An old woman with suspicious eyes, her thick, shapeless body lurching from side to side, passed by me in indifferent silence, and I felt bolder stares from a cluster of young men who moved more swiftly and with purpose.

Around the corner, the street was quieter. The human noise of shouts and speech and motors grew steadily more faint behind me, until my own footsteps sounded intrusively loud. On every house the shutters were pulled back and fastened; lace curtains fluttered at the open windows. Painted doors sagged on their ancient hinges, over steps that had been swept spotlessly clean. The evidence of human life was everywhere, but I saw no one. The twisting street was empty, lonely, silent.

I might have been the only soul alive.

And so the cat, racing past me in a sudden blur of black and white, nearly scared me to death. I jumped aside as a great lolloping mongrel of a dog came tearing up the street in hot pursuit, but the cat was even quicker. In the blink of an eye it hurled itself over a high stone wall, leaving the dog standing in frustration on the other side. After barking its displeasure, the dog slunk sourly off in search of a more co-operative quarry.

The wall over which the cat had vanished formed part of a narrow alleyway whose name, Ruelle des Rèves, was plainly marked for all to see. The Lane of Dreams. It seemed too grandiose a name for such a tiny thoroughfare.

Curious, I crossed the street. Standing in the lane, one could easily see how the cat had managed its escape. The wall was thickly hung with ivy – not the dark English ivy to which I was accustomed, but the other kind so common here in Chinon, a tangled mass of paler green that brightened at its outer edge to crimson, where the smaller leaves spilled down in curling tendrils.

No windows peered into the little lane, and there appeared to be just one door, painted green and set so deep in ivy that one almost didn’t notice. It would open, I thought, into the garden of the house that rose behind the high stone wall.

The house itself looked less than friendly. Even as I took a step backwards to view it from a proper angle a window slammed above my head, and looking up I saw a face against the glass. Only for an instant, the briefest glimpse, and yet I recognised the face and knew the man who owned it: the young German artist, Christian Rand.

This must be his house, then. The house that had been loaned to him by Martine … what was her name? Martine Muret. The house in which, three days ago, a man had died. I remembered Garland Whitaker saying cattily, Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe Christian did it … One wouldn’t need much fancy to imagine murder here.

It was enough to give one the creeps, really – the silent street and the dingy, claustrophobic Lane of Dreams, and the touch of death still hanging heavy round the house. Like ivy, I thought, dropping my gaze to the wall.

The cat’s unblinking eyes locked with mine. I hadn’t heard a sound, yet there it was, settled comfortably among the red-tinged vines that rustled along the top of the high wall. After a moment’s hard stare the cat, like Christian, chose to ignore me. The pale eyes closed.

Twice snubbed, I turned away. Since I was, by this time, quite hopelessly lost, it hardly seemed to matter which direction I chose, and so I walked on through the narrow lane and came into another street as quiet as the one I’d just been on. Unlike the first street, though, this one was packed with cars and people, and the silence made me curious until I saw the cause of it.

At the street’s end stood an old church, pale and plain and solid. And in front of the church, almost blocking the road, a long hearse stretched dead black against the yellowed walls of the houses. The mourners, sombre in their dark overcoats, milled about the pavement, exchanging subdued kisses and handshakes.

One face among the many drew my gaze. It was the smoothly handsome face of my taxi driver, his classic profile turning a fraction away from me as he bent his head to say something to the young woman standing by the church door – a young woman with short black hair and fragile features that were almost tragic in their beauty. I frowned. I’d seen her somewhere, too, just recently … but where? And then she placed her hand upon his sleeve and I remembered.

I looked with deeper interest at Martine Muret. This morning, from the château walls, I’d seen her laughing, leaning close against Neil Grantham, full of life. She looked sedate now, solemn, though I couldn’t find much sadness in her lovely face. But then, I thought, perhaps she wasn’t sad. Paul called the dead man her ex-husband, so they must have been divorced. She might have hated him, for all I knew. She might have wished him dead.

Respectfully, she looked down as they carried out the flowers – great elaborate racks of flowers, red and gold, that were laid with care inside the waiting hearse. A woman, not the widow, started weeping audibly, and not wanting to intrude further I pulled my gaze away.

And then I froze.

Across the narrow street, not ten feet from me, the dark, unshaven man from the fountain square leaned one shoulder against the stuccoed wall of the house behind him, and calmly lit a cigarette. Expressionless, he met my eyes. For a long unnerving moment we just stood there, staring at one another, and then the church bells set up a great clanging peal of sound that made the dog at his feet throw back its head and howl, joining the general lament.

The burst of noise broke the spell. I turned and walked on rapidly, away from the church and the press of mourners. Foolish, I thought, to be nervous of a stranger in broad daylight, in a public street. Foolish to find myself listening for a sinister fall of footsteps on the pavement behind me. Still, foolish or not, I kept on walking faster and faster, and I was very nearly running by the time I reached the river.