Yves and I are having breakfast at my hotel in Fougères.

“Why did he come to see you?” I ask.

“He had a business proposal he wanted publicized,” he says. “He wanted to create a hot-air balloon port from the grounds of the château.”

“Oh?” I say.

“We have a lot of wind here,” he says. “The balloons would have lifted off and . . . whoosh!” He waves his arm to indicate a hot-air balloon flying uncontrollably away.

We laugh. “Did anyone say anything to them about the wind?” I ask.

“Oh no!” he replies. “We don’t see rich English people often. So we put the red carpet out for them!”

Yves asks if I’ve heard the news: The prosecutor has decided to charge Robert Hall with aggravated murder.

•   •   •

THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL double-fronted Georgian mill owner’s house outside Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, with an oak-paneled dining room, low beams, marble fireplaces. The windows look out across the fields where they filmed Last of the Summer Wine.

In front of the big AGA-type stove in the kitchen, the owner, Richard Skelton, tells me a story about what happened shortly after they bought the place from the bank, who had repossessed it from the previous owner, Robert Hall. Late one night—this was in 1999—there was a knock on the door. Richard’s wife, Loretta, answered. Two frightening-looking men were standing there.

“Is Robert in?” they asked.

“They didn’t look like normal bailiffs,” Richard says. “These were serious, hard men.”

Loretta knew something like this might happen one day. They had heard stories from the neighbors. On one especially creepy occasion, the next-door neighbor had had a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The two men standing there wouldn’t believe him when he said he wasn’t Robert Hall. He had to get a utility bill to prove it.

“There was a trail of irresponsible behavior all over town,” Richard says. “Not paying loans back . . . And you should have seen the state of this place when we moved in. The pattern over and over is that people would do work for him, he wouldn’t pay them, so they’d walk away, leaving everything all rough and unfinished. Wiring, joinery . . .”

Loretta told the men at the door that Robert Hall didn’t live there anymore, that he’d moved to France. Luckily, they took her word for it. As they left, one of them turned to her and said, quite cheerfully, “Oh, if you ever want someone beaten up, it’s two hundred pounds.”

Richard gives me a tour of the house. He shows me the en suite bathroom. “They had a corner bath in here,” he says, “which was an utter disaster. It was cracked, leaking. The chap who put in the new toilet says it’s amazing any waste got out of the old one.”

He pauses. “Everyone says Robert was a very closed person,” Richard says. “He was very sociable and charming, but after a conversation with him, you’d walk away realizing you’d learned nothing.”

“What was Joanne like?” I ask.

“She was considered to be lovely and charming,” he says. “A neighbor said that regular as clockwork she’d go blasting past the houses in a battered Porsche, taking the kids to school at five past nine. Everything was always chaotic.”

I stop off at the local ironmonger’s store, J W Kaye, to test Richard’s story about Robert Hall leaving debts all over town.

“Yes, he owed me money,” says Dave Earnshaw, who runs the place. “But it wasn’t much, so I didn’t think it was worth pursuing. He owed a lot of other people a lot more money than he owed me when he disappeared out of sight.”

“To France?” I say.

Dave shrugs: “I suppose.”

He reels off a list of failed Robert Hall businesses: a kitchen place in Dewsbury; a fitness center; an abandoned golf-resort project in Derbyshire; a company that imported cars from Europe and (illegally) adapted them from left-hand to right-hand drive; a disastrous Santa’s grotto in the farmers’ market in Hollowgate.

“He told Kirklees Council he was going to make it Christmassy and lovely, like a fair,” Dave says, “but when it opened, it was just a stall selling cheap plastic crap.”

When the council shut it down, Robert Hall smashed his way back in with a baseball bat.

MAN SELLING FESTIVE GIFTS IS CLOSED DOWN

. . . Security guards are patrolling the former Castle garage in Hollowgate and Robert Hall has been given until the end of the month to remove his property. Mr. Hall admitted he broke in and continued to trade for two days after the locks were changed by the council. Councilor George Speight, who chairs the council’s markets committee, said, “In our opinion this was a market and not a fair.”

—Huddersfield Examiner, December 1993

“He always had big plans that were always . . .” Dave pauses. “Crumbling.”

•   •   •

A FEW HUNDRED MILES south of the Château de Fretay, in the countryside near Cognac, Maria-Louise Sawyer runs a support group for British people who’ve moved to rural France to try to live the Year in Provence–type dream, only to find the whole thing spiraling out of control.

“It’s the same story time and again,” she says. And then—with a quite chilling fluidity—she tells me the “story”:

“The French like to live in little tiny modern bungalows. When they inherit these big old properties, they don’t want them. So they sell them cheap to the British. Back in Britain, the man was working, the lady was home. That was fine. They saw each other for only a couple of hours in the evening and at weekends. But then they move here. These are larger properties with grounds. So they’re isolated. They can’t speak the language. The man is possibly renovating an old property, but he doesn’t know how to do it. Everything is different. You go to a government office, you don’t speak French, you’re an outsider. So he gets more and more isolated and resentful. He and his wife are together all the time. And they realize they don’t like each other. They drive each other bonkers. They drink, because the drink over here is less expensive than water. And then . . . bang.”

Maria-Louise pauses. “That’s what happened with my husband. He buggered off back to Britain after shredding all my clothes, daubing food over the walls, and leaving a note that said, ‘I’ve gone.’”

•   •   •

THE DAY JOANNE HALL DIED, some neighbors saw her in the garden. It was the last sighting of her. She was pruning the trees and gardening—starting to plant the hundreds of seedlings in the plastic cups on the table that are still there but all dead now. The neighbors say she looked up at them and, with a big smile, waved.

“I’ve Thought About Doing Myself in Loads of Times . . .”

Maesbrook, Shropshire, is a beautiful, well-to-do village on the Welsh border. The houses are vine-covered Georgian mansions. The cars parked in the driveways are Range Rovers and Porsches. The people of Maesbrook are, by and large, self-made millionaires from Birmingham and Wolverhampton, entrepreneurs who’ve made it big.

“I’d love to live somewhere like this if I could afford it,” I think ruefully as I drive through the village, closely tailed by a police car. The police have been following me ever since they spotted me reading the condolence bouquets on the road outside the grand Osbaston House.

On August 26, the mansion’s owner, Christopher Foster, returned from a neighbor’s barbecue and meticulously destroyed everything he owned. At some point he made the decision to include his family in that. He shot his wife, Jill, in the back of her head in their bedroom. He did the same to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Kirstie, in her bedroom, interrupting her as she chatted with friends on Bebo. He shot the horses and the dogs, and he jammed a horse trailer against the gate and shot out the tires, presumably to stop potential Good Samaritans from intervening. He flooded the mansion with oil, set everything on fire, and then shot himself. A few hours later, the bailiffs arrived, unaware that the possessions they were supposed to impound that day no longer existed.