A picture-book hamlet of two dozen stone-built houses, with no shop, church or buses, Le Grand Pic in Limousin, south-central France, is so far off the beaten track that even locals in the nearest village struggle to direct you there.
Twenty-five years ago, when Adrian Maxwell, a retired City of London Police detective and criminal barrister, stumbled on this timeless idyll he assumed he’d left the sordid side of life far behind.
Early on Tuesday morning, however, the 77-year-old expat and his elderly female neighbour became the unlikely lone witnesses to a dramatic moment that every law-abiding French citizen had been waiting
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