BBC visits hamlet in France where British couple died

For the final 15km (9.3 miles) of the journey from Toulouse to the hamlet of Les Pequiès, you travel on narrow winding roads through hilly, dense woodlands. Without a reliable GPS system you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.

I expected the home of Andrew and Dawn Searle, the British couple found dead earlier this month, to be remote. That’s the suggestion from the photos of the crime scene I had seen. But I was surprised when I arrived to find it well within shouting distance of several homes.

It’s an important detail because Dawn’s partly naked body was discovered outside the front of the house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Nicolas Rigot-Muller, said she had severe head wounds caused by a blunt weapon. Any screams would have been heard very clearly by neighbours.

Her husband’s body was found hanging inside the back of the house. The prosecutor says no weapon has been found, that there’s no obvious sign of a burglary nor evidence that Andrew put up a fight, nor of a sex crime.

A friend discovered Dawn’s body when she came around to the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs of their own, and they often walked with the friend or several other dog owners I talked to in the quiet hamlet.

One woman, Bénédicte, said the couple were “absolutely adorable, we would often meet like this simply walking our dogs around the village”.

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

Lydie, a butcher, sells her produce at local markets with her husband. Their property overlooks the Searle’s home, just a fallow field separates them.

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

But not everyone I approached wanted to talk. Their looks give away that this is a very difficult moment for this rural community in the glare of a criminal investigation.

The railroad crossing next to the village doesn’t have safety barriers, just a stop sign, which tells you how little traffic there is here normally. Now, you can feel the presence of the Gendarmerie, the branch of the French military which is leading the investigation.

While I was providing live coverage for BBC Scotland a large car with tinted windows drove past me slowly, inside four stony-faced officers from the Toulouse homicide and organised crime branch.

There is no question locals are scared. Several officers from the Gendarmerie photographed our car and asked to see our ID cards and urged us to be discreet. They said the residents were frightened and that their presence was partly to reassure them.

There is bright yellow Gendarmerie tape strapped to the front gate of the Searle’s home. The dogs are gone and their swimming pool has a cover over it. Two large candles have been lit in the driveway and a leaflet taped to the gate has a phone number for anyone who feels they need psychological counselling or moral support, provided by local social services. The same leaflet has been taped to a community board in the centre of the hamlet.

The Searle couple retired to this region five years ago, and other mailboxes in the hamlet indicate they are not the only expatriates in the region. This isn’t surprising: there are no official statistics but in the time I have been based in Toulouse, Foreign Office staff have told me at various times they believe around 30,000 Brits live full-time in the south west, making it the biggest British expat population in France outside of Paris.

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

What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, relatively cheap property and achingly beautiful countryside and architecture.

The nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcade-lined central squares in a region teeming with them. In summer, an open-air market in the square is crammed with holiday makers, including many Brits, carrying weaved baskets filled with local produce.

Various conspiracy theories circulate about how the couple died – I’ve been asked about them by countless French national TV and radio media outlets. But all we know for sure is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine, as he reiterated to me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy resulted from a domestic crime followed by suicide or involved a third party”.

Ever since the deaths I’ve been speaking to the prosecutor leading the case, who revealed to me late this week that he was handing over the investigation to a senior judge in Montpellier with more resources available.

I asked him if that means he was leaning towards the idea that the Searle couple were both murdered.

He replied that he was not ruling anything out. He added that if they were murdered, and it goes to trial, he would lead the prosecution.

Dr Remy Sevigne, the psychologist who answers the counselling hotline from the leaflets, told me that so far around a dozen people had called him for some sort of support. They were all local, he said, and all knew the couple personally.

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