Dear Sergio could not allow himself to be cynical and hope to do a decent job.

For a cop, it’s harder. Aliette supposed she could understand Miri’s aggrieved papa. And she had agreed with the feminist side of the debate the sad incident had sparked during the trial some ten years before. There may have been mitigating circumstances, but there was no excuse.

But the backlash of bitterness disappointed her. Nine years in prison is not nothing.

In November a popular Senegalese band invited Luc to come and sing with them.

Which incited yet more angst and accusation in the salons and studios of Paris.

Luc Malarmé had come down before Christmas, to his retreat on a ridge between Prades and Berlou. They’d started seeing him around town that winter. It was hard to miss that boyish face, the tousled hair that kept him looking barely over twenty even after nine years in a prison cell. He was indeed well practised in the art of gazing straight ahead. Luc Malarmé now existed in a netherworld of shame, permanently stained by his violent act. Most citizens of Saint-Brin stared but kept their distance as he unassumingly took his turn in line at the post office, the bank, the butcher’s, or at the Sunday market, that most public moment in the course of a week, when you saw everyone, at least in passing. They were curious to see such a man so close, and so ordinary. Aliette stared too. Impossible not to.

Others were more than curious. They were the ones who found him unforgivable.

It was the way they sized him up, openly judgmental, as if he were a melon past its prime.

There’s a cheap image for you — a cheap image for a small, mean-minded sentiment.

But apt for a Sunday morning in early March. Aliette and Sergio were selecting tomatoes. Luc Malarmé was directly across the lane, at a fruit vendor’s, standing in a shaft of spring sunlight that had found its way through the covering of plane tree foliage. He was choosing a cantaloupe, appraising each piece of fruit with a touch once magical on a keyboard, a guitar string, working notes from his haunting flute. The Midi sun was truly warm that day and you might have thought that simple fact might be reflected in a fruit vendor’s eyes. But, no… Aliette watched the woman edging closer, peering, angry in advance, as if sure that Luc Malarmé would grab one of her wares and run, a pathetic petty thief. The sheer meanness in that woman’s face left the inspector boggled. ‘He looks so utterly alone,’ she murmured.

‘Everyone looks lonely when they’re shopping.’

Sergio’s off-the-cuff profundities were one of the many reasons Aliette had stayed with him for coming on three years. Today, purposely or otherwise, he’d missed her point. ‘I mean in the world. No one will go near him… How can that woman go to mass?’

‘She doesn’t.