“Part of the neural coding where we get our feelings from, and ultimately our behavior, comes from the position of these pictures,” he explains. “Pictures that are close and big and bright and bold have a greater emotional intensity than those that are dull and dim and farther away.”
“And Richard Bandler was the first person to identify this?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
He chats away to me, in his hypnotic baritone voice, about this and that: his own worries in life, etc. Suddenly, when I’m not expecting it, he grabs the space in the air where my vision was and mimes chucking it away.
“Let’s shoot it off into the distance,” he says. “Shrink the picture down, drain the color out of it, make it black-and-white. Make it transparent. . . .”
And, sure enough, as the image shoots away, far into the distance, the neurotic feelings associated with it fade too. This is Paul McKenna “repatterning” my brain. He says this isn’t self-help. I don’t have to do anything. This is reprogramming, he says, and I am fixed.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything now. It’s worked.”
A year passes. I don’t have a single paranoid fantasy about something bad happening to my wife and son. I really am cured.
And so I have to say, for all the weirdness, I become very grateful that Richard Bandler invented NLP and taught it to Paul McKenna.
Death at the Château
The Château de Fretay is a hundred-acre estate in the Brittany countryside, with chapels and cottages and a lake and forests. From a distance, the place looks like a dream. Some teenagers from the village tell me that until a few weeks ago they’d go up to hang out with the children of the English couple who lived there. The mother, Joanne, always had an open fire and English breakfasts on the go. The place was so big and overgrown that one time they found a chapel on the grounds that nobody, not even the English kids, knew existed.
I park my car. There are hundreds of seedlings in little plastic cups in rows on tables, ready to plant but all dead now; abandoned plastic garden furniture is strewn everywhere, as if a tornado had come through; a statue of the Madonna and Child stands in some builder’s rubble; and a swimming pool is filled with rotten green water—two unopened bottles of Heineken sit there poolside.
I peer in through the window of the main house. It isn’t, actually, a château. There’s nothing castle-like about it. It’s a big farmhouse. It is dark. The doors and windows are police-taped up, as they have been for the past seven weeks, since September 4, so the place is a time capsule of that weekend. There’s a pack of playing cards on the living room table, a beer on the arm of a comfy-looking leather chair, next to a folder filled with complicated-looking business plans. In the kitchen, the dishwasher is still turned on. You get the eerie sensation that Mr. and Mrs. Hall have just gone into another room and will probably return any second and have a fright to see a journalist peering in through their window.
The village mayor, Pierre Sourdain, a farmer, says he liked Robert and Joanne Hall very much. All the villagers say the same: They were impressive, charming, self-possessed. (Saying that, the people in the village speak no English, and Robert Hall—despite living here for ten years—never learned French.) For years the Halls had been trying to get an ambitious golf project off the ground. They wanted to turn the château into an eighteen-hole golf resort with holiday cottages. That’s presumably what the file resting on the chair was all about, Mayor Sourdain says.
“It would have happened too,” he says. “They would have made it happen. That’s the kind of man Robert Hall was. It would have been so good for the region.” There’s a short silence. Then he says, less confidently, “I’m sure it would have happened.”
On the evening of September 4, Sourdain got a call from the gendarmes: Something had happened at the château. It is a French custom for the gendarmes to call the mayor, as the representative of the people, to the scene of a crime or a terrible accident. He arrived to see the oldest son, Christopher, twenty-two, with the gendarmes as they stood in protective suits, breaking up a big block of concrete. Robert Hall was inside the house, crying.
“After twenty-four hours, concrete is like biscuit,” Sourdain explains. We’re sitting in his office in the village of Le Châtellier, two miles from the château. “So the gendarmes were crumbling it with their hands. And after a while they discovered a ring. They asked Christopher, ‘Is this your mother’s ring?’ He said, ‘Oui.’”
Robert Hall had told the gendarmes that twenty-four hours earlier he’d had a drunken argument with Joanne during which she accidentally fell, hit her head, and died. Then, during the hours that followed, he set her body on fire, put her remains into a builder’s bag, poured in concrete, and hauled it onto the back of a lorry. All this happened behind the house, near the back gate, next to a row of half-built holiday cottages.
Then he stopped. He telephoned Christopher. He said he was going to commit suicide. Christopher called the ambulance, who called the gendarmes, who called the mayor.
Catherine Denis, from the prosecutor’s office in Rennes, told a press conference later that week that when the gendarmes asked Robert why he burned Joanne’s body and encased her remains in concrete, he explained that she’d always said she wanted to be cremated and laid to rest in a mausoleum and he was simply respecting her wishes, albeit in a somewhat informal way.
“What did the Halls do for money?” I ask Mayor Sourdain. “How were they living? How were they funding the golfing project?”
“He told me he was a big success in England,” he replies. “He had lots of businesses there. And sometimes British tourists would rent the château for their holidays.”
“Do you know if the tourists enjoyed staying there?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he replies. “It would have been between English people. You see?”
• • •
FABRICE FOUREL works in a bright office in the nearby village of Saint-Étienne-en-Coglès. Posters advertising successful Brittany tourist endeavors line the walls. I am sitting, he says, exactly where Robert and Joanne Hall sat when they came to him in a flap regarding their golf project, in September 2008.
“They were lost,” he says.
Fabrice’s job is to be the middleman between prospective tourist businesses and the labyrinthine French bureaucracy.
“What were the problems?” I ask.
Fabrice sighs as if to say, “Where do I begin?” “They wanted to clear some trees. French law says you have to plant three trees for each one you cut down, not necessarily on your property, but in the region.” He pauses. “It was a big problem. In fact, the administration was angry with the Halls because they didn’t follow the procedure. We had to calm everything.”
“How many trees would they have needed to plant?” I ask.
“Around twenty thousand,” Fabrice says.
Fabrice says people basically already have all the trees they want. If you go to people and offer them trees, they tend to say no. And that wasn’t the only problem. The Halls needed sprinklers, enough electricity for thousands of visitors . . .
“We quickly noticed a gap between the financial needs for such a project and what they had,” Fabrice says. “A project like that could cost twenty million euro.” Twenty-seven million dollars.
“Was it a big gap?” I ask.
Fabrice indicates with his hands a very big gap.
“But they were really motivated,” he says. “That’s why we didn’t want to say, ‘You can’t do it.’ People have to be a bit crazy to lead these kinds of projects.”
I ask Fabrice if he knows whether the Halls’ business renting out the château to British tourists was a success.