The Frozen Dead (10 page)

‘Do you still have the DVD?'

‘Uh … yeah.'

‘Right, we'll do a little reconstruction – to see if it is actually possible that your very private little show could have drowned out all that noise. And we'll try it with a football match, too. And even a porn movie. Why not? – may as well do things properly.'

Servaz could see the sweat running down the watchman's face.

‘We'd had a few drinks,' he muttered, so quietly that Servaz had to ask him to repeat what he'd said.

‘Pardon?'

‘We'd been drinking…'

‘A lot?'

‘Fair amount.'

The watchman raised his hands, palms upward.

‘Look … you can't imagine what it's like up here, in the middle of winter, Commissaire. Have you had a look around you? When it gets dark, you feel like you're alone on earth. It's as if … as if you were in the middle of nowhere … on a desert island, yeah … An island lost in the middle of an ocean of snow and ice,' he added, with surprising lyricism. ‘No one down at the plant gives a damn what we do here at night. To them we're invisible, we don't exist. All they want is to make sure no one comes to sabotage the equipment.'

‘For a start, it's commandant, not commissaire. Be that as it may, someone did manage to get up here, break the door, start up the cable car and load a dead horse on board,' said Servaz patiently. ‘That all takes time. And doesn't go unnoticed.'

‘We'd closed the shutters. There was a blizzard last night. And the heating doesn't work properly. So we get cosy, we have a little drink to get warm, and we put on the telly or the music with the volume on loud so we can't hear the wind. Pissed as we were, we might have thought it was the noise from the storm. So we didn't do our job, fair enough – but we didn't have anything to do with the horse.'

One point for him,
thought Servaz. It was not hard to imagine what a storm up here would be like. The wind gusting, the snow, the old deserted buildings full of draughts, shutters and doors creaking … An instinctive fear, of the kind which gripped man's most distant forebears on their first encounter with the unbridled fury of the elements. Even tough nuts like these two.

He hesitated. The two watchmen's versions matched. And yet he still didn't believe them. No matter which way he turned the problem, Servaz was sure of at least one thing:
they were lying.

*   *   *

‘Well?'

‘Their stories tally.'

‘Yes.'

‘A little too neatly.'

‘That's what I think.'

Maillard, Ziegler and Servaz had gathered in a windowless little room lit by a pale neon light. On the wall a poster proclaimed, ‘Occupational medicine, prevention and evaluation of workplace hazards,' with instructions and a telephone number. Fatigue was apparent on the faces of the two gendarmes. Servaz knew it must be the same with him. At this time and in this place, they all felt as if they had come to the end of everything: the end of tiredness, the end of the world, the end of the night.

Someone had brought coffee. Servaz looked at his watch: five thirty-two. The manager of the plant had gone home two hours earlier, with a grey face and red eyes, after he had said goodbye to everyone. Servaz frowned when he saw Ziegler typing on a little laptop. In spite of her fatigue she was concentrating on her report.

‘They agreed on what they were going to say before we had time to separate them,' he concluded, gulping down his coffee. ‘Either because they're the ones who did it or because they have something else to hide.'

‘What do we do?' asked Ziegler.

He thought for a moment, crumpled his polystyrene cup and tossed it towards the basket, but missed.

‘We've got nothing on them,' he said, leaning over to pick it up. ‘We let them go.'

Servaz pictured the watchmen. He didn't trust either one of them. He'd met truckloads of blokes like them in seventeen years in the profession. Before the interview Ziegler had told him that their names had shown up in the criminal offences database – which didn't really mean much: there were twenty-six million offences recorded there, some of which were categorised as fifth class, applicable to minor offences – to the great displeasure of civil liberties activists, who had given the French police a Big Brother Award for having set up an ‘informationage watchtower'.

But he and Ziegler had also discovered that the two watchmen had criminal records. Both of them had served what were several fairly short prison sentences, given the crimes they'd committed: assault and battery, death threats, unlawful detention, extortion and an entire range of violent crimes, some of them against their partners. Yet in spite of criminal records as voluminous as a Who's Who, both of them together had not spent more than five years in jail. They'd come across as mild as lambs during their interviews, swearing that they'd learned their lesson and were back on the straight and narrow. Their professions of faith were identical, their sincerity null and void: the usual blah-blah, which only a lawyer could even pretend to swallow. Instinctively, Servaz had sensed that if he weren't a cop, and had asked them the same questions in a deserted car park somewhere, they'd have given him a rough time and taken a certain pleasure in hurting him.

He wiped his hand over his face. There were circles under Irène Ziegler's lovely eyes and he found her even more attractive. She had removed her uniform jacket, and the neon lights played in her blonde hair. He looked at her neck. There was a small tattoo emerging from under her collar. A Chinese ideogram.

‘Let's take a break and get a few hours' sleep. What's the programme for tomorrow?'

‘The riding academy,' she said. ‘I sent the men to cordon off the box. The crime scene investigators will take care of it tomorrow.'

Servaz remembered there'd been mention of breaking and entering.

‘We'll start with the staff at the stables. Someone must have heard or seen something. Captain,' he said, turning to Maillard, ‘I don't think we'll need you. We'll keep you posted.'

Maillard nodded.

‘There are two questions that are an absolute priority. Where has the horse's head got to? And why go to all the trouble of hanging the horse up at the top of a cable car line? It must mean something.'

‘The plant belongs to the Lombard Group,' said Ziegler, ‘and Freedom was Éric Lombard's favourite horse. So obviously he's their target.'

‘An accusation?' suggested Maillard.

‘Or revenge.'

‘Revenge can also be an accusation,' said Servaz. ‘A man like Lombard is bound to have enemies, but I can't imagine a simple business rival going to such lengths. I think we need to look, rather, at his employees, the ones who've been fired, or who have a past history of psychiatric problems.'

‘There's another hypothesis,' said Ziegler, snapping her laptop shut. ‘Lombard is a multinational with subsidiaries in a lot of countries: Russia, South America, South-East Asia … It could be they've crossed paths with the mafia or some organised crime ring, at one point or other.'

‘Good thought. Let's keep all these possibilities in mind and rule nothing out for the time being. Is there a decent hotel anywhere round here?'

‘There are fifteen or more hotels in Saint-Martin,' Maillard replied. ‘Depends what sort of place you're looking for. If I were you, I'd try the Russell.'

Servaz made a note of the name, still thinking about the watchmen, their silence, their awkwardness.

‘Those guys are afraid,' he said suddenly.

‘What?'

‘The watchmen: something or someone has frightened them.'

6

Servaz was startled awake by his mobile. He looked at the time on the clock radio: eight thirty-seven.
Shit!
He hadn't heard the alarm; he should have asked the owner of the hotel to wake him up. Irène Ziegler would be coming for him in twenty minutes. He grabbed the telephone.

‘Servaz here.'

‘How'd it go up there?'

Espérandieu's voice … As usual, his assistant was at the office before everyone else. Servaz could see him now, reading a Japanese manga or trying out the latest police software applications, dressed in a designer jumper his wife had chosen, a lock of hair falling over his brow.

‘Hard to say,' he replied, heading towards the bathroom. ‘Let's just say it's not like anything we've ever known.'

‘Drat, I wish I'd seen it.'

‘You'll see it on the video.'

‘What does it look like?'

‘It looks like a horse hanging from the support tower of a cable car, at an altitude of two thousand metres,' answered Servaz, adjusting the temperature of the shower with his free hand.

There was a brief silence.

‘A horse? On top of a cable car?'

‘Yes.'

The silence lingered.

‘Fuck,' said Espérandieu bluntly, sipping something a little too close to the speaker.

Servaz would have wagered it was something sparkling rather than a plain coffee. Espérandieu was a specialist in chemicals: chemicals to wake him up, chemicals to go to sleep, for memory, for energy, against coughs, colds, headaches and stomach upsets … The most incredible thing was that Espérandieu was not some ageing copper nearing retirement, but a young crime unit sleuth who'd only just turned thirty. In great shape. Who went running along the Garonne three times a week. Absolutely no issues with his cholesterol or his triglycerides, but he dreamt up a whole host of imaginary evils, some of which, by virtue of his zeal, eventually became reality.

‘When will you be back? We need you here. The kids are claiming that the police
beat them.
Their lawyer says the old woman's a drunk,' continued Espérandieu. ‘That her testimony is worthless. He's asked the examining magistrate to release the oldest one immediately. The other two have gone home.'

Servaz pondered this for a moment.

‘And fingerprints?'

‘Not until tomorrow.'

‘Call the deputy public prosecutor. Tell him to drag it out for the older boy. We know it's them: the prints will talk. Have him speak to the magistrate. And tell the lab to get a move on.'

He hung up. He was wide awake now. Once he was out of the shower he dried off quickly and put on clean clothes. He brushed his teeth and inspected himself in the mirror above the sink, thinking about Irène Ziegler. He was surprised to see he was taking longer than usual to check his face. He wondered what sort of image he projected to the gendarme. A guy who was still young, not bad-looking, but utterly drained by fatigue? A cop who was sort of stubborn, but efficient? A divorced man whose solitude was plain to see, both on his face and in the state of his clothes? If he'd had to describe himself, what would he have seen? Without a doubt the shadows under his eyes, the wrinkles around his mouth and the vertical line between his brows – he looked as if he'd just come out of the spin cycle of a washing machine. Still, he remained convinced that despite the extent of the damage something youthful and passionate rose to the surface. Good God! What had got into him all of a sudden? He suddenly felt like some teenager in heat; he shrugged and went out onto the balcony.

The Russell Hotel was located in the upper part of Saint-Martin, and his room looked out over the town's rooftops. With his hands on the railing he watched the shadows ebbing from the narrow streets, giving way to a luminous dawn. At nine o'clock in the morning, the sky above the mountains was as bright and transparent as a crystal dome. Up there, at two thousand five hundred metres, the glaciers would be emerging from shadow, sparkling in sunlight, even though the sun was still hidden. Straight ahead of him lay the old town, the historic centre. On the left, beyond the river, council housing. On the other side of the broad basin, two kilometres away, a high wooded slope rose like a wave, scarred with a wide trench of cable cars. From his perch Servaz could see figures darting through the shadow of the little streets in the centre of town, on their way to work; there were the headlights of delivery vans; adolescents perched on back-firing mopeds on their way to their colleges and lycées; tradesmen rolling up their iron shutters. Servaz shivered. Not because it was cold, but because he had just thought again of that horse hanging up there, and the person or persons responsible.

He leaned over the railing. Ziegler was waiting for him downstairs, lounging against her squad car. She'd swapped her uniform for a rollneck jumper and leather jacket. She was smoking, a bag slung over her shoulder.

Servaz went down to join her and invited her for a coffee. He was hungry and he wanted something to eat before they set off. She checked her watch, made a face, then finally stepped away from the car to follow him back inside. The Russell was a hotel from the 1930s; the rooms were poorly heated; the corridors, with high moulded ceilings, were endless and gloomy. But the dining room, a vast veranda with vases of flowers on the tables, offered a breathtaking view. Servaz sat down at a table near the picture window and ordered a black coffee and a buttered slice of bread, and Ziegler asked for a fresh orange juice. At the next table were some Spanish tourists – the first of the season – speaking loudly, punctuating their sentences with lusty-sounding words.

When he turned his head, a detail caught his attention and left him puzzled: not only was Irène Ziegler not in uniform, that morning she had also clipped a fine silver ring to her left nostril, and it shone in the light from the window. It was the sort of jewellery he expected to see on his daughter, not on an officer of the gendarmerie.
Times have changed,
he thought.

‘Sleep all right?' he asked.

‘No. I ended up having to take half a sleeping tablet. And you?'

‘I didn't hear the alarm. At least the hotel is quiet; most of the tourists haven't arrived yet.'