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.’