Their enmity went back to the days of the Resistance, when one of them had been in a Communist group and the other had joined de Gaulle’s Armйe Secrиte, but Bruno could never remember which. He only knew that they had never spoken to one another since the war, had never allowed their families to speak beyond the frostiest ‘bonjour’, and each man was said to have devoted many of the years since to discreet but determined efforts to seduce the other man’s wife. The Mayor had once, over a convivial glass, told Bruno that he was convinced that each had attained his objective. But Bruno had been a policeman long enough to question most rumours of adulterous passion and, as a careful guardian of his own privacy in such tender matters, was content to allow others similar latitude.

These morning movements were rituals to be respected – rituals such as the devotion with which each family bought its daily bread only at a particular one of the town’s four bakeries, except on those weeks of holidays when they were forced to patronise another, each time lamenting the change in taste and texture. These little ways of St Denis were as familiar to Bruno as his own morning routine on rising: his exercises while listening to Radio Pйrigord, his shower with his special shampoo to protect against the threat of baldness, the soap with the scent of green apples. Then he would feed his chickens while the coffee brewed and share the toasted slices of yesterday’s baguette with his dog, Gigi.

Across the small stream that flowed into the main river, the caves in the limestone cliffs drew his eye. Dark but strangely inviting, the caves with their ancient engravings and paintings drew scholars and tourists to this valley. The tourist office called it ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. It was, they said, the part of Europe that could claim the longest period of continual human habitation.