The Frozen Dead (12 page)

‘How many of you sleep on site?'

‘Two of us: the groom and me.'

‘Is everyone here today?'

Marchand looked at them in turn.

‘The instructor is on holiday until the end of the week. Autumn is slack season. I don't know whether Hermine came in today. She's terribly upset. Follow me.'

They walked across the stable yard towards the tallest building. On entering, Servaz was overwhelmed by the smell of horse manure. A thin film of sweat formed at once on his face. They walked past the tack room and found themselves at the entrance to a large indoor riding ring. A horsewoman was exercising a white horse; the horse marked out each of his steps with an infinite grace. The rider and her horse seemed completely united. The animal's white coat was tinged with blue: from a distance, his chest and nose shone like porcelain. Servaz thought of a female centaur.

‘Hermine!' called the manager of the stables.

The horsewoman turned her head and rode slowly towards them, came to a halt and dismounted. Servaz saw that her eyes were red and swollen.

‘What is it?' she asked, patting the horse's neck and nose.

‘Can you fetch Hector? The police want to interview you. You can go into my office.'

She nodded silently. No older than twenty. Smaller than average, quite pretty in a tomboyish way, with freckles, and hair the colour of wet straw. She gave Servaz a sorrowful look, then walked away, leading the horse behind her, head down.

‘Hermine loves horses; she's an excellent rider and an excellent trainer. And a good kid, but she's got quite a personality. She just needs to grow up a bit. She's the one who looked after Freedom. Ever since he was born.'

‘What did that involve?' asked Servaz.

‘Getting up very early, grooming and caring for the horse, feeding, taking him out to the field to lunge him. The groom's job is both to exercise and take care of the horses. Hermine also has two other adult thoroughbreds she's responsible for. Show animals. It's not a profession where you count your hours. Of course, she wasn't going to start breaking Freedom in until next year. Monsieur Lombard and she were waiting impatiently. He was a very promising horse, with a fine pedigree. He was the mascot here, so to speak.'

‘And Hector?'

‘He's the oldest of us all. He's been working here for ever. He was here long before I arrived, before anyone.'

‘How many horses are there?' asked Ziegler.

‘Twenty-one. Thoroughbreds, French saddle horses, one Holsteiner. Fourteen of them belong to us; the rest are boarders. We provide boarding, foaling and coaching for outside customers.'

‘How many boxes are there?'

‘Thirty-two. And one foaling box that's forty metres square, with video surveillance. And exam rooms for pregnant mares, a dispensary, two stabling areas, an inseminating centre, two outdoor schools with professional showjumping obstacles, eight hectares of paddocks, pens and pathways, with wooden shelters and a galloping track.'

‘It's a very fine academy,' confirmed Ziegler.

‘At night there are only the two of you to keep an eye on everything?' asked Servaz.

‘There's an alarm system, and all the boxes and buildings are locked: these horses are worth a great deal.'

‘And you didn't hear anything?'

‘No, nothing.'

‘Do you take something to help you sleep?'

Marchand gave him a scornful look.

‘We're not in town here. We sleep well. We live the way we were meant to live, to the rhythm of things.'

‘Not the slightest odd noise? Anything unusual? That might have woken you up in the middle of the night? Try and remember.'

‘I've already tried. If I had thought of something, I would have told you. There are always noises in a place like this: the horses move; the wood creaks. With the forest nearby, it's never silent. I haven't paid it any mind for a long time. And then there are Cisco and Enzo; they would have barked.'

‘The dogs,' said Ziegler. ‘What breed are they?'

‘Cane corso.'

‘I don't see them anywhere. Where are they?'

‘We've locked them in.'

Two dogs and an alarm system. And two men on site …

How much did a horse weigh? He tried to remember what Ziegler had told him: roughly two hundred kilos. The visitors could not possibly have come and gone on foot. How could they have killed a horse, decapitated it, loaded it onto a vehicle and left again without anyone noticing, without waking up the dogs or the residents? Without setting off the alarm? Servaz didn't get it. Neither the men nor the dogs had been alerted – and the watchmen at the power plant had not heard a thing, either: it was simply impossible. He turned to Ziegler.

‘Could we ask a vet to come and take a blood sample from the dogs? At night, are they free to roam or kept in the kennel?' he asked Marchand.

‘They're outdoors, but attached to a long chain. No one can get to the boxes without walking within reach of their fangs. And their barking would have woken me. Do you think they were drugged, is that it? That would surprise me: they were wide awake yesterday morning, perfectly normal.'

‘The toxicology test will confirm that,' replied Servaz, already wondering why the horse had been drugged and not the dogs.

*   *   *

Marchand's office was a cluttered little room between the tack room and the stables, its shelves crowded with trophies. The window looked out onto the forest and snow-covered fields bounded by a complex network of gates, enclosures and hedges. On his desk were a laptop computer, a lamp and a jumble of invoices, binders and books about horses.

During the previous half-hour Ziegler and Servaz had toured the facilities and examined Freedom's box, where the CSIs were already busy at work. The door to the box had been forced, and there was a great deal of blood on the ground. Clearly Freedom had been decapitated there and then, probably with a saw, probably after he had been put to sleep. Servaz turned to the groom.

‘You didn't hear anything that night?'

‘I was asleep,' replied Hector.

He hadn't shaved. He looked old enough to have taken retirement long ago. Grey hairs pricked his chin and hollow cheeks like the spines of a porcupine.

‘Not a single sound? Nothing?'

‘There's always some noise in a stable,' he said, echoing Marchand's words, but unlike the two watchmen's answers, this did not sound rehearsed.

‘Have you been working for Monsieur Lombard for a long time?'

‘I've always worked for him. And his father before him.'

His eyes were bloodshot, and tiny burst veins wove a fine purplish network over the thin skin of his nose and cheeks. Servaz would have wagered he didn't take sleeping tablets but always had another soporific to hand, of the liquid variety.

‘What is he like to work for?'

The man stared at Servaz with his red eyes.

‘We don't see him very often, but he's a good boss. And he loves the horses. Freedom was his favourite. Born right here. A royal pedigree. He was crazy about that horse. So was Hermine.'

The old man lowered his eyes. Servaz saw that, next to him, the young woman was trying to keep from crying.

‘Do you think someone could have had a grievance against Monsieur Lombard?'

The man kept his head lowered.

‘That's not for me to say.'

‘But you've never heard that he'd been threatened in any way?'

‘No.'

‘Monsieur Lombard has a lot of enemies,' interrupted Marchand.

Servaz and Ziegler turned to look at the steward.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Just what I said.'

‘Do you know any of them?'

‘I'm not interested in Éric's business. Only his horses interest me.'

‘You used the word “enemy” – you must have meant something by it.'

‘Just a manner of speaking.'

‘And what else?'

‘Éric's business always causes a lot of tension.'

‘That is clear as mud,' insisted Servaz. ‘Is it involuntary or intentional?'

‘Forget what I said,' answered the steward. ‘It was just idle talk. I don't know anything about Monsieur Lombard's business.'

Servaz didn't believe it for a moment. But he thanked him. On leaving the building, he was dazzled by the blue sky, the snow melting in the sun's rays. Horses gazed out of their boxes into a stream of sunlight; others were already being ridden, taken over the jumps. Servaz stood there for a moment, clearing his mind, his face in the sun …

Two dogs and an alarm system. And two men on site.

And no one had seen or heard a thing. Here or over at the power plant. Impossible. Absurd.

The more details they unearthed about this horse business, the more space it seemed to fill in his thoughts. He felt as if he were a pathologist digging up first a finger, then a hand, then an arm, then the entire corpse. He was beginning to feel more and more uneasy. Everything about this business was extraordinary. And incomprehensible. Instinctively, like an animal, Servaz sensed danger. He was trembling, in spite of the sun.

7

Vincent Espérandieu raised an eyebrow when he saw a lobster-faced Servaz come into his office on the Boulevard Embouchure.

‘You've got sunburn,' he pointed out.

‘It's the reflection,' answered Servaz by way of a greeting. ‘And I went for a helicopter ride.'

‘You, in a helicopter?'

Espérandieu had known for a long time that his boss had no liking for speed or heights: drive any faster than 130 kilometres and he went all pale and sunk down into his seat.

‘Have you got something for a headache?'

Vincent Espérandieu opened a drawer.

‘Aspirin? Paracetamol? Ibuprofen?'

‘Something fizzy.'

His assistant took out a bottle of mineral water and a glass and handed them to Servaz. He laid a fat, round tablet in front of him, then swallowed a capsule with a bit of water himself. Through the open door, someone let out the perfect imitation of a neigh; there was a smattering of laughter.

‘Stupid bastards,' said Servaz.

‘But you've got to admit they're right: the crime unit for a horse…'

‘A horse that belongs to Éric Lombard.'

‘Ah.'

‘And if you'd seen it, you'd be wondering too whether the men who did it aren't capable of more.'

‘Men? You think there are more than one?'

Servaz looked distractedly at the beautiful little fair-haired girl grinning on Espérandieu's computer screen, a large star painted round her left eye like a clown.

‘Can you see yourself hauling two hundred kilos of meat all alone in the middle of the night and hanging it up three hundred metres from the ground?'

‘That is a perfectly valid point,' his assistant conceded.

Servaz shrugged and looked around him. On one side of the room, the blinds were lowered against the grey sky and roofs of Toulouse, and on the other, over the glass partition that separated them from the corridor. The second desk, belonging to Samira Cheung, a new recruit, was empty.

‘And the kids?' he asked.

‘The eldest has been remanded in custody. As I told you, the other two went home.'

Servaz nodded.

‘I spoke to the father of one of them,' Espérandieu added, ‘an insurer. He doesn't get it. He's shattered. At the same time, when I mentioned the victim, he lost his temper: “He was a tramp. Drunk all God's hours! You're not going to put kids in prison because of some homeless tramp?”'

‘He said that?'

‘Word for word. He met me in his big office. The first thing he said was, “My son hasn't done a thing. That's not how he was brought up. It's the others. That boy Jérôme dragged him into it. His father is unemployed.” He said it as if in his eyes being unemployed was the same thing as drug trafficking or paedophilia.'

‘Which one is his son?'

‘The boy called Clément.'

The ringleader,
thought Servaz.
Like father like son. And the same disdain for others.

‘Their lawyer has contacted the examining magistrate,' continued Espérandieu. ‘Obviously they've got their whole strategy worked out: they're going to charge the eldest one.'

‘The son of the unemployed bloke.'

‘Yes.'

‘The weakest link.'

‘Those people make me want to puke,' said Espérandieu.

He had a childish, drawling voice. Because of it, and his somewhat mannered air, some of his colleagues suspected him of being interested not only in women, even when they were as beautiful as his wife. Servaz had wondered as much himself when Espérandieu joined the department. The young man's taste in clothes also caused the hackles to rise among some of the Cro-Magnon men on the squad, the ones who thought that if you were a cop, you were duty bound to display nothing but virility and machismo triumphant.

Life had been kind to Espérandieu. At the age of thirty he'd made an excellent marriage and he had a very pretty little five-year-old girl, the one whose smile lit up his computer screen. Servaz had quickly befriended him, and his assistant had invited him round to dinner half a dozen times in the two years since he'd joined the squad. Every time, Servaz had been completely overwhelmed by the charm and wit of Madame and Mademoiselle Espérandieu: they looked as if they belonged in the pages of a magazine – in adverts for toothpaste, travel or family holidays.

But then there'd been an incident between the newcomer and the veterans on the squad, whose homicidal tendencies seemed to be aroused by the fact of sharing their everyday life with a young and potentially bisexual colleague. Servaz had had to get involved, with the end result that he'd made himself a few lasting enemies. There were two blokes in particular, two macho and narrow-minded roughnecks, who would never forgive him. One of them had got a bit of an earful during their argument. But Servaz had also earned Espérandieu's lasting recognition and respect: Charlène was pregnant again and they'd asked Servaz to be the godfather.