He came into the bar at half past two on the first day, which meant he had been at the bottom of the hill all morning and had heard about the car at eleven and had waited three and a half hours.
He stopped just inside the door.
"Nadine," said Anton Brandt.
He was three and thirty. He had been two and twenty when it happened and he had worked for her father four days a week for four years, and she had not seen him since a funeral in the November of the following year at which he had stood at the back and left before the end.
"You have got his shed," she said.
"I have got his shed."
"Since when?"
"Since 2029. It was empty four years and then it was going to be pulled down, and I bought it off the commune for eleven thousand and I have been in it nine years."
He put his hands in his pockets.
"And there are three of his boats on the racks at the back," said Anton Brandt, "and I have not touched one of them in nine years, and I have thought about writing to you about eleven times a year for all of them, and I did not have an address and I did not have the nerve."
Nadine Roux put her cup down very carefully.
"You have got three of my father's boats."
"I have got three of your father's boats."
"Which three?"
"The Delaunay boat. A dinghy of Pichon's that was never collected. And a hull he started in 2016 that has nothing on it and that I have never been able to date."
She did not say anything for about four seconds.
"I am going to say the other thing now," said Anton Brandt, "because you have been sitting in this bar since eleven o'clock letting this town make something up, and I have known you since you were nine years old and I am not going to sit here and be part of the audience.
"I was two and twenty," he said. "I was in that workshop four days a week for four years. I told them."
The bar at the far end of the square went entirely quiet.
"Told who?"
"The gendarmes. Twice, in the April, four days apart. The magistrate's clerk at Saint-Omer in the June, which took me four hours to arrange and eleven minutes to do.
"And Vasseur's own foreman, in the yard, in the July, which was the stupidest thing I have ever done and which I got hit for."
"And?"
"And I was two and twenty and I worked for your father," said Anton Brandt, "and every single one of them wrote that down first.
"Employé de M. Roux. It is the second line on all three statements. I have seen two of them.
"And after that there is nothing else on the page."