‘Of course.’

He was patient. The way he’d been with me when we were children, and I was grateful. I wanted to invite him to join me for coffee but he had on his policeman’s face that said he was busy doing whatever it was that policemen did in this quiet law-abiding town.

‘Who are the people you’re questioning?’

‘Eloïse, I can’t tell you that.’

‘Are they local? People I know?’

Léon laughed and the warmth of it melted the edges of the cool politeness. ‘You were never one to give up, were you, Eloïse?’

I stood up, face to face. ‘No,’ I said softly.

‘Leave this to me. Please don’t get involved. Whoever killed your bull has demonstrated the kind of violence they are capable of and I don’t want you,’ he lightly took hold of my wrist, ‘caught up in the middle of it.’

‘Violence works both ways,’ I said.

He gave me a hard stare, a professional police stare, but a memory suddenly cartwheeled into my head of Léon Roussel skinny-dipping at twilight in one of the lagoons in the marshes, his naked buttocks as pink as the flamingos in the light of the setting sun. He must have been around twelve or thirteen years old at the time, lean as a hunting hound and unaware of the seven-year-old wide eyes watching him from among the reeds. I couldn’t help but laugh now, surprising him. He took a pace back, but I followed him.

‘Léon, why didn’t you tell me yesterday that André used to come down to Serriac at weekends before the crash?’

Even now, that word – crash – cut like glass on my tongue. He frowned. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘You know I didn’t know.’

I nodded a polite farewell and walked away across the warm sunlit square.

I am no fool, Léon. Remember that.

*

‘Where are the Americans?’

I was holding a delicate unicorn on the palm of my hand. I’d been hugged, kissed, my scar fussed over, inspected and I’d been kissed once more. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed Marianne until I saw her again. My friend, Marianne Durand, daughter of Monsieur le Maire. She was large where he was lean, she wore floating flamboyant dresses while his suits were tailored and tasteful. That Marianne.

She was a gifted glass-maker and ran a small but fancy business from a shop in Rue des Dindes where she sold her own superb animal designs. I could have watched her all day long working her alchemy, wielding her shears and hairpin jacks. Snipping and tweaking on the steel marver. In a matter of minutes she could turn a lumpen cone of fiery glass into something exquisite that lived and breathed, with a whisker here, a tail there, a raised hoof pawing at the air.