‘No … Actually, I’m keeping away from it.’

Julien whistled to call the dogs back, waved at the man and started the truck again. Franck turned around to look at the odd pairing of mule and pilgrim, dripping wet underneath all the plastic.

‘Idiots. If they didn’t follow the Grande Randonnée, they’ll be heading straight for the cliff.’

‘So?’

‘So, we have to track them down before they jump,’ Maurice blurted out. ‘No, I’m joking.’

Franck was finding it harder and harder to hide his unease in the company of these two determined, methodical men, especially since they had started asking questions.

‘Are you chasing them for those contracts?’

‘Partly, yes.’

‘You wanted them to sign them, is that it?’

‘Yes.’

Franck had only been on safari once, a photographic safari in Kenya at that, a picnic compared to hunting two men in the rain with blood-tracking dogs following their trail. He had produced this kind of scene several times in films, but now he was part of a real manhunt. He focused on Alpha. After all, he wanted to find Alpha too.

‘And the dog? Why do you think he left?’

‘Your dog is doing his job; he’s following them. I bet you we’ll see him before them.’

‘I don’t understand – he should’ve held them back when they got out of the cage; he should’ve … I don’t know, attacked them.’

‘You mean you wanted him to harm them!’

‘No, just keep them there.’

‘If you didn’t give him the order to attack them, he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it of his own accord.’

Franck tried to stoke up his feelings of hatred by concentrating on his two bastard colleagues taking advantage of his rough patch to hand his library over to Netflix or Amazon. At least by cornering them with three dogs and two guns, he would give them a taste of the violence that had made them all their money – the stupid, ultraviolent games in which the aim was always to kill as many targets as possible, to shoot anything that moved in order to gain points. When he saw them again, he would throw it in their faces: ‘So, guys, you’re obsessed with violence – war games, hunting games, the hyper-realist gameplays that made your reputation and made you a living … Well, here you go, you’re right inside one now. Not so funny when it’s for real, eh?’

The track got narrower, turning into little more than a footpath between two drystone walls. And then Alpha appeared, standing right in the middle of the path in the rain. The other dogs caught up with him, sniffed him and then returned to their quest, while Alpha stayed where he was, watching the 4×4 come towards him as if he had been waiting for it.