BBC visits Hamlet in France, where the British couple died

For the last 15 km of the trip from Toulouse to the Les Pequiès neighborhood, you travel along narrow winding roads through hilly, dense forests. Without a reliable GPS system, you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.

I was expecting the home of Andrew and Dawn Sealer, The British couple found dead earlier this monthto be distant. This is the proposal from the scene of the crime scene I had seen. But I was surprised when I arrived to find him well within a shouting distance of several homes.

This is an important detail because the partially naked body of the dawn was discovered outside the front of the house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor responsible for the case, Nicolas Rigot-Mueller said he had severe wounds on the head caused by a dumb weapon. All screams would be heard very clearly by the neighbors.

Her husband’s body was found to hang in the back of the house. The prosecutor says No weapon foundThat there are no obvious signs of burglary, no evidence that Andrew is fighting, nor for a sexual crime.

A girlfriend found the body of the dawn as she approached the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs and often went with a friend or several other dog owners I talked to in the quiet neighborhood.

A woman, the Benedict, said the couple was “absolutely delightful, we often meet so, just walking their dogs around the village.”

“We are very shocked, of course we are,” she said.

Lydi, butcher, sells his production in local markets with her husband. Their property overlooks Searle’s home, only the ugly field separates them.

“They were a great couple who smiled a lot and once I lived in England, I was able to talk to them in English,” she told me. “They were well integrated and every year they invited everyone to a party.”

But not all of which I approached, they want to talk. Their appearance gives out that this is a very difficult time for this rural community in the glare of a criminal investigation.

The railway crossing to the village has no safety barriers, but only a stop sign, which tells you how little traffic is usually here. You can now feel the presence of the gendarmerie, the branch of the French military who is conducting the investigation.

As I was providing live coverage for the BBC Scotland, a large car with toned windows was slowly moving around me, inside four officers with stony faces from the Murder Branch and Organized Crime in Toulouse.

There is no doubt that the locals are scared. Several gendarmerie officers shot our car and wanted to see our ID cards and called us to be discreet. They said that the residents were scared and that their presence was partly to calm them.

There is a bright yellow gendarmerie tape attached to the front gate of Searle’s home. The dogs are gone and their pool has coverage over it. Two large candles are lit on the alley, and a leaflet glued to the gate has a telephone number for anyone who feels that it needs a psychological counseling or moral support provided by local social services. The same leaflet is recorded in the Community Board in the center of the neighborhood.

The Searle couple withdrew in this region five years ago, and other mailboxes in the neighborhood show that they are not the only emigrants in the region. This is not surprising: there are no official statistics, but at the time I am based in Toulouse Makes the largest British population of expatriates in France outside Paris.

On top of that, tens of thousands more have holiday homes in this region called oxitania, which is one of the fastest growing areas of France, attracting people not only from the United Kingdom, but also Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.

What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, a relatively inexpensive property and painfully beautiful nature and architecture.

The nearby city of Villefranche-de-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcade central squares in a region littered with them. In the summer, the outdoor market on the square is packed with festive manufacturers, including many Britons wearing fabrics filled with local production.

Various conspiracy theories are spread about how the couple died – they ask me about countless French national television and radio media. But all we know is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine, as he repeated me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy is the result of a home crime, followed by suicide or participated in a third party.”

Ever since the death, which I am talking about with the prosecutor leading to the case, which he revealed to me at the end of this week that he was reporting an investigation into a senior judge in Montpellier with more resources.

I asked him if it meant that he was now bending over the idea that the couple Sealer was killed.

He replied that he was not excluding anything. He added that if they were killed and it went to court, he would lead the prosecutor’s office.

Dr. Remy Sevin, the psychologist, who responds to the hot line of leaflets consulting, told me that so far around a dozen people had called him for some support. They are all local, he said, and they all knew the couple personally.

They are all either frightened or in shock, he said.