Oh, he was good. I felt my feet slipping, as if he had pulled away the polished floorboards beneath my seat, and I conjured up a memory of him down in the dirt in front of my horse Cosette after she had barged him to the ground when I was fifteen. Cosette never tolerated anyone shouting at me, even if I was in the wrong. That moment of fear had bleached the skin around his eyes as white as paper. I remembered that.

He regarded me now through a flimsy veil of cigarette smoke and I wondered if he remembered it too.

‘Will you explain, please, Monsieur le Maire, what is going on in this town? What makes the people of Serriac turn into a bunch of murderers, instead of a peaceful community that discusses problems over a civilised glass of wine?’

‘Murderers?’ He gave a snort of dismissal. ‘That’s too strong.’

‘They murdered Goliath.’

‘Now, Eloïse, be careful of your tongue.’

I studied his pale blue eyes, committing each detail of their colour and shape to memory, so that I would know in future when he was lying.

‘So what are they, if not murderers?’

He exhaled a skein of smoke and his eyes narrowed. Was it the smoke? Or was a lie coming?

‘Most likely it was a foolish group of two or three drunken youths at night trying to prove how macho they are.’ He gestured with his hands, as if he would smack one of the youths’ cheeks, but it was done with amusement. ‘Taking on the biggest and best bull in the whole of the Camargue. I can imagine them driving out in the darkness to . . . No’ – he smiled – ‘probably on bicycles, eager to become men.’

A lie then.

I sat forward. ‘If a group of drunken youths had approached Goliath in a field in the dark, he would have trampled them to the ground and gored them to death.’

He considered my words. ‘You are of course right, Eloïse. I had not looked at it like that.’

‘So who was it?’

‘The men in this town are angry that your father has sold a large tract of his land to the American military.’

Sold?

The word went off like a grenade in my head. I had not realised. The sale was already settled. Why had Papa not said?

‘But the men of Serriac,’ Durand continued, ‘would not take the law into their own hands, I assure you.’

‘Who would?’

He smiled patiently. ‘That is for Captain Roussel to find out.’

‘Monsieur, we all know that factions within Maurice Thorez’s Communist Party are causing trouble for Prime Minister Laniel up and down the country over the nuclear arms issue. The presence of nuclear weapons in the Camargue is going to stir up a huge swell of anger. Do you have in your possession the names of any Communist agitators in Serriac?’