Score!

Valhalla had been hot, but the Midi seemed a hundred times hotter. The wind, blowing like a hair-dryer about to fuse, whipped Lucy’s curls into a frenzy.

‘Now I know how a frozen chicken feels when it’s shoved into the microwave,’ she grumbled.

Stupid from lack of sleep, she was passionately grateful for the cool efficiency with which Wolfie hired a car, located the village of Montvert and booked into its best hotel, appropriately named La Reconnaissance.

Having departed in such haste, Lucy was dismayed she hadn’t packed deodorant, a hairbrush, or base to tone down her shiny, increasingly flushed face.

‘At least we’ll get a decent dinner this evening,’ said the ever-practical Wolfie, who was consulting the menu and the wine list as she came down. ‘And there’s the château,’ he added, pointing up at the disdainful back of a large grey house nestling in woodland on top of the hill.

‘The Montigny family never forgave the villagers for burning the place down during the French Revolution,’ said Lucy, as they got back into the hired car, and she eased her bare legs gingerly on to the scorching leather seat. ‘When the family returned from exile, they pointedly built the new château facing away from the village and overlooking the Pyrenees. Oh, what a sweet dog. Can I ring Rozzy to ask if James is OK?’

‘Certainly not. She’d want to know where we were and promptly grass to her friend Gablecross. We don’t want Interpol muscling in. Anyway, we’ll be back tomorrow.’

As Wolfie swung off the main road and headed for the mountains, Lucy groped for her dark glasses to ward off the dazzling golden glare of the sunflower fields.

‘Am I too under-dressed?’ she asked nervously, glancing down at her orange T-shirt and grey shorts. ‘Hortense sounds a martinet. Tristan says she’s been having little heart-attacks for ages, growing more and more eccentric. She used to play golf with the Duke of Windsor and once smashed a Louis XIV chandelier demonstrating some iron shot. Evidently she cuts up Le Monde every morning and lays all the stories she wants to read on chairs so no-one can sit down.’

‘She’ll need a fleet of sofas to accommodate the coverage of Tristan’s arrest,’ said Wolfie.

‘Probably been kept away from her, if she’s so ill. I do hope she’ll see us. Tristan also said she was terribly mean. The estate’s next to a golf course, and she rushes out, grabs any lost balls and wraps them up for her nieces and nephews for Christmas. Tristan realized she was losing it last birthday when she sent him a blackboard with the letters of the alphabet round the frame.’

Wolfie stopped Lucy’s rattling by asking her irritably if she remembered everything Tristan had ever told her.

‘Probably.’ Lucy flushed an even more unbecoming shade of red.

Wolfie noticed the anguished way she glanced at every farm-building they passed as if she was expecting some horrific content of battery hen or veal calf.

‘Oh, no,’ she wailed, as he slowed down behind a lorry, ‘they’ve got lambs in there. I bet they haven’t been watered for yonks.’

Nearly removing the side of the hired car, as he shortened her misery by overtaking the lorry, Wolfie snapped that she’d got to toughen up.

‘You can’t suffer for every squashed earwig in this world.’

‘Hortense suffered,’ protested Lucy. ‘She claimed that the best years of her life were spent fighting for the Resistance, despite being captured and tortured by the bloody Krauts— Oh, Wolfie, I’m sorry.’

‘I’m used to it,’ said Wolfie calmly. Then, catching sight of two fat men towing trolleys and sweating in plus-fours, ‘Here’s the golf course, and there’s the château.’

To repel intruders, two hissing stone Montigny snakes were chained to the pillars on either side of the big iron gates. Ahead at the end of an avenue of limes and flanked by ancient arthritic oaks stood a grey, square house with its pale grey shutters closed against prying eyes and the afternoon sun.

The good news was that all Hortense’s greedy relations had temporarily pushed off to another family house in Brittany to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of Tristan’s eldest brother Alexandre, the judge. With them, leaving the coast even clearer, had gone the even greedier Dupont, who was already carrion-crowing at the prospect of a large cut of Hortense’s estate.

The bad news was that Hortense, who’d kept such iron control of her life, was now lying upstairs under a mosquito net, morphinised up to the eyeballs, recognizing no-one.

‘Yesterday, she was convinced the Bolsheviks had taken over the château,’ sighed Florence, the kind, plump housekeeper, who was almost as old as her mistress. ‘Today the Nazis have moved in, and she’s back in the Resistance. So I’m afraid you won’t be very welcome,’ she added apologetically to Wolfie.