Martin Walker: Bruno, chief of police

Then he turned and saw Isabelle striding jauntily towards him. For the pleasure of it rather than the camouflage for the gossips, he kissed her formally on both cheeks and Christine rose to kiss her too. He supposed that Isabelle would ensure that the Englishwoman understood the need to keep the town’s secrets.

With a burst of cheery greetings, Monsieur Jackson and his family arrived, the grandson with his bugle brightly polished, and Pamela introduced them to Isabelle, who dutifully admired Monsieur Jackson’s British flag.

It was less than five minutes to twelve when Momu arrived with Karim and his family. Bruno kissed Rashida, who looked ready to give birth there and then, and hugged Karim as he handed him the flag with the Stars and Stripes, and the Mayor came across to greet them. Bruno checked his watch. The two old men were usually here by now. The siren was about to sound, and the Mayor looked at him, one eyebrow eloquently raised.

And then Jean-Pierre and Bachelot emerged, walking slowly and almost painfully up opposite pavements from the Rue de Paris into the square, and made their separate ways to the Mairie to collect their flags. The two men were very old, Bruno thought, but neither one would stoop to use the assistance of a walking cane while the other walked unaided. What power of rage and vengeance had it required, he marvelled, to endow these enfeebled ancients with the strength to kill with all the passion and fury of youth?

He stared at them curiously as he handed them the flags, the tricolore for Jean-Pierre and the Cross of Lorraine for Bachelot the Gaullist. The two men looked at him suspiciously and then shared the briefest of glances.

‘After all that you’ve been through together, and I include the secret you’ve shared for the past month, do you not think in the little time remaining to you that you two old Resistance fighters might exchange a word?’ he asked them quietly.

The old men stood in grim silence, each one with his hand on a flag, each with a small tricolore in his lapel, each with his memory of a day in May sixty years ago when the Force Mobile had come to St Denis, and a day in May more recently when the story had come full circle and another life had been taken.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ snapped Bachelot, and turned and looked at his old enemy, Jean-Pierre.

A look passed between them that Bruno remembered from the schoolroom, two small boys stoutly refusing to admit that there was any connection between the broken window and the catapults in their hand; a look composed of defiance and deceit that masqueraded as innocence. So much contained within a single glance, Bruno mused, so much in that initial look they had exchanged when they first saw the old Arab at the victory parade. That had been the first direct look between the two veterans in decades, a communication that had led to an understanding and then to a resolve and then to the killing. Bruno wondered where they had agreed to meet, how that first conversation had gone, how the agreement had been reached to murder. Doubtless they would have called it an execution, a righteous act, a moment of justice too long denied.

‘If you’ve got something to say, Bruno, then say it,’ grunted Jean-Pierre. ‘Our consciences are clear.’ Beside him, Bachelot nodded grimly.

‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ Bruno quoted.

This time they did not need to look at one another. They stared back at Bruno, their backs straight, their heads high, their pride visible.

‘Vive la France!’ said the two old men in unison, and marched off with their flags to lead the parade as the town band struck up the Marseillaise.