There was barely any light in the sky, even though there was only half an hour until dawn. The American physicist, with his bandaged head and his black raincoat and his thin pink ankles poking out beneath his expensive pyjamas, was helped into the back of the ambulance by one of the attendants. Since his gabbling remarks about the Victorian photograph, he had fallen silent; Leclerc thought he seemed embarrassed. He had taken the book with him. His wife followed, clutching a bag full of his clothes. They looked like a pair of refugees. The doors were banged shut and the ambulance pulled away, a patrol car behind it.

Leclerc watched until the two vehicles reached the curve of the drive leading to the main road. Brake lights briefly gleamed crimson and then they were gone.

He turned back into the house.

‘Big place for two people,’ muttered one of the gendarmes standing just inside the doorway.

Leclerc grunted. ‘Big place for ten people.’

He went on a solitary expedition to try to get a feel of what he was dealing with. Five, six – no, seven bedrooms upstairs, each with an en suite bathroom, none apparently ever used; the master bedroom huge, with a big dressing room next to it lined by mirrored doors and drawers; a plasma TV in the bathroom; his-and-hers basins; a space-age shower with a dozen nozzles. Across the landing, a gym, with an exercise bike, a rowing machine, a cross-trainer, weights, another big TV. No toys. No evidence of children anywhere, in fact, not even in the framed photographs scattered around, which were mostly of the Hoffmanns on expensive holidays – skiing, of course, and crewing a yacht, and holding hands on some veranda that seemed to be built on stilts above a coral lagoon of improbable blueness.

Leclerc went downstairs, imagining how it must have felt to be Hoffmann, an hour and a half earlier, descending to face the unknown. He skirted the bloodstains and passed through into the study.