Léon wrapped Eloïse’s wet figure in a rug from the boot of his car and bundled her into her 2CV with instructions to drive slowly. Her windscreen wipers in a storm like this would be of little use, so he stuck close to her bumper all the way from Serriac to Mas Caussade. He wanted her to leave her car behind and travel in his black Citroën but she insisted on driving herself. She drove slowly, especially when they came to the tight bend where tyres had dug deep into the dirt and gouged a crater that stretched right across the road and which was now filling up with muddy rainwater. Her car limped through it until another thunderclap made her jump, her foot plunging down on the accelerator so that she kangaroo-hopped forward.

What the hell had gone on with the mayor? She’d shot out of his gate, a low moan coming from her, but his first concern had been to get her home and dry until she was ready to talk. He planned to do his own kind of talking with Monsieur le Maire tomorrow at the gendarmerie.

The sky was almost dark, so he switched his lights on, though it wasn’t yet evening, and the rain was lashing down. It was time to have a talk with André too, but not the gendarmerie kind. Not yet. A bottle of wine and a handful of fat olives might oil the wheels, but he was well aware that his boyhood friend knew how to hold his tongue when he chose.

Whatever it was that André had said to his sister up in that room of his had damaged her. She’d come out and kissed him in front of André to prove a point, but what that point was, he could only guess at. Léon flexed his shoulder blades to try to unstick the dressings on his back that chafed from too much driving, but he was still upright and still moving from A to B, which was about as much as he could hope for right now. The Arles police were dealing with the body in Bertin’s rented house in the old town, but there was still the matter of the mayor’s gun. And why the hell it was left lying there.

*

The wind was fierce when they reached the farm, tearing the blossom off the tamarisk tree and shifting some of the timbers of the half-constructed roof on the new stables. Yet a dozen gardians were milling around in the yard in the rain, crouched inside their rainproofs and soothing their horses as they prepared to ride out.

What was going on?

Before he and Eloïse had even shut off their engines Aristide Caussade came barrelling out of the house in a sou’wester and shiny cape of olive green. He wrenched open Eloïse’s door and almost lifted her out of her seat.