Didier, Rocco noticed, was missing the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand, and his face looked shiny on one side.

‘Looks like he suffered for his art.’

Claude laughed. ‘He hit a grenade a little too enthusiastically one day. It was a dud, but still had enough life in it to stop him playing the accordion.’

‘Now there’s a blessing.’ Lucas paused, did a double take. ‘He hit a live grenade?’ It made him wonder if there was, after all, some truth to the slanderous rumours about country folk circulated among his former colleagues, who rarely, if ever, ventured outside the city limits. ‘Tell me you’re kidding.’

‘Unbelievable, but true. World War Two, British, I think it was. He doesn’t usually bother with them — they’re too small and not worth the effort. He prefers artillery shells, the bigger the better. And bombs like this one.’

‘You make it sound like a full-time job.’

‘It is. The last big one he found was next to the school eighteen months ago. He’d just finished clearing the ground around it and went to get some lifting gear when it blew up. Knocked him flat on his arse and blew the roof off the schoolhouse. Luckily, the kids were on holiday.’

‘For him, too.’

‘Not the way he saw it. All that metal, fragmented to hell; he got totally tanked and cried for three whole days.’

Rocco grunted. No wonder the scrap man was so interested in this find. Large, oblong and rounded, it had a hefty hexagon nut at the end protruding from the ground. The casing was covered in a thick scale of rust, no doubt through being buried in the chalky soil of the Poissons-les-Marais churchyard with only the ancient village dead for company. Quite how such a monster had lain overlooked for so long was a mystery, although he knew these things worked their way to the surface from time to time, like pebbles in the garden.