He paid penance for his thoughts by making lunch with the things in the fridge she had worried would go off. They lay side by side with their plates on the newly cut grass, playing music through Alex’s portable speaker and looking at pictures of their lives in London and YouTube, falling through the rabbit hole of connections; cover versions, spinoffs, spoofs. There was nobody there to see them, lying together in the garden, just the tall trees all around and the empty hotel. They even made love, for the first time since it happened. They made love on the grass, as if nobody had recently died, and there was no crisis, and held one another afterwards, resting in the sunshine.

‘You’ll burn,’ he said.

‘So will you.’

They roly-polied together into the shade.

‘Mind the snakes don’t come,’ she said.

Their phones shuddered warnings and alerts. Griff would like to see them at the Chateau L’Orée des Vignes later that afternoon.

‘Oh God!’ shouted Bea in distraction, stretching her arms up to the sky. ‘I don’t want to go there again!’

He pinned her down and kissed her. ‘More luxury. Poor you.’

They heard banging.

‘What the hell?’ he said.

Banging again. A fist on the door.

‘I didn’t hear the bell,’ said Dan.

‘Nor me –’

As they scrambled up, before they had time to go inside, a uniformed gendarme appeared round the corner. He walked straight over the flower bed in his army boots, like an apparition, as if it weren’t a flower bed, just earth. They stared at him marching towards them, gun and taser heavily hanging from his belt, with his navy-blue peaked cap pulled down. The banging started again, on the front door.

‘They’re back here!’ the gendarme shouted over his shoulder.

Bea and Dan were dazed; fumbling and scared in their bare feet, clothes in a mess.

‘What do you want?’ said Bea.

He stood, boots planted wide, staring at them, at a loss.

‘I need to go and open the door,’ said Bea.

‘He stays here,’ said the gendarme, pointing at Dan.

‘He said “stay here”,’ Bea told Dan, her voice shaking.

‘Why?’ said Dan, but he froze.

‘I’m going to open the door,’ she said in English, then French, holding out her hands to pacify the gendarme.

She ran through the hotel and opened the door to two men, in dark blue bomber jackets and army trousers, with bright white stripes and Gendarmerie written on their chests. She didn’t recognise either of them.

‘What’s going on?’ she said. She saw a white van and a squad car parked behind them. ‘What’s he doing?’ She pointed at the back garden.

‘I’m sorry,’ said one of the men. ‘We didn’t mean to scare you.’ He held out a badge. ‘TIC.’

The second one set off, round the corner of the hotel.

‘I’ll sort out Girard,’ he said.