Page 25 of The French Wife

‘Right, we need to get these down to the station right away for testing by firearms experts. Antoine, write out a receipt for Madame Hudson to sign, listing what we’re taking away with us.’

The policemen carried the boxes to their car and stowed them in the boot.

‘I will let Gaston know when you can go and see my grandmother,’ Brodin said, shaking Emma’s hand. ‘And, of course, we will let you know the results of the firearms tests on the weapons.’

‘Thank you. And thank you so much for coming.’

Once Emma had signed the receipt Antoine Barbier had written out for her, the two policemen drove away. She stood beside Gaston in the courtyard and watched the black Citroën bounce along the track and disappear into the spinney.

‘I didn’t expect my first morning here to be quite so eventful,’ Gaston said, turning to go inside.

Emma laughed. ‘Me neither,’ she said, following him into the house. ‘What an amazing thing to have happened. I think I need another coffee to recover from the shock. Would you like one? And what about you, Pierre?’

The two men sat at the table while Emma brewed coffee on the camping stove. They were discussing the amazing find in the cellar.

‘Did you know this place was once used by the Resistance during the war?’ Gaston asked Pierre.

Pierre shrugged. ‘There were always rumours about this farm because it was closed up for so long. Rumours that it was haunted, that something strange had happened here during the war, yes. But nothing directly about the Resistance. It’s not surprising though. It’s well hidden here and a good distance away from the town. It probably would have been a good place for partisans to hide.’

Emma gave the men their coffee, then went out into the courtyard where there was better phone reception than in the house, and called the office of Felix Giroud, the notaire in Carcassonne. The receptionist put her through, and when Giroud answered, she asked him if he had any information about the previous owners of Le Châtaignier.

Giroud asked her to wait a moment while he looked. He put down his phone and she heard him opening and closing the drawers in his office before he came back on the line.

‘I don’t have a great deal of information about them,’ he said. ‘But I do know their names were Bruno and Amélie Garnier.’

Emma digested this information.

‘But, monsieur, I’ve been to the mairie in St Marie-des-Champs and looked at the property records there. I know the Garniers were the people who owned the farm during the war, but the farm wasn’t repossessed by the state until the 1960s. Did the Garniers own it right up until that time or were there subsequent owners, do you know?’

‘No. Nobody is recorded as having owned the farm after them. As I said, madame, I don’t have much on record about the history of Le Châtaignier. The Garniers were the last people to own the farm as far as I can see.’

‘Thank you. Thank you, monsieur. That’s really helpful.’

She was about to hang up, when he ventured, a little reluctantly, ‘There might be some more files in our archives. I will dig them out for you and let you know if I find anything.’

‘I’d be very grateful if you could, monsieur,’ Emma said.

‘It could be a couple of weeks, though, and I will have to invoice you for my time, I’m afraid.’

‘Of course. I’d be only too happy to pay.’

She ended the call and returned to the kitchen. Pierre was still replacing the electric sockets and Gaston was hard at work sanding down the wooden cupboards. They chatted for a while, speculating about what might have happened in the house during the war.

‘These walls must have witnessed some incredible things,’ Gaston said.

‘I know. And I’m going to do my best to find out as much about it as I can,’ Emma replied.

She watched Gaston working for a while in silence, enjoying the sight of a true craftsman at his task. He had skilled hands, a careful eye and he worked quickly. At last he must have sensed her watching him because he stopped working, looked up and smiled.

The two men left in the middle of the afternoon. Gaston had told her he needed to go to a builders’ merchants in the nearby town of Fabrezan to get some wood stain and black paint for the range. He was also going to buy some linseed oil to treat the terracotta tiles on the kitchen floor.

‘I’ll be back at eight tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ll need Pierre tomorrow, so I’ll come on my own.’

Emma stood in the courtyard and watched them leave, then she locked up the house and wandered towards the barns. She’d barely looked inside them since she’d arrived, there had been so much to do in the house itself, but now she wanted to investigate them. She’d been inside the former herbergerie of course, which led directly off the kitchen, where the wooden bunks that must have once housed farm workers were gathering dust, but now she wanted to take a look at the other barns.

The first barn had its back to the front of the house. It wasn’t as large as the herbergerie, and she was curious to see if there was anything inside it; any clues or reminders of the past. She approached the huge, double doors that were secured with a thick plank of wood through the handles and a padlock holding them together. She took out her bunch of keys and began to search through them for one that fitted this padlock. It took her a while, there were several keys on the bunch, a few of which were likely candidates, but she found the one she was looking for eventually and eased it into the padlock.

Just then, she saw something strange out of the corner of her eye, some fleeting movement at the other end of the barn. She froze, fear rushing through her for a split second. But then, more curious than afraid, she let go of the padlock and walked towards the end of the barn to see who or what had startled her.