LÉON ROUSSEL
Captain Léon Roussel moved quickly into the cobbled yard, because he didn’t want the Caussade girl running headlong into what lay in the barn. He’d been there. Seen it. Smelled it. The stench still clung to his nostrils. He stepped in front of her slender figure as she took off towards the largest of the old barns and placed a restraining hand on her arm. Her bare skin was cold.
‘Steady, don’t rush. It’s not going anywhere,’ he said.
She jerked to a halt. Shock changes people. He’d witnessed it time and again in his work in the police force. When it hits hard, really hard, some people freeze. Some scream. Some shake or weep their hearts out. Others seem to lose their bones, they crumple, eyes glazed. With Eloïse Caussade, shock stole her tongue.
They stood awkwardly in silence while he gave her time, aware of the scar on her face pulsing bone-white. He’d heard rumours. That she’d almost killed her brother in a car accident – you can’t keep that sort of thing quiet in a small town like Serriac. The last time he’d laid eyes on Eloïse Caussade she’d been a scrawny fifteen-year-old who’d possessed the wildness of the marshes in her. All elbows and knees, galloping her horse through a rainbow of sea-spray across the wetlands, long black hair streaming loose behind her like river-reeds.
Now look at her.
Eight years later, a Parisian to her polished fingertips, she was wearing a sleeveless blue shirtwaister, the colour of the wild irises among the glasswort, with a full skirt and cinched tiny waist. She obviously hadn’t come to ride horses. Her patent leather shoes were out of place in a bull-yard but she was like her father. They had the same capacity for silence, and the same bloodless lips today. Léon turned his face away, giving her a moment of privacy. A fitful breeze from the south carried the tangy scent of the sea and the sun hovered low on the vast horizon as though reluctant to leave the scene.
The fields were low-lying and stretched out in the hazy distance with long alleyways of willows and silvery white poplars that fringed the numerous narrow waterways that cut through the salty earth. Léon kept an eye out for anyone approaching on the single-track road that ran past the Caussade farm but it remained empty, yet he had an uneasy sense of being watched. He glanced at the farmhouse windows upstairs but saw no one.
Léon nodded towards the barn. ‘The bull is in there.’
‘Who did it?’ She’d found her tongue. ‘Goliath is the farm. He is Mas Caussade. Who killed him?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘Who do you suspect? Who might be guilty?’
‘That’s what I’m here to find out,’ Léon said. ‘Most probably the attackers are people who object to what your father is doing. There appears to be a forceful group of them working together.’
‘Against my father?’
‘Yes.’
She took that in, lungs pumping hard, then she strode towards the barn, her feet kicking up the dust. Under the Parisian poise Léon recognised the energy and the determination that had driven her as a child to undertake the impossible.
*
‘Goliath.’
Léon heard the name whisper out of Eloïse as she dropped to her knees on the soiled straw. He wanted to snatch her away from the blood and the gore of the mutilated black carcass of the Caussade farm’s prize bull. Camargue bulls were small compared to the massive bulk of their Spanish cousins, but even so, it dwarfed her slight figure. The air in the barn was dim and dusty. It caught in his throat, and the stench turned his stomach. Eloïse placed the palm of her hand on the creature’s bloody black hide and leaned close.
‘Goodbye, my friend,’ she whispered to the animal lying on its side in front of her.
Its horns had been broken into jagged stumps, its ears, tail and genitals hacked off. It was a vicious, violent slaying that appalled Léon in its brutality. Gaping axe wounds split open the muscles of the beast’s powerful back and its throat was sliced from chest to jawbone in a raw slash that was a seething carpet of flies.
‘Goliath and I were born on the same day,’ she said. ‘Twenty-three years ago.’ She made an attempt at a smile. ‘He was my hero.’
‘He was magnificent,’ Léon acknowledged. ‘The strongest and the fastest of the bulls in the Arles arena.’
He had seen the prize bull a hundred times charging across the golden sand of the Arles and Serriac arenas, a black tornado in pursuit of the local young razeteurs who dared to try to steal the cockade from its horns. Himself included. The cockades were a symbol of manhood that tempted young men to risk their lives, because in the course Camarguaise, unlike the corridas of Spain, no blood is shed. The true star of the show is the bull, not a matador. The bull’s name and its manade, the farm from which it comes, gain great fame and respect. For years Goliath was a magnificent celebrity and could draw an audience from all over Provence.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ he said quietly, ‘until you’re ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘I’ve already interviewed your father and brother. I need to ask you a few questions too.’
For the first time her gaze left the animal and she studied his uniform thoughtfully as if she had forgotten the job he was here to do. ‘What did my father do?’
She stopped. Léon saw her eyes fix on something behind him. He turned and in the gloom at the far end of the barn beside what looked like grey bins of livestock feed there was a shape, indistinct and unmoving.
‘André!’ Eloïse leaped to her feet.
Léon looked closer. She had good eyes. It was indeed her older brother, seated in a wicker chair with a pair of wooden crutches lying on the floor beside him. Across his knees lay a hunting rifle. Léon felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, but André gave him a reassuring nod. His sandy hair had grown down over his collar during the last few months and he was wearing a soft checked shirt that had been scrubbed too often, as if he were trying to pretend he was a simple country boy again. But his eyes said otherwise.
‘I’m keeping watch,’ André said softly.
He had always been good at that, Léon recalled. Taking you by surprise. He and Léon had been through school together and too many teachers had been caught out by his slouching shoulders and soft voice.
‘I thought you were resting in your room,’ Léon commented, eyeing the rifle.
‘I changed my mind.’
‘André!’ Eloïse cried out again.
She saw the crutches splayed out on the dirty straw, his right leg below the knee encased in a metal leg-iron, and her cheeks flushed a dull crimson. She darted towards her brother and dropped on one knee in front of him, so he wouldn’t have to look up at her. Something about her position of supplication jarred with Léon and he wanted to raise her to her feet. She used to hang around as a child on the edge of André’s gang of unruly boys and even then Léon had been the one to swing her up on to the first branch of any tree they were climbing, while her brother sat at the top urging her on to greater effort. But by fifteen she could outride and outshoot the lot of them. Everything they did, she strove to do better, but it was never good enough. Not for André.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were at the farm?’ she demanded. ‘I thought you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me?’ Her hand reached out to his knee but stopped just short of touching it. ‘How are you now?’ she asked. Her voice was shaking.
‘How do you think?’ He rested his hand on the stock of the rifle. ‘They would not have dared touch Goliath if I had not been a cripple.’
It was worse than a slap. Léon watched the dark blood drain from her cheek. André was blaming her for the prize bull’s death. Léon feared tears from her, but he was wrong. Underneath the Parisian gloss of silky black hair and the stylish dress with an animal’s blood on its skirt, the old Eloïse still stalked. He saw it in the speed with which she shot to her feet, in the straightness of her spine as she stared down at her brother.
‘What happened here? Why would anyone want to slaughter Goliath? What have you done?’
‘It’s not what I’ve done. It’s what our father has done.’
She turned to Léon. ‘Is it true?’
‘It’s true, Eloïse.’
‘What has Papa done? Tell me.’
Léon was aware of the dense humming of the flies in the sudden silence. ‘He is selling part of his land to the United States Air Force to expand their nuclear air base here at Dumoulin.’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Papa would rather chop off his right hand than sell Caussade land.’
André gave her a hard tight smile. ‘It might yet come to that.’