Saint Joseph’s was a private secondary school whose surrounding wall took up a large part of one side of rue de Beaucaire, just a few meters away from Tarascon town hall.
It was 5 p.m.
In front of the gates, children were running in all directions, excited by their first day back at school.
The Baron spotted Gilbert Sicard, who was watching them come out. Two days before, Sicard had replied to the message de Palma had left on his answering machine. The former history student had become a teacher and was now headmaster of a Catholic school.
“Good evening, M. de Palma. Come into my office.”
They crossed a concrete playground planted with three ancient plane trees. The classroom windows looked out over a shadowy courtyard, and a gray door led to the headmaster’s office at the far end.
“This is all very sad …” Sicard said, weighing in his hands a copy of his dissertation, before putting it down on his desk.
“You’re just about the last chance I’ve got.”
Sicard had an odd-looking face: round, with eyes like marbles and thick oval glasses perched on an aquiline nose.
“I must tell you that I myself come from those very same villages. My mother was born in Maussane and my father came from Fontvieille.”
Sicard opened his thesis and riffled through the pages with his thumb.
“There are things missing from my version,” he said. “But you must understand that I wrote it in 1966. I was very young at the time.”
He knew the history of his native village thoroughly. He spoke at length about the period of the Occupation, and named one after the other the families that had collaborated with the Nazis. The Reys had been the most involved. One of their sons, Christian’s uncle, had died in Pomerania in the SS uniform of the Charlemagne Division. The Reys had consolidated their fortune and had not been among the families investigated during the subsequent purge. Christian Rey’s grandmother had even been part of the kangaroo court that had judged Simone Maurel.
“These are very painful stories,” he said, closing the cover.
He then spoke of the bogus resistance fighters who had shot Simone Maurel’s brother. De Palma noted the names of Gabriel Morini and Sébastien Marceau. Emile Maurel had been shot down without any semblance of justice. Gabriel Morini and Sébastien Marceau had gone to La Balme and had killed him in the guise of belonging to the resistance.
“Why do you think they did that?”
“For money, Monsieur! Or rather, for land. The Maurel family was the richest in the region and it has to be said that Simone’s parents hadn’t always been very straight when they bought land. Just before the war, they had got their hands on the Downlands by paying off old Morini, an Italian lumberjack who had married a girl from Eygalières, a girl called Bérard … Justine Bérard. He was an old drunk who had sold the land to Maurel for a song. The Maurels wanted it all, and for that the younger members of the Morini family could never forgive them! That transaction ruined them in fact, do you see?”
De Palma saw the jigsaw coming together. Because that’s where they should have looked. In the family. He opened his bag and took out the photograph he had found in Bérard’s house. Sicard took it and stared at it for some time, as though running a magnifying glass over each person in the shot.
“Where did you find this picture?” he asked with a frown.
“I’d rather not say.”
Sicard put the photograph down and folded his hands. A glint of bitterness turned his eyes cold.
“It’s the Tarasque,” he said, still staring at the picture. “The Knights of the Tarasque who are standing round the monster are descended from the most powerful families of Tarascon and its vicinity. You can see Bérard, Emile Maurel, Lucien Soubeyrand … At the end of the fifteenth century, King René codified the brotherhood of the Tarasque in such a way that the sons of the great families of the region came together instead of fighting duels. In those days, it was only the sons of the powerful who had the right to serve the monster. Before the war, this tradition was still in force and that must have made a lot of jealous people. Especially because these families are very traditional. The Bérards descended from one of Mistral’s daughters, and I think that the Soubeyrands were connected with Roumanille. In this part of Provence, let me tell you that is quite something!
“Let me tell you also that during the war they had quite a problem choosing a side, because most of them were Catholic fascists. But they were also patriots, Bérard and Soubeyrand above all. Etienne Maurel, too. They formed the Vincent network and were in the resistance right from the start. They were also members of the Félibrige, that famous literary circle … Bérard was even its laureate once.”
Sicard opened his hand and pointed a thumb toward the ceiling.
“So here we have tradition, jealousy, revenge … In the series of murders that happened last summer you can find all of that. According to what you told me earlier, it was a conflict between two conceptions of Provence: traditionalists and those who wanted to use its folklore for more commercial ends. It’s more complex than that. I know nothing about the plans for the leisure park that you mentioned. I do know that the real motive was revenge.”
Control of the Tarasque had changed hands, and Vincent Soubeyrand, the heir to an epoch, could not bear that fact. In the middle, there was Bérard, the former head of the Knights and the master of them all. Old man Soubeyrand had died in the 1950s after his fall from fortune, and his son Vincent was badly unbalanced. He was notoriously violent, and from what Moracchini had managed to unearth so far, he had been jailed several times for assault and wounding during village dances and election campaigns.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know much about him. I always thought it odd that he bought the La Balme farmhouse. I don’t know why, but I said to myself that there was a secret behind all that.”
“He was the son of Simone Maurel and Karl Steinert.”
Sicard stared at the photograph. His eyes were wide, and shone like a mirror reflecting flames from a fire.
“If there is anyone who should have been out for revenge, it was him. And he didn’t do it. That will be the final truth of this tragedy.”
He uttered this last remark in a murmur that lost itself in the silence of the empty school.