In the cool of the air conditioning, a sudden thought crossed his mind: perhaps Madame Dauclercq rented out the house without the owners even knowing; perhaps she was making money behind their backs, which would mean this rental was no more than a sham … No, that was impossible. There was the telephone number in Singapore, the bank transfer to an account not in the name Dauclercq, and the emails that always had a response, even if it was three days later. He had trouble imagining that old woman replying to his emails; he doubted she even had the internet. The scam must be somewhere else. Unless there wasn’t one. Or maybe it was some sort of cursed house that no one in the area wanted to live in; land that, for one reason or another, nobody would even think of buying, the kind of place where things have happened. Franck knew his imagination could run away with him. It was foolish to believe that producers don’t have any; that because they had to see to all the practical details of film-making, that was all they did. Franck knew that wasn’t true. Producers are the biggest dreamers of all, the storytellers who have to make it all happen. That was why he had convinced himself that all these people with their big baskets had deliberately pushed in front of him … There was no one behind him when he left the shop, not even one customer.

He went around the square to avoid getting caught up in the market again; he especially didn’t want to come across the butcher. He caught sight of him from afar. The man fascinated him even from here, a sort of big warlike Buddha or bloodthirsty deity presiding over everything from behind his stall, as if it were at the centre of it all: the market, the village and the surrounding area. The crimson canvas of his great meat display shone through a gap in the crowd. Franck thought back to the way the guy had looked at him. Everybody here was looking at him with the same cold strangeness, the same distance. It was as if they all knew he was the one renting the house at the top of the hill and that he had done a deal with a cursed animal, a dog that, at his instigation, had caused the wild animals of the entire area to scatter. In their eyes, he was perhaps some kind of devil or deranged god, someone who had been put forward unknowingly for some sort of experiment … No, he knew perfectly well that he was getting carried away. His anxiety often resulted in paranoid delusions that he managed with the tablets he always kept in his pocket, in his little green pillbox. And yet last night he had definitely seen that dog, or wolf, just as he had definitely heard the pack of excited animals. In that respect, he wasn’t going mad.