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.