The Guardian of Lies Page 4

He walked away into the living room. I followed him, impatient, into the room where the ancient sideboard had stood on the same spot for three generations and where the floor tiles were the exact same colour as my father’s eyes.

  ‘Papa,’ I started, but halted.

  A figure rose politely from one of the chairs and I became aware of his dark uniform and gun holster on his hip. A gendarme. What were the police doing here?

  My father gestured at the officer. ‘You remember Captain Roussel.’

  But I didn’t hear the name. Instead my eyes were fixed on my father’s hand. It was covered in dried blood.

  ‘Bonjour, Eloïse.’

  I regarded the police officer with surprise. ‘Of course, Léon Roussel.’ I held out my hand. ‘I apologise for not recognising you. You look different in uniform.’

  He smiled and I noticed that he didn’t fight to keep his eyes off my scar the way most people did. He looked at it openly but without pity and I liked him for that. Léon Roussel and I had been at school together, though he’d been in André’s class six years ahead of me. I was surprised to see him in uniform now, as he had always been something of a hell-raiser. He was tall with brown hair clipped short like a GI and calm eyes, not exactly good-looking, but there was something about his face that held my attention. A quiet authority that had certainly not been there the day he set fire to our geography teacher’s desk.

  ‘I’m here about the attack,’ he said.

  ‘What attack?’ I swung round to my father. ‘On André?’

  To my horror, his eyes filled with unshed tears. I had never seen my father cry, not once in my whole life. Not even when my mother died giving birth to Isaac. He snatched up a porcelain statue of Saint Genesius, the patron saint of Arles, which had stood on the sideboard eyeing us sternly for as long as I could remember, and hurled it with a bellow of rage at the tiled floor. Without a word he strode out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the plaster on the wall cracked.

  ‘What is it?’ I said urgently to Léon Roussel. ‘What has happened? Is André worse?’

  His expression had grown sombre, his police captain face firmly in place.

  ‘Goliath,’ he said, ‘has been hacked to death.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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 r
eassuring 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.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I stood in the bull-yard and watched a monstrous silver bomber dip one long wing as it banked towards the east with a roar, its wing-lights flashing against the sky darkening behind it. It seemed to flatten the trees and punch a hole in the evening. So this was it. This was what my father wanted to inflict on Mas Caussade.

  Why? It didn’t make sense.

  I had intended to go straight from the barn to the house to question my father, but instead I headed in the direction of the stables. I was wound so tight, I couldn’t trust myself. The wrong words might come out to Papa. What better way to calm down than a nuzzle with one of the Caussade white horses?

  The second reason was Léon Roussel. I’d seen him heading in the direction of the stables after he’d walked out of the barn. He had left André and me to our privacy, to brother and sister talk inside the barn, except, of course, at first there was no talk. Just silence, solid as a wall. Each brick in it seemed unbreachable.

  I’d said, ‘I’m happy to see you are walking again, André.’

  ‘Is that what you call it? Walking.’

  My brother lifted one of the crutches from the floor and held it aloft for me to admire. It was beautifully handmade – undoubtedly my father’s work – with a strong black leather pad to fit under his armpit.

  ‘My legs,’ he said. ‘Very handsome, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word caught in my throat. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were alive, André? I’ve been worried out of my mind, not knowing whether you were dead or alive. How long have you been back here?’

  ‘Only a month.’

  ‘A whole month and neither you nor Papa thought to tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t want you informed of where I was, either here or in Paris. Because I knew you would come and I didn’t want you near me. Go back to Paris, Eloïse.’

  I kept breathing. I don’t know how, but I made the air go in and out of my lungs. I didn’t blame him. If I were him, I wouldn’t want me near either.

  ‘You should talk to Papa, Eloïse.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I mean now.’

  That was it. He didn’t want me here. I walked out of the barn and straight into the sound of the aircraft blasting across the sky.

  *

  It was a different sound that greeted me in the stables. The high-pitched welcoming whinny that I knew so well, though I hadn’t heard it for a long time. It belonged to Cosette, my fine Camarguais mare, twelve years old, who even now recognised my footsteps and huffed a greeting through her broad nostrils.

  Léon Roussel was standing at the half-door of her stall in the stable. He was talking to her with the kind of easy smile on his face that whisked me back to the carefree days before the war came, when we all laughed just with the pleasure of being alive. I recalled that he had always been good with horses, never riding them too hard or driving them over jumps that were too dangerous for them. As I approached, Cosette pawed at the wooden door with her hoof and leaned out to nuzzle my neck and breathe moist air into my face. I was glad the light in the stable was dim because her delight in my return home brought me to tears that I had managed to avoid in front of anyone till now. I ran a hand down her short muscular neck and gently scratched her velvety muzzle. She smelled wonderful.

  My father owned about a hundred and fifty Camargue horses that roamed across the landscape in small white herds – though officially termed grey – each one bossed by an unruly handsome stallion. I’d wanted to be one of those stallions as a child, to roam free, to toss my hair and stamp the ground if anyone so much as looked at me the wrong way. They lived semi-wild in the marshland and even gave birth out there. Only the working ones were kept in the stable for the gardians to ride when herding the bulls – even the females were called bulls. Papa possessed more than three hundred black Camargue bulls, but never any Spanish ones like some neighbouring manades. The barking sounds that were uttered by their deep chests and the special musky bull-smell that rose from their dusty hides had formed the backbone of my childhood.

  ‘Do you still ride?’ I asked Léon. It was like slipping back in time to the days before we forgot how to laugh.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head with a disparaging smile. ‘I’m a town dweller. I ride a motorcycle instead of a horse.’ He ruffled a hand over one of Cosette’s pricked ears, an elegant snowy white curve with a smoky inner shell. ‘But handlebars don’t sit as well in the hands as a pair of well-used reins.’ He glanced down at my hands, still moving over the horse. ‘And you? I don’t expect there’s much scope for bareback-riding down the Champs-Élysées.’

  I gave a token laugh. ‘I didn’t think you’d end up in the gendarmerie, Léon.’

  ‘And I didn’t think you’d end up a Parisian, Eloïse.’

  I nodded. ‘We both have our reasons.’ I tickled Cosette’s chin and she batted her long white eyelashes at me. I stepped back and focused on the policeman in the forbiddingly dark uniform. It seemed to have swallowed him. Devoured him. The bold young boy I used to know was gone. Grey eyes still clear and alert, still on the lookout for trouble, but where was the fizzi
ng grin with teeth too large for his mouth? And the honking laugh? Now was not the time or place for either of them, I admit, but even so, I missed them. The strong features of his face were clothed in stillness and a seriousness that felt alien. I wondered whether he pulled them on with the dark-blue serge uniform each morning, or whether they were imprinted permanently on his skin like a tattoo.

  ‘Please tell me,’ I said, ‘the reason for what’s going on here.’

  ‘You should ask your father.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  The lines of his face sharpened. ‘Why not your father?’

  ‘My father may choose not to tell me.’

  He did not challenge that.

  As the last rays of the sun slipped through the doorway and painted a dusty golden rectangle on the cobbles of the stables, I walked over to the windowsill where a riot of small rosy apples overflowed a reed basket. I took three, one for each of us. Cosette whickered her thanks prettily.

  Léon took a bite of his. ‘I’ve come to ask questions, Mademoiselle Caussade,’ he said formally, ‘not to answer them.’ But he smiled. A genuine one, not a polite one, and for the first time that day I felt the tight band around my chest loosen enough for me to breathe freely.

  ‘There’s no point asking me anything,’ I pointed out. ‘I know nothing about the killing of Goliath. I came because my father asked me to but I don’t have any idea what is going on here.’

  ‘You know about the American plan to construct eleven air bases in France?’

  ‘Of course. There have been mass protests in Paris against the idea.’

  ‘The United States Air Force – USAF – as part of NATO, is putting together a defence strategy against the threat from the Soviet Union’s build-up of forces.’

  ‘But I thought the air base sites were all going to be on France’s north-eastern border, not down here in the south. Why us?’

  ‘They are proposing for this one to be a back-up base. They’ve taken over Dumoulin airfield and have expanded it. But now they want to extend the runways much further and that’s why they need your father’s land.’