Inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret) finds that the wife of the murdered man in his latest case is a woman he loved twenty years earlier. Her mysterious disappearance from his life in fact started his career as a sleuth; as she is a very blonde Bernadette Lafont, we can only think of Vertigo, and go on from there. Chabrol himself admits that the interest of the film is the ways in which it is not a whodunit: “Only someone who has never read a detective story could possibly be surprised by the identity of the guilty party,” he said. “It's only when what appeared to be the principal problem has been solved that we begin to subvert the genre and allow the perversity of the film to become manifest. It is only then that the film removes its mask.”