Franck kept an eye on his phone as he drove back to Mont d’Orcières, watching the number of bars between bends in the road. It had felt as if he was plunging into a lost world since he had left Limogne. The network fell away one bar at a time, severing his lifeline; he was losing all his points of reference and entering another world not confined by telephones, and where not everything is trackable. He got a signal again in places along the byroads; a bar or two would suddenly appear and then disappear, then come back, before vanishing a hundred metres further on. After one bend an ‘E’ briefly appeared for the last time. After ten kilometres he turned onto the little road to the old village of Orcières, and there his phone became completely useless.

He pulled in at the bottom of the track leading to the gîte, got out of the car and looked at the potholed incline. It was incredibly steep. If you crouched down it looked steeper still, the angle verging on forty per cent, like a ski jump. He couldn’t believe he had climbed to the top yesterday and gone back down again this morning. Without a 4×4 there would be no chance of getting up this path, unless you had a tractor. He didn’t understand why anyone would have come up with the idea of such a steep access road. At the time, you could probably only have got to the house on foot, or else by horse-drawn cart; or maybe the people who lived up there were completely self-sufficient, and were independent enough not to have to go down to the village.