He decided to bore her back to sleep again with a recitation of distances, speeds and map references but a rush of good humour cut him short. ‘No! Miles to go before bedtime. Big place, Provence. I was planning to spend the night in Avignon then set off into the hills straight after breakfast to track down your pa. Silmont? That’s the place we have to find. Outskirts of the Lubéron hills. Olive-silvery Silmont?’ he speculated. ‘I wonder if there’ll be vines growing there? And lavender. Honeysuckle. All those herbs … wild thyme … rosemary … oregano,’ he murmured. ‘Dorcas?’

She was feigning sleep again. Botany also was a bore, clearly.

Joe fought down a spurt of irritation with the child’s father. As a friend, Orlando Joliffe came in for a good measure of regard, even affection, from Joe. Joe found—and was surprised to find—that he admired his skills as an artist but he also enjoyed the man’s company. He appreciated his intelligence and his worldly ways. When Joe made himself evaluate the relationship which would have been frowned on in his own staid professional circle, he came reluctantly to the conclusion that there was in Orlando a quality of raffish insouciance, a childlike delight in sensual indulgence that struck a chord in Joe’s being, that spoke to something long buried under layers of Quaker respectability.

Yes, as a drinking companion there was none better but, judged as a father, Orlando failed on all counts to satisfy. He wasn’t uncaring exactly but careless, ready to leave the upbringing of his four motherless children to anyone he could persuade or pay or blackmail into attending to their needs. When Joe’s sister, in dire emergency, had shown neighbourly concern and rashly offered to take Dorcas under her wing, Orlando had accepted with shaming alacrity.

Lovely, good-hearted Lydia! Joe felt a pang of guilt whenever he thought of his sister’s involvement with the wretched Orlando’s family circus.

It had all been Joe’s fault.

In a moment of concern for the family’s situation, he’d handed over Lydia’s telephone number. ‘This here’s my sister’s number. You’ll see she lives close by. She has children of her own and she’s a trained nurse. You can depend on her. Give her a ring if there should be an immediate problem and you can’t raise me.’

And Dorcas had taken him at his word. With life-changing results for several people, not least poor Lydia.

Appalled by the circumstances of the children’s hand-to-mouth, bohemian existence Lydia had swept them all away to the safety of her own comfortable home. Dorcas had stayed on longer than the rest, and, with her uncivilized ways of going on, she’d become a project for Lydia, her upbringing a social duty. ‘Give me that girl for two years and I’ll have her fit to present to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception,’ she’d been unwise enough to declare in Orlando’s hearing. He’d hurried to take her up on the offer and Dorcas had become a fixture in the household. And Joe had acquired ‘a niece’.

Months had passed but ‘Auntie’ Lydia was still a long way short of her target, Joe reckoned. As his brother-in-law commented, ‘Buckingham Palace be blowed! I wouldn’t trust that scallywag to behave herself at a Lyon’s Corner Café.’

But then, on their journey through France, the child had surprised Joe. Lydia’s training and preparation had not been in vain, it seemed. Dorcas had put on gloves and—alarmingly—silk stockings and behaved impeccably for the family at the Champagne Château Houdart where they’d stayed near Rheims. He glanced at the shiny dark head with its newly acquired and very fashionable fringed bob and smiled a smile that was both sad and tender. The wretched girl, he did believe, had fallen in love. With the highly suitable and totally admirable son of the house. Aged all of sixteen, Georges Houdart had seemed equally smitten and the two had been inseparable for the length of their stay.