The Guardian of Lies Read online

  No car behind me stayed there for long and there were none of the ones I’d memorised from the town square, though I admit that one black Citroën looks much like another. I was about halfway home and the road was empty, travelling straight as a bull-pole through the broad flat landscape I loved, edged by purple drifts of sea-lavender and raised up above the surrounding fields. The expansion of the vivid green rice crop, fed by a network of water channels, was made possible by finance from the post-war Marshall Plan. I could smell the familiar fragrance of it through my open window. It calmed me.

  I was totally alone. In every direction I could see to the shimmering horizon. No houses, not even one of the old traditional thatched huts used by the gardians on this stretch. I liked being alone. It opened up my senses. I was able to see and hear more clearly, my thoughts came to me pin-sharp.

  Just when I was starting to relax and think things through, a speck appeared in my rear-view mirror and grew larger at a startling speed until I could see it was a motorcycle. Its low-pitched growl reached me, setting the hairs on my neck on edge, but it hung back at around five hundred metres and came no closer. I sped up, pushing the 2CV’s engine to its limit, but the motorcycle kept pace easily.

  What did it want?

  It was too far away for me to make out any details of the bike or rider.

  I was almost home when suddenly I pulled over. I could hear the throb of the motorcycle engine as I reached into a canvas bag under my seat and drew out André’s gun, his High Standard pistol. I had never fired a gun in anger, only on a practice range, so I was surprised to see my grip on it so steady. I swivelled quickly in my seat and peered out of the rear window to see that the motorcycle had also stopped on the side of the road, about five hundred metres behind me. I aimed the gun.

  Stalemate.

  For a full minute we remained like that, staring at each other. My finger tightened on the trigger. It desperately wanted to pull it. Another minute crawled past and then, without warning, the motorcycle abruptly gunned its engine harshly, spun on one wheel to face the opposite direction and shot off back the way it had come in a cloud of dust. It became a speck once more, then vanished.

  I held on tight to the relief. This is what it did to you when someone threatened to kill you, it filtered out all else. Everything except that one thought grew fuzzy and faded.

  Did the person on the motorcycle write the threatening note? But why turn and run? It didn’t make sense, and my mind became a blur of questions groping their way towards answers. I threw the car into gear and with knuckles white on the steering wheel I drove in the direction of Mas Caussade. I needed to speak with my brother.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LÉON ROUSSEL

  Léon Roussel was hiding in plain sight. Wearing a black suit, freshly pressed out of respect. No police uniform, not here. Not today. He didn’t want to remind the mourners of the real reason he was in attendance.

  He had to admit that Aristide Caussade had chosen a good spot, though it couldn’t have been easy digging so deep in this waterlogged terrain. Léon knew that the water always got you in the end here, whether it was the river, or the thousands of canals, or one of the étangs, the salty lagoons, or even the water butt that caught the run-off from your roof. A man in Serriac had drowned in his own giant waterbutt last week, head first, trying to rescue his cat from the bottom of it. The coroner had declared a verdict of death by misadventure.

  Léon was not so sure. The thing about water is that it hides too many traces, fingerprints float away. So if a wife threw a cat into a water butt and then tipped her husband in there too, locking the lid down on him, who’s to know? Especially if that woman is a barge-hauler by trade with muscles as thick as one of Caussade’s bulls. Even when you are safe in your grave the waters of the Camargue can still come for you when the drainage pumps jam and the watertable rises unchecked.

  The bull’s grave lay in the shade of a grove of white poplars in the field at the back of the Caussade farmhouse where the roots would hold the soil firm. Over the years the tree branches had been stretched and elongated sideways by the relentless fingers of the mistral, the way a baker lengthens his dough. The mistral is the wind that shapes the landscape of the Camargue, forms its dunes, moulds the banks of its lagoons and scours its plains raw. Sometimes Léon thought the mistral had shaped him too. He could hear it at odd times blowing deep in his blood when the winds whipped up the soil and threw it in their face.

  Word about the funeral had spread fast around Serriac. For Léon, that worked in his favour. Well over three hundred mourners had gathered around the large black gash in the ground, and it was surprising to him that so many people from all over the region would come to pay their last respects to a bull.

  A bull?

  It was a rare event to honour a bull with a burial ceremony even down here, but Goliath had been champion bull almost as long as Léon could remember. He looked around the faces circling the grave, mostly gardians with cheeks as creased as their saddles, but many were just enthusiastic spectators of the bull arena, unable to resist their favourite’s last performance. Léon nodded to those he knew, but they were cautious. A crime had been committed and he was a policeman, in or out of uniform.

  Aristide Caussade looked like a bull himself at the head of the grave, standing there in his funeral suit and tie, the wind whipping his white hair into horns. Léon could feel the man’s grief like a dark storm over the field. He was not an easy man to be around, but Léon had always had respect for him. This farm had been a magical place when Léon was young; working the bulls with André had been a fascinating and terrifying way to spend summers for the son of a postman who was accustomed to negotiating the lanes on a humble bicycle.

  He had learned to race through the marshes on a white horse with the wind tearing his lungs out, bringing danger charging into his neatly arranged ambitions, and it changed his life. Because Léon found he was good at danger. He had a calm head for it. He discovered a new Léon Roussel tucked away behind an unopened door inside the old Léon, and for this he had to thank Aristide Caussade, a man with such passion for his bulls and his horses that he swept others up into it.

  He was doing so now, his voice loud and bold, encircling his listeners the way he encircled his bulls. He was relating stories of Goliath’s glory in the arena, delighting those who had come to mourn but found themselves laughing instead. Many of them were remembering a brush or two with the champion bull during the weekly course Provençal. As reckless razeteurs, they had attempted to steal the ribbons from Goliath’s lethal horns. Did the bull ever kill anybody? Yes, he did. In fact most of them bore scars to remember him by, Léon included.

  Léon moved unobtrusively through the crowd. Watching faces, studying smiles. Listening. But he could detect no gloating at the disaster that had hit the Caussades. Oddly, unexpectedly, the gathering started to sing, softly at first but growing louder, reaching out to the edges of the field. It was a familiar old folk song that the gardians would sing around the campfire under the stars, giving praise to the prowess and speed of the Camargue bulls in contrast to the slower, more stupid Spanish bulls. These were bull people. They would never slaughter a champion.

  But there were two men present who weren’t.

  Outsiders. They might think that in their dark suits and black ties they blended in with the other mourners, but they were mistaken. They stood out like white wolves in a black bull pen. Léon manoeuvred through the crowd until he stood shoulder to shoulder with the taller one of them.

  ‘An interesting occasion, don’t you think?’ Léon commented in English.

  ‘Hell, yes. Never seen the like.’

  ‘Driven over from the air base for it, have you?’

  ‘We have. It is impressive, the respect you have for animals here. I grew up on a ranch in Texas and I’ve never seen anything like this. It is powerful, isn’t it, Matt?’

  ‘Sure is. That old guy at the graveside is quite something, isn’t he?�
� said the one called Matt.

  ‘How did you hear of the bull’s funeral?’ Léon enquired casually.

  They laughed. Of course they laughed. This was just local entertainment for them. Or was that what they wanted him to think?

  ‘We have a damn efficient set of jungle drums at the camp,’ Matt laughed again. ‘Nothing gets past them.’

  ‘I can believe that.’

  ‘Or past us,’ the other American added. His eyes were fixed on Eloïse.

  Léon had tried not to look at her too much. Something was wrong with her, something that had not been there when he’d spoken to her in the bar in Serriac this afternoon. She was standing beside her father, too stiff and too hidden under her black felt hat, its brim pulled down low over her eyes, her hair worn long, masking her face. She looked like one of the forest animals that he’d seen her father carve out of wood. She had cast aside her finery and was wearing oak-brown riding trousers and a plain black shirt, but she looked ready to flee.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ the taller one asked.

  But at that moment two fighter jets streaked across the sky and both Americans tipped their heads back to track them with keen interest.

  ‘Republic Thunderjets,’ said the tall one.

  ‘On patrol.’

  Léon turned his back and moved away into the crowd. He exchanged a greeting with Father Jerome, who was looking hot and uncomfortable in his long black soutane. Whether from the sun’s rays or from a distinct awkwardness at attending a bull’s funeral was a question Léon found debatable. There was no sign of the vociferous groups of Serriac men who made a habit of hanging around the town’s bars in denim overalls with hands still covered in axle grease. To make a point. They were the workers. The ones forging the trade unions and fighting for workers’ rights, the ones the government feared. The ones who were aggressively anti-American. They didn’t actually wear Communist Party lapel badges, but they might as well have. They had stayed away.

  Interesting.

  Léon prowled impatiently at the back of the crowd who had now all lined up to drop a snippet of coloured ribbon into Goliath’s open grave, a token to acknowledge the cockades that he had worn so boldly in life. Léon was impatient to talk to André. His friend. Yet he barely seemed a friend anymore. When they were together, it felt like they were two strangers. André Caussade was dutifully positioned at his father’s side, the three of them – father, son and daughter – presenting a wall of Caussade solidarity, but his injured friend was in a wheelchair.

  The sight of it had come as a shock. There was even a rug, draped over André’s immobile legs despite the heat, and it was the final straw. The enormity of the sadness was written all over André’s face and Léon noticed the way people’s eyes skittered away from him, the spectre coming too close.

  Even for Léon it was hard, hard to look at him without pity. Was the companion of his youth still buried somewhere inside that broken body? Léon was seeing no sign of it. Neither André nor Eloïse raised their gaze from the rectangle of raw soil or from the canvas sheet that covered the animal’s ravaged carcass as each well-wisher filed past.

  ‘André,’ Léon murmured when he drew near.

  Again it was like reaching out to a stranger. To someone else whose name just happened to be André too. The eyes that flicked up to his were narrowed to slits, bristling with suspicion, no longer the gleaming amber that had urged Léon as a boy to be far more than he ever thought possible. Now they were the dull mud colour that you find on the soles of your boots after rain.

  ‘André, they will not get away with it, I promise you.’

  André gave an odd cracked sort of smile. He drew breath to say something, but at that moment the shade and the sunlight in the field were torn apart by the shrill and terrified scream of a horse.

  *

  Dense grey smoke poured up into the sky. Flames leaped from one end of the stable’s thatched roof to the other, sparks spiralling on the wind and catching in hair and clothes. Shouts and cries echoed through the yard.

  Somewhere someone was yelling, ‘Quick! More water here, you bastards!’

  Lungs were choking. Hooves lashed out. A voice shrieked a warning as a roof-beam burned through and thundered down on those beneath. Bridles were seized, but panic turned tamed animals into wild creatures once more.

  The roar of blazing timbers and the reek of scorched horse-hair filled the air as the stables became an inferno. Léon was attempting to prevent people from hurling themselves inside the burning building to rescue the animals, but it was impossible. These were horse people. There were at least twenty horses in there. Probably more. Many of the mourners had arrived in the saddle.

  He worked to help the gardians save as many horses as they could. Blinded by smoke, they beat off with bare hands the burning debris that clung to the white hides and though the terrified animals reared and kicked and rolled their huge eyes in panic, they led them out to a paddock where they were safe. But Léon could see neither Eloïse nor Cosette in the paddock. He darted one more time back to the flames.

  ‘Eloïse,’ he bellowed.

  Timbers were crashing down around him.

  ‘Eloïse!’ He cursed the thick smoke.

  A hand seized his sleeve. He whirled round but the roar of flames swallowed any words. Dimly through the wall of smoke he made out two grey shapes. One was a person bent double, the other larger one was a horse stumbling and shuddering and almost on its knees. Both were covered in blood.

  He took a firm hold of them and together they forced a way towards the burning entrance.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My hands were covered in blood, as thick and glossy as scarlet satin. Not mine. Mon Dieu, I wish it were mine. It was Cosette’s.

  Have you ever seen a white horse covered in blood, the dense hairs glistening bright red? It twisted my heart. My Cosette’s breath was coming in deep tormented gasps and my own matched hers, but I spoke calmly to her as I bathed the terrible gash. It ran from her withers at the base of the ridge of her mane, across the muscular left shoulder, right round to the front of her chest in a back-to-front C-shape. It was the mirror image of the one on my own cheek.

  I’d tethered her in the barn and wrapped my arms around her. She placed her heavy head on my shoulder, her skin trembling and muscles quivering, breath blowing hard, whiskers twitching. A terrified sound was coming from deep in her throat.

  ‘My poor Cosette,’ I murmured, and hurried to fetch water and bandages from the house.

  Outside was ordered chaos. Gardians know how to deal with fire and had formed a line to cart buckets of water and to handle a hose from the pump, but it was too little, too late. The flames had won. Wounded horses and people were receiving attention, Mathilde flitting between them with salve and sheets torn into strips.

  I saw Léon directing cars and lorries to block the entrance to the farm. No one could leave or enter. It jolted me into the realisation that this was now a crime scene and he was doing his job. But I wanted everyone to go, to leave, to get off our land. Léon would call for a support team and there would be questions. More and more questions.

  I craved quiet.

  *

  My hands swept over Cosette’s heaving chest. I didn’t know whether I was soothing her or she was soothing me, as the tremors pulsed inside both of us. The veterinary surgeon was sewing together the raw and splintered edges of her wound and she proved herself as brave as any bull, though the blackrimmed sockets of her eyes were pale with shock. He had injected her with a sedative and when he looked at me he’d laughed and asked if I wanted one too.

  I nearly said yes.

  People came and went. I spoke to no one. My hand never left my horse. Inside my head the sound of screams and the crackle of flames kept crashing into the question of who had set the fire?

  Why?

  First Goliath. Now the horses.

  The same person? Or a different person?

  I was caressing Cosette’s hot neck
when my father walked into the barn, his heavy features set hard, and I stepped back from my horse to let him examine her. When his great hands ran over her, he murmured soft loving words, and I was jealous. I had never received such words from him. He looked deep into her anxious brown eyes, then checked that each of her legs and fetlocks was sound despite the wound. He examined the burns on her flank and swept a hand up over her prominent white cheekbones and down the jugular groove. Satisfied, he leaned his broad forehead against hers with such devotion that she whickered gently in response.

  When he finally turned and inspected me, he looked surprised. I didn’t care to think what I must look like. I was alone with him for once and would not waste my chance to learn more.

  ‘Papa, is it true you’ve already signed the contract to sell our land to the United States Air Force?’

  I couldn’t keep my anger out of my voice. I tried.

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  ‘Why did you agree to it?’

  ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘That’s not what Mayor Durand says.’

  ‘Then Mayor Durand is lying.’

  Lying. Which one was lying to me? Which one had reason to lie?

  ‘Was it a Compulsory Purchase order?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why sell?’

  ‘My reasons are my own.’

  I knew better than to ask what those reasons were. ‘First Goliath. Now the horses, Papa. What next? Your children?’

  His face shut down and he started to leave.

  ‘Papa, who are they, these people who kill our livestock? Do you know?’

  He gripped his blood-streaked beard in the way he did when trying to control his anger. ‘They are Communist trash.’

  ‘Have they demanded anything from you? Like insisting you rescind the sale?’

  ‘Too many questions, girl.’ His straggly eyebrows descended in a deep V as he frowned at me. ‘I have enough to deal with out there without you making—’