The hour was early, the location remote, and therefore the response was slow. Much later, a commission of inquiry would reprimand the chief of the local gendarmerie and issue a lofty set of recommendations that went largely ignored, for in the quaint little fishing village of Audresselles, recriminations were the last thing on anyone’s mind. For many months afterward, its shocked residents would speak of that morning in the most somber of tones. One woman, an octogenarian whose family had lived in the village when it was ruled by an English king, would describe the incident on the beach as the worst thing she had seen since the Nazis hoisted a swastika over the H?tel de Ville. No one took issue with her claim, though a few found it hyperbolic. Surely, they said, Audresselles had seen worse than this, though, when pressed, none could provide an example.
The commune of Audresselles is only two thousand acres in size, and the blast wave from the explosion rattled windows the length and breadth of it. Several startled residents immediately called the gendarmes, though twenty long minutes would elapse before the first mobile unit arrived at the little sand car park adjacent to the beach. There they discovered a Citro?n C4 engulfed in a fire so hot no one could get within thirty meters of it. Another ten minutes would pass before the firefighters arrived. By the time they managed to smother the flames, the Citro?n was little more than a blackened shell. For reasons that were never made clear, one of the firefighters took it upon himself to pry open the rear hatch. Instantly, he fell to his knees and was violently sick. The first gendarme to look inside fared no better. But the second, a veteran of some twenty years, managed to maintain his composure as he confirmed that the blackened contents of the car were indeed the remains of a human being. He then radioed the desk officer for the Pas-de-Calais region and reported that the exploding car on the beach at Audresselles was now a murder case—and a grisly one at that.
By daybreak more than a dozen detectives and forensic experts were working the crime scene, watched over by what seemed like half the town. Only one resident of Audresselles had anything useful to tell them: Léon Banville, owner of a recently built manor house on the edge of town. As it happened, Monsieur Banville had been awake at 5:09 a.m., when a man in street clothes had come running past his window shouting in a language he didn’t recognize. Police immediately undertook a search of the road and found a leather jacket that looked as though it would fit a man of moderate height and build. Nothing else of interest was ever found—not the key that the running man had hurled into the field of grain, nor the Volkswagen car that it operated. The car vanished without a trace, along with the ten million euros hidden inside two suitcases in its trunk.
The intense heat of the fire did significant damage to the remains of the body in the back of the Citro?n but did not destroy them completely. As a result, forensic examiners were able to determine that the victim had been a young woman, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, approximately five-foot-eight inches in height. The description was a rough match for Madeline Hart, the English girl who had gone missing on Corsica in late August. The French police quietly reestablished contact with their brethren across the Channel and within forty-eight hours had in their possession a DNA sample taken from Ms. Hart’s London flat. An expedited comparison test showed that the sample matched DNA taken from the car. The French interior minister immediately sent word to the Home Office in London before making the findings public at a hastily called news conference in Paris. Madeline Hart was dead. But who had killed her? And why?
They held the funeral at St. Andrew’s Church in Basildon, just down the road from the little council house where she had been raised. Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster was not in attendance—his schedule would not permit it, or so said his press spokesman, Simon Hewitt. Nearly the entire staff of party headquarters was there, as was Jeremy Fallon. He wept openly at the graveside, which inspired one reporter to remark that perhaps he had a heart after all. Afterward, he spoke briefly to Madeline’s mother and brother, who looked curiously out of place amid the well-dressed London crowd. “I’m so sorry,” he was overheard telling them. “I’m so very sorry.”