Limogne was thirty minutes from Mont d’Orcières along a small road barely wide enough for two vehicles. He had only come across one car on the way, an old van in which he thought he could make out Madame Dauclercq behind the filthy windscreen. As he was driving, he glanced over at the undergrowth, looking for the dog from last night, but maybe it never came out of the hills up there, hiding in the woods like a wolf.

Limogne was a small town. Even so, it had two cafés and two big grocery shops, but no supermarket. He spent a long time driving around the back streets before eventually parking right in the sun. What mattered was to reconnect with civilisation and see some people. The main street was shut because it was market day, Sunday. Earlier, coming into town, he had almost been grateful for the minuscule traffic jam going into the centre; he even delighted in the difficulty of finding a space large enough to park the 4×4. It was doing him the world of good just to be away from the deafening silence of the hills.

When he had left that morning, Lise was still asleep. He closed the curtains as he was getting up so she could carry on sleeping. At nearly nine o’clock she still had her head hidden under the sheet, as if she hadn’t moved since yesterday evening. She seemed peaceful. Anyone would think she really was in her element here. He couldn’t understand why she was so at home in this bedroom, this bed, this house, why she was completely at ease on the hill open to the winds, right in the middle of nowhere. It made no sense. Yesterday he had told her that he would go shopping early so he would go on his own. He knew Lise had no desire to go into town. She would prefer to spend the morning relaxing in the house, avoiding the crowds. She had written him a shopping list – tea, vegetables, pasta, then salt, sugar, milk and lots of basic things, organic if possible. Once in town he started to wonder if it was really wise to have left her all alone in that isolated house, with the windows and doors wide open. Yesterday they had wedged them open with stones to create as much draught as possible, and he hadn’t closed them when he left this morning.