“It would have happened too,” he says. “They would have made it happen. That’s the kind of man Robert Hall was. It would have been so good for the region.” There’s a short silence. Then he says, less confidently, “I’m sure it would have happened.”

On the evening of September 4, Sourdain got a call from the gendarmes: Something had happened at the château. It is a French custom for the gendarmes to call the mayor, as the representative of the people, to the scene of a crime or a terrible accident. He arrived to see the oldest son, Christopher, twenty-two, with the gendarmes as they stood in protective suits, breaking up a big block of concrete. Robert Hall was inside the house, crying.

“After twenty-four hours, concrete is like biscuit,” Sourdain explains. We’re sitting in his office in the village of Le Châtellier, two miles from the château. “So the gendarmes were crumbling it with their hands. And after a while they discovered a ring. They asked Christopher, ‘Is this your mother’s ring?’ He said, ‘Oui.’”

Robert Hall had told the gendarmes that twenty-four hours earlier he’d had a drunken argument with Joanne during which she accidentally fell, hit her head, and died. Then, during the hours that followed, he set her body on fire, put her remains into a builder’s bag, poured in concrete, and hauled it onto the back of a lorry. All this happened behind the house, near the back gate, next to a row of half-built holiday cottages.

Then he stopped. He telephoned Christopher. He said he was going to commit suicide. Christopher called the ambulance, who called the gendarmes, who called the mayor.

Catherine Denis, from the prosecutor’s office in Rennes, told a press conference later that week that when the gendarmes asked Robert why he burned Joanne’s body and encased her remains in concrete, he explained that she’d always said she wanted to be cremated and laid to rest in a mausoleum and he was simply respecting her wishes, albeit in a somewhat informal way.

“What did the Halls do for money?” I ask Mayor Sourdain. “How were they living? How were they funding the golfing project?”

“He told me he was a big success in England,” he replies. “He had lots of businesses there. And sometimes British tourists would rent the château for their holidays.”

“Do you know if the tourists enjoyed staying there?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he replies. “It would have been between English people. You see?”

•   •   •

FABRICE FOUREL works in a bright office in the nearby village of Saint-Étienne-en-Coglès. Posters advertising successful Brittany tourist endeavors line the walls. I am sitting, he says, exactly where Robert and Joanne Hall sat when they came to him in a flap regarding their golf project, in September 2008.

“They were lost,” he says.

Fabrice’s job is to be the middleman between prospective tourist businesses and the labyrinthine French bureaucracy.

“What were the problems?” I ask.

Fabrice sighs as if to say, “Where do I begin?” “They wanted to clear some trees. French law says you have to plant three trees for each one you cut down, not necessarily on your property, but in the region.” He pauses. “It was a big problem. In fact, the administration was angry with the Halls because they didn’t follow the procedure. We had to calm everything.”

“How many trees would they have needed to plant?” I ask.

“Around twenty thousand,” Fabrice says.

Fabrice says people basically already have all the trees they want. If you go to people and offer them trees, they tend to say no. And that wasn’t the only problem. The Halls needed sprinklers, enough electricity for thousands of visitors . . .

“We quickly noticed a gap between the financial needs for such a project and what they had,” Fabrice says. “A project like that could cost twenty million euro.” Twenty-seven million dollars.

“Was it a big gap?” I ask.

Fabrice indicates with his hands a very big gap.

“But they were really motivated,” he says. “That’s why we didn’t want to say, ‘You can’t do it.’ People have to be a bit crazy to lead these kinds of projects.”

I ask Fabrice if he knows whether the Halls’ business renting out the château to British tourists was a success.

“We know nothing about that,” he says. “We know they welcomed people into their house. But we don’t know the details.”

•   •   •

IN AUGUST 2006, Laura Walsh was looking to rent a château for her family holiday when she chanced upon chateaudefretay.com. The site is gone now, but you can still find it on the Internet archive, with its photograph of horses grazing by the lake, plus a list of activities such as fishing, swimming, a games room, a go-karting stadium, cycling, and a weekly treasure hunt.

Laura phoned Joanne Hall, who told her, “We’re not Center Parcs, but we do our best,” which Laura took to mean they were something like Center Parcs.

And so, swept up in the lovely-sounding nature of the thing, she offered to pay the full amount up front—$4,000 for a fortnight’s stay.

“The first thing we saw, as we walked into the bedroom, was what looked like mouse droppings on the bed,” Laura says. “Robert Hall appeared in the doorway. I said, ‘There are mouse droppings on the bed.’ He said, ‘Oh no, no, they’re more likely to be bat droppings.’”

“How was he?” I ask.

“Friendly,” Laura says.

She ran herself a bath and left the bathroom for a minute. When she came back, the bath was empty and the bathroom floor was flooded. They decided to persevere, and went looking for the go-karting stadium.

“We found it in a clearing in the forest,” Laura says. “It was a mess. A shambles. An overgrown shambles. And in the middle of it was a dead goat.”

And so on. There were live wires dangling in the outside toilet, the pool was leaking, there was rubble and broken glass everywhere, and so that evening they confronted the Halls.

“They seemed dazed,” she says, “out of their depth. And drunk. They must have known on some level that this wasn’t right, but instead of admitting it, there was a restrained crossness about them. Robert kept saying, ‘You’re just not getting it. You’re not getting it. You don’t get it.’”

“‘Not getting it’?” I ask.

“He meant, ‘You’re not getting what this is about,’” she says. “‘You’re not getting how idyllic it is.’”

The saddest thing, Laura says, was that the most clearheaded family member was Christopher, the teenage son. He was the only one trying to make everything OK. Laura negotiated with him, and they agreed to stay a week and get a refund for the second. On day two they decided to try out the games room.

“In the hall right outside it,” Laura says, “propped up against the wall, was a shotgun.”

“Was it loaded?” I ask.

“There was live ammunition on the shelf next to it,” she says.

When they left, Laura let the tourist office in nearby Fougères know what a mess the place was. They told her they’d had countless similar reports and had been trying to shut down the place for years. It was widely known in the area, she says, that Château de Fretay was a disaster.

From August 2006 onwards, anybody Googling the château would have straightaway come across Laura’s startling reviews on TripAdvisor and Mumsnet: “BEWARE: CHÂTEAU DE FRETAY!!”

The Halls’ neighbors—farmers who didn’t want to be named—tell me that very few tourists, if any, came to stay at the château these past few years. The Halls’ income seemed to dry up.

•   •   •

THE HALLS HAD BEEN in France for only a year when, in 2000, Robert Hall called on Yves Bourel, a local journalist. Yves knew him by reputation, he says, as there had been some excitement locally about the family’s arrival. “English people with money usually go to the south of France,” he tells me. “We tend to get the poor English people here, because living here is cheap.”