Inside Paligny at five o’clock that afternoon it was dark. They felt tired and strange from travelling, and being there again. The hotel was exactly the same, and the sameness made it feel more empty, and sinister. In the few days they had been away, the weeds had grown taller and the vines thicker on the windows. Capitaine Vincent’s card had the grenade symbol of the gendarmerie centred above his name and number. It was dusty from the seams in the bottom of her cotton bag and the corners were bent.

‘Do you trust him?’ asked Dan.

‘Yes. Completely.’

‘OK.’

She called the number, staring at the card. The phone rang out.

‘Capitaine Vincent, this is Beatrice Adamson, could you call me?’

Then she called the gendarmerie, in Beaune, and left a message for his team. They packed up the last of their things. It was muggy; everything felt damp.

‘It’s weird being here, knowing there’s all that money somewhere,’ he said.

‘It’s frightening,’ she said.

‘Yes. Let’s just go.’

‘But if Alex did tell – somebody – it was here, Griff’s probably right, they would have been here by now.’

‘I don’t much want to take the chance.’

‘No. I know. I wish the police would call back.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Bea. Let’s go,’ said Dan. ‘If they call, they call. We can stay somewhere nearby.’

She was looking down at her hands. She didn’t answer.

‘What?’ he said.

She got up and walked away from him.

‘I want to look for this money,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘I need to see it.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see what’s so important to everybody.’

He could not dissuade her. He tried, but he wanted to see it too.

They looked in cupboards and drawers; the wardrobes, and chests of drawers in the bedrooms, and the sideboard in the dining room. The act of searching made the need to find it stronger.

‘We need to be thorough,’ she said. ‘I’ll start at the top, and you start at the bottom.’

The wine cellar was not as big as the ground floor itself. It was accessed by an outside door, down small stone steps, or from the annexe by the kitchen. Outside, in the dusk, Dan pushed the door open. The handle was loose in the soft wood and the lock was broken. He went inside, stooping, and hunching his shoulders, scared of vermin. It was too damp for snakes. Part of the floor was dirt and most of the rest was stone, except for in one place, where there were boards. It looked to Dan as though there might be another cellar, deeper, underneath.