The car was on the square at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning in March and by two the whole of Ardres knew.
It is that sort of town. Eleven hundred people, four bars on the square, a mill at one end and a river at the other, and a car with a Paris plate that stays parked for three hours is a piece of news.
By four they had a name.
By six they had a story, and the story was that Roux's girl had come back after eleven years with money, and that Gérard Vasseur had better look at his fences.
Nadine Roux sat in the third bar on the square — the bad one, the one at the far end, where nobody her family had ever known would set foot — and let them look.
That was planned.
She had worked it out in a flat in Paris over about four months, on paper, the way she works out everything: arrive at eleven in the morning, park on the square, sit somewhere visible for three hours, and say absolutely nothing to anybody at all.
And let a town of eleven hundred people write the whole thing for her by six o'clock.
It worked better than her model.
By the Thursday there were eleven people in Ardres telling each other that she had bought the old Perrin place. She had not.
By the Saturday there were four telling each other she had bought the yard, which she had not either, and one of the four had heard it from a woman who cleans in Vasseur's office.
By the following Wednesday, Gérard Vasseur had a lawyer down from Lille.
She was eight and twenty.
She had left Ardres at seventeen on the half past five bus with a bag and four hundred francs, eleven days after four men came into her father's workshop on a Saturday morning and took him out of it in front of about ninety people.
He was never charged with anything.
That is the part that people from outside these towns cannot ever be made to understand, and she has given up trying to explain it: there was no trial. There was no case.
There was a statement made by a man of eight and fifty who owned the mill and the yard and half the square. There was an investigation that ran eleven weeks and found nothing.
And at the end of the eleven weeks Michel Roux was told he was free to go, and he walked down the hill to a workshop with four boats in it and no orders.