Maganhard looked at me again. I shrugged. 'I still think we can do it.'

The front door opened and the girl stepped down beside us.

'If Harvey says he shouldn't go, then you can't make him-'

'I'm not asking Harvey to go. I'm going myself. It's what I was hired for.'

Harvey said dully: 'You know who's up there? Alain.'

'Alain?'

Then I thought about it, and he was right. Alain and Bernard – the two top gunmen, the men I'd first asked for. They always worked together. Only they hadn't been together in the Auvergne – and Bernard had got killed. Yes: Alain would most certainly be here now. I should have thought of that.

Harvey said: 'You know Alain. You think you can beat him?'

'Yes.' I nodded. 'I know him. I can beat him.'

'You're crazy.'

'No – Alain didn't set this thing up -I did. I put him out there. And he's still thinking we'll come walking down not expecting trouble. No – this is going to happen my way, not his. I can beat him.'

Miss Jarman said viciously: 'You must reallywant your money.'

'No.' Harvey shook his head wearily. 'It's not that, honey. He wants to be Caneton. And nobody ever beat Caneton. Yet.'

I said quickly: 'Bring the car through in fifteen minutes. Unless you hear shooting. Then you can decide for yourself.'

I walked away down the bank to the right, looking for the entrance to the communication trench. I found it and turned in.

I took several fast steps, turned the first corner, and the close concrete walls shut in on me. After that, I moved more carefully, testing the walls at my side, the floor beneath.

The trench was no more than an unroofed concrete tunnel, working its way forward in zigzags so that an invader couldn't shoot down the length of it. The concrete had the samegritty-soft dampness of the blockhouse farther back, and mud had dribbled down the sides into heaps that were growing tufts of grass. The floor had once had a drainage channel down the middle, but now it was a series of slimy puddles where things moved and gurgled, but never seemed to break the thick surface.

And where are you waiting, Alain? I should know. I worked with you, on your side, in the old days. I remember you: fast, cool, and ruthless. And since then, you've been practising, I hear.

I found myself walking crouched. Stupid. The trench had been dug just deep enough so that you could walk upright and not be seen from outside. Seven feet deep. Just one foot deeper than the grave. And the view out wasn't much better.

At the next corner the turn was much sharper. I poked an eyebrow round, and I was in the third-line firing trench.

It ran across square to the line of the communication trench. Again lined with concrete, but wider and with an eighteen-inch firestep on the front side for defenders to stand on. And above that, at the lip of the trench, there was an irregular humped line sprouting small bushes that must once have been a sandbag parapet.

I took a step and trod on something that crunched. The walls picked up the sound and rang it like a peal of bells along the trench, and things moved suddenly in the puddles, leaving slow swirls and softglop noises.

I froze, and the sounds died. Then I lifted my foot and I'd crushed the muddy-white skeleton of a frog. I took a deep breath and a long stride across on the firestep.

The air felt suddenly sweet and the bushes rustled gently in the wind. But I couldn't see a damn thing. Ahead of me, the whole battle zone was covered with small bushes, growing higher than I could stand from the trench.

Are you out there, Alain, and not in the trenches at all? You could hide an army out in the bushes, too, by now. And you wouldn't be alone; not you. At least two of you, one on either side of the path to give cross-fire. So if the first shots missed, whichever way we jumped, we'd be jumping into the guns. You're professionals – this job's no use if you don't live to collect your pay. You don't want a gun-battle; just a neat little murder.

I moved along the firestep, where there were no puddles but just heaps of wet sand that had spilled down from the rotted sandbags. When I ducked my head, the wind shut off as if I'd closed a hatch, and the air was close, warm, and slimy.

The firing trenches had their own pattern: the zigzags were squared off, like the shape of huge battlements laid flat on the ground. The front parallels were where you were supposed to win the war from; the rear ones (what the hell did they call them? – yes, 'traverses') for having a quiet smoke while somebody else won it.

I walked round several corners, from traverse up to front and back again. Almost every front wall had something in it: dark, foul-smelling entrances to deep dugouts, or steps up to a squat pillbox sunk into the parapet. The pillboxes were always on the front parallels.

Then I saw the tank path. It crossed on a culvert built into a traverse: a heavy concrete affair to support the weight of a tank above, yet leaving a three-foot tunnel for crawling through underneath.

I stayed where I was. I knew now that if Alain was in the trenches, he wasn't in this third line. He'd have somebody on both sides… I shivered as I remembered how cheerfully I'd walked up round those corners.

I walked back more carefully, found the communication trench leading to the second line. As I turned in, I looked at my watch: I'd used six of my fifteen minutes.

The lines were supposed to be seventy yards apart, but the zigzag of the trench turned it into a hundred-yard trip. And at one point a barbed-wire entanglement laid across the top had collapsed into the trench itself. I slid through with no more than three or four injections of blood-poisoning off the rusted spikes.

But at least it told me how far I'd come: barbed wire should be laid just outside grenade-throwing range of the trench it protects. Rules of War – before people started throwing dive-bombers and armoured columns instead of grenades…

Grenades. Would Alain have grenades? Yes-if he was expecting a car. But he wasn't. Just several people in the open – and there grenades are useless. All that time waiting for them to go off, and after the flash and bang, you don't know if they're dead or hiding in the ditch. So – no grenades.

So what instead? A burst of Sten-gun fire. Just waiting until we were close enough to chop us down with one burst…And where had I thought of that idea before? Yes – in Quimper, the man in the car, the dead man. Resistance Sten-gunner.9 mm. cartridge on his key-ring – probably from the first time he killed with his nice new Sten. Sentimentalist. Realists fight for money. Like Alain. Like Caneton.

I stopped at the corner, lowered my head, and peered carefully around three feet off the ground. Nothing. I hadn't expected anything. But I'd remembered I was in a trench system built to have as many corners as possible for men with guns to wait behind…

Was I here for twelve thousand francs? No. I'd insisted on being told that Maganhard was in the right- that he hadn't raped anybody, that he wasn't trying to kill anybody but people were trying to kill him. That made him in the right – and me too. Just an old sentimentalist.

Or because I was Caneton?

I looked quickly left and right into the second-line firing trench, stepped across on the firestep, and started moving left, towards the tank path.

Suddenly it was a long, cold bright way to the next corner. I got there, but it cost me something that I wouldn't have left to get me round the next. And the next after that.

I moved carefully, feeling with my foot for obstacles before putting it down, keeping my eyes and the gun on the corner ahead.

Put 'He died for twelve thousand francs' on a man's tomb and nobody'll sneer. They'll reckon he knew what he was doing. Twelve thousand francs is something you can count; you can say it isn't enough; you can change your mind and not earn it.