‘See if you can work it out,’ Georges challenged them. ‘The two of you ought to be up to it.’

‘Well, he’s clearly a saint,’ said Joe. ‘He has a halo round his head, look. But he does look much more like a soldier. In fact, he looks like a Roman soldier to me. Cavalryman?’

‘Mounted on a horse at any rate. Crested helmet,’ said Dorcas. ‘He’s drawn his sword and he’s sliced his red military cloak in two and he’s offering half to the naked beggar sitting on the ground at his horse’s feet. Haven’t a clue.’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Georges, choosing to take her literally. ‘You’ve come up with all the evidence you need.’

‘I’ve got it!’ said Joe. ‘It’s St Martin of Tours! But I’ve still no idea what he’s doing here in a wine cellar. Friend of beggars and the poor. Hardly a qualification for presiding over choice bottles of champagne?’

‘Where else would he be? Very appropriate! St Martin is the patron saint of wine growers and wine makers. And he’s a local boy. Born in 316 AD, in Roman Gaul, he was in the army up in Amiens. His saint’s day is 11th November. Remembrance Day. And, yes, he was a cavalry officer.’

There was a pride and a sadness in the boy’s tone that prompted Dorcas to ask: ‘Did you put him here, Georges?’

He nodded.

‘And the flowers?’ Joe said quietly. He had noticed, on the ground underneath the icon, a jam jar containing three wilting white roses.

‘I put fresh ones in every week,’ said George with a touch of defiance.

Dorcas had begun to shiver in spite of the thick jersey which reached down to her knees. She turned a desperate pale face to Georges and came slowly back to join them. She took both Georges’s hands in hers and asked a silent question.

‘Yes, it was here,’ he said simply. ‘It happened here. I put up a cavalry officer to mark a fellow officer’s grave. I believe my father, whatever remains of him, lies behind that wall.’

‘Would it distress you, Georges, to tell us what you remember happening down here?’ asked Joe with a quick look to left and right.

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry – Maman never comes down here. She hasn’t been in the cellars, as far as I know, from that day to this.’ He pointed to St Martin. ‘There was just a deep alcove there ten years ago with bits and pieces of cellar equipment in it. It was a summer evening in 1917. I’d been out in the fields with Felix, working. I was angry with my mother for sending me out because my father had come home. He’d been with us for two days and I wanted to be with him every possible moment. Now, I can see that I must have been the most awful little nuisance,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘shadowing my father everywhere. I finished my work and ran back to the house but my parents had both disappeared. I went to the kitchen and asked the housekeeper where my father was. She said she’d last seen him come clattering downstairs in his uniform and call for his horse to be saddled and then he’d gone off across the courtyard and into the cellars. But that was about an hour earlier.

‘I was distraught! This meant he was leaving again. So soon. And apparently without intending to say goodbye to me. I was furious with my mother. I blamed her. She’d been quarrelling with him. I’d heard them shouting at each other and she’d been crying on and off for a whole day. I wanted to find him, tell him that whatever was wrong it had nothing to do with me.

‘I ran to the cellar. I wasn’t allowed to come down here by myself but I knew my way. Could have found my way blindfold, I think. The lighting wasn’t so wonderful in those days – oil lamps and home-made candles – but it was adequate. I raced along until I got to that turning there.’ Georges pointed down the way they had come. ‘And I stopped. I could hear the most awful noise.’ He shuddered at the memory. ‘It was a wailing and then a scrunching, dragging sound, repeated rhythmically every few seconds. I was terrified. I shouldn’t be there. I would get a spanking if I were caught. And there was something frightful going on in the corridor ahead, I knew it. I peered round the corner and . . . and . . . I saw the hunched shadow on the wall first.’

He paused, lost in his nightmare.

‘One shadow?’ Joe prompted gently.

‘Yes. My mother. She had long hair in those days – all the women had – and long skirts. She was sobbing and tugging at something on the ground. I thought at first it was a sack of some kind. But it wasn’t. She was dragging my father’s body over into the alcove. It was leaving a dark trail on the floor as she pulled it along. I don’t know how long I stood there frozen but I couldn’t move forward. I couldn’t go to my mother. I turned around and began to creep back along the gallery. But I had only gone about twenty yards when I caught a metal pail with my foot. Maman called out at once. “Who’s that? Is that you, Felix?”

‘I turned around and called back. “No, it’s me, Maman. I’m frightened. I didn’t know where you were.”

‘“Stay where you are!” she shouted. “Stand still!”

‘She came towards me round the corner and I nearly fled. She looked like the Greek women in my books – you know, the Furies or Medea or the Gorgon even. Her hair was hanging over her face, in damp strands, she’d been weeping and her eyes were dilated. She was panting and I could smell her terror. I would have run away but she knelt and seized me by the arms. “Georges, you are to go and find Felix,” she said. “Tell him he’s to come to me here. At once. And then I want you to go straight to your room. Speak to no one else.”

‘I was only too pleased to be sent away and I ran back and found him and delivered the message. When I got upstairs I went to the bathroom as I always did to get ready for bed. I saw myself in the mirror. My old white linen shirt was stained with blood where my mother’s hands had held me. I was daubed with my father’s blood. She’d stabbed him to death.’

Dorcas asked quietly: ‘You were only seven, Georges. Did you understand about death and bodies at that age?’

He looked at her wonderingly for a moment. ‘I knew about death. I killed things every day. Vermin. Birds. It was my job to keep the vineyards clear. I snared rabbits for the pot. Food was always short. And we were living in the middle of a battlefield. We were always coming across corpses . . . dead soldiers in the fields. Runaways hiding in ditches. One winter we found two deserters, wounded, starving, who’d crept into the cellars for shelter. They hadn’t dared to ask for help in case someone turned them in, I suppose. They were dead when Felix and I came across them. Dead for several days. We buried them in the churchyard in the village and sent their name tags in. I saw sights no child should see. Yes, I know it was a lifeless corpse my mother was hauling across the floor.’

Dorcas’s next question was inspired by a quick glance up at the icon of St Martin in his cloak and helmet. ‘The housekeeper told you he’d left in his uniform. Was the body you saw in uniform?’

‘Well, you know, it’s odd but it didn’t occur to me for years but – he wasn’t in uniform. She’d stripped the body down to his underwear. I suppose she burned the uniform later or got Felix to do it – just as the stained shirt that I’d hidden under my bed was never seen again. Felix knew how to put up the partitions and all the materials were to hand in the cellar. If he worked all night he could have sealed off the alcove. And then, in the future, long after her own death, if someone were to pull it down they would find a body not so easily identifiable.’

‘What are the chances of hearing from Felix . . .?’ Joe began.

‘He died three years ago,’ said Georges, subdued. ‘But he would never have spoken of it. Not to anyone. He was devoted to my mother.’

He slumped suddenly, like a string puppet at the end of his act. ‘This is as far as it goes. I’ve given you all I have.’