Franck and Lise had set off that morning. Their aim was to arrive mid-afternoon to pick up the keys at the agreed place and get to the gîte in time to explore the surroundings before nightfall. With a bit of luck, they might even be able to get back down to do some shopping, if they could find a town, and the shops didn’t close too early. They were confident that at the height of summer there would be something open after seven o’clock.

Yet, from the very beginning, nothing had gone to plan, starting with the traffic jams on the way out of Paris. It was the first time they had had to leave in peak holiday traffic on a Saturday at the beginning of August, and they got caught up in the big rush. Then at lunchtime there was the endless wait at the service-station restaurant, followed by a problem starting the huge hired Audi 4×4, driven poorly by Franck. It was as complicated as it was cumbersome, but it was all they could find to rent.

After the motorway, there was a main road and then a series of small roads, at which point the satnav was so inaccurate it seemed they would never reach Orcières. Again and again, they would be nearly there, only to get further away once more. The directions the computer voice gave seemed to contradict one another. Franck began to doubt whether the place really existed. From the start he had had a nagging feeling that they were being taken for a ride. He had always thought there was something odd about the advert. The telephone number they had tried to call was in Asia – Singapore, to be precise – and even though it was possible that the owners lived there, there was still the strange fact that they only ever responded via email. Maybe the advert was a hoax, and they had been defrauded of their €1,400 deposit.

No expert in hire cars, Franck finally understood why he couldn’t get to Orcières. The vehicle was so big that the rental company had put the satnav in camper-van mode for safety purposes, and because of this it only recommended the larger roads. The narrow or steep ones were never suggested, so they were just circling around their destination.

It was seven o’clock by the time they finally reached the village where they were supposed to be picking up the keys, Orcières-le-Bas. It was more a sparsely populated hamlet with tracks leading to a number of unsignposted farms. There was someone waiting to hand over the keys in one of these, though they could not tell which one, as no names or house numbers were visible at the entrances. It was still so hot – the dashboard read thirty-six degrees – that the shutters on the doors and windows were kept closed. Three times they knocked at doors without success. The fourth time, someone appeared.