The Frozen Dead (47 page)

That's all I have for the time being. I'll keep on digging. Goodnight, Vince.

Espérandieu frowned. If this was relevant to the case, why now? Eight years later? Had any of the workers ended up in prison? Or after several years of unemployment had they killed themselves, leaving behind families filled with hatred? He made a note to find the answer to these questions.

Espérandieu looked at the time in the corner of his screen: 7.03 p.m. He switched off the laptop and stretched on his chair. He got up and took a bottle of milk from the fridge. The house was silent. Mégan was playing in her room; Charlène wouldn't be back for several hours; the babysitter had left. He leaned against the sink and took an anxiety supressant. Prompted by a sudden thought, he looked for the name of the laboratory on the box – only to find that, in order to calm the worry brought on by the doings of the Lombard Group, he had just taken one of their drugs!

He wondered how he could go about finding out more about Lombard, and remembered a contact in Paris – a brilliant young woman whom he had known at the police academy and who would surely be well placed to obtain juicy revelations.

*   *   *

‘Martin, come and have a look.'

They had gone back to searching every floor. Servaz had started on a little room which, judging by the layer of dust, had not been used for ages. He opened cupboards and drawers, lifted up a mattress and pillows, was even trying to remove the metal sheet blocking the fireplace when Irène's voice reached him.

He went out onto the top-floor landing. On the other side was an inclined ladder with a handrail, like on a ship. And an open trap door directly above. A ribbon of light fell from the gaping hole and pierced the darkness on the landing.

Servaz climbed up and put his head through the opening.

Ziegler was standing in the middle of the room, and motioned to him to join her.

The attic consisted of one long, attractive space under the beams, and served both as bedroom and study. Servaz emerged from the hole and got his footing. The furnishing and décor were like something you'd find in a mountain chalet: rough wood, a wardrobe, a bed with drawers beneath the window, a table that served as a desk. On one of the walls was an immense map of the Pyrenees – with valleys, villages, roads and peaks. Right from the start Servaz had been wondering where Chaperon slept, as none of the bedrooms had seemed lived in; now the answer was before his eyes.

Ziegler looked all around the room, as did Servaz. The cupboard was open.

Empty hangers in a tangle inside; a pile of clothing lying on the floor.

On the desk, loose papers, and, under the bed, a gaping drawer revealed a tangle of men's underwear.

‘I found it like this,' murmured Ziegler. ‘What is going on here?'

Servaz noticed a detail that he had initially missed: on the desk, among the papers, was a box of bullets, open …

In his haste, Chaperon had dropped one on the floor.

They looked at each other.

The mayor had fled, as if he had the devil at his heels.

And he was afraid for his life.

21

Seven p.m. Diane had become very hungry and she hurried to the little cafeteria where something would be provided for the staff who did not go home. On her way in she greeted two guards eating at a table near the door, and picked up a tray.

She made a face as she looked through the glass display where the warm meals were served: chicken and chips. She would have to get organised if she wanted to eat a balanced diet and and not leave with ten extra kilos at the end of her stay. For dessert she took a fruit salad. She sat by the picture window and gazed out at the nocturnal landscape. Little lamps set around the building lit the snow at ground level, beneath the fir trees. The effect was magical.

Once the two guards had left, she was all alone in the silent room – even the server behind the counter had disappeared – and a wave of sadness and doubt overcame her. And yet as a student she would often be alone in her room, studying and working while others were scattered among the pubs and clubs in Geneva. Never had she felt so far from home. So isolated. So lost. It was the same thing every evening, as soon as night fell.

She told herself angrily to get a grip. What had become of her lucidity, of her human and psychological knowledge? Couldn't she do a better job of observing herself, instead of succumbing to her emotions? Was she simply
maladjusted
here? She knew the basic equation: maladjustment = torn = anxious. She brushed the argument aside. It wasn't as though she didn't know why she felt so ill at ease. It had nothing to do with her. It was because of what was going on here. She would have no peace of mind until she got to the bottom of it. She stood up to leave. The corridors were just as deserted as the cafeteria.

She went round the corner of the corridor leading to her office and froze. A chill, right down into her gut. Xavier was there. He was slowly closing the door to
her
office. He glanced first to the right then left, and she quickly stepped back behind the wall. To her great relief, she heard him head off in the opposite direction.

*   *   *

Audio cassettes.

That was the next thing that caught his attention. Among the loose papers on the mayor's desk were tapes of the kind no one used anymore but which, it would seem, Chaperon had kept. Servaz picked them up and read the labels:
Birdsongs 1, Birdsongs 2, Birdsongs 3.
He put them back down. There was a small stereo with a tape deck in a corner of the room.

Mountaineering, birdsongs: the man was truly passionate about nature.

And old things, as well: old photos, old cassettes … All these old things in an old house – what could be more normal?

Yet somewhere at the back of his mind an alarm bell was sounding. It had something to do with the things in this room. More precisely, with the birdsong. What did it mean? He tended to trust his instinct as a rule; it rarely warned him in vain.

He racked his brain, but nothing came. Ziegler was calling the gendarmerie to have them come and seal off the house, and bring forensics with them.

‘We're getting near the truth,' she said when she had hung up.

‘Yes,' he agreed solemnly. ‘But clearly we're not the only ones.'

He could feel the fear in his guts again. At this point he no longer doubted that the foursome made up of Grimm, Perrault, Chaperon and Mourrenx, and their former ‘exploits', were at the crux of the investigation. But the killer, or killers were at least two steps ahead. Unlike Ziegler and himself, they knew everything there was to know, and they had known it for a long time. And what did Lombard's horse or Hirtmann have to do with any of it? Once again, Servaz told himself that there was something he had failed to see.

They went back downstairs and out onto the lit porch. The trees tossed shadows about and painted the garden with darkness. Somewhere a shutter creaked. Servaz wondered why the birdsong obsessed him so. He took the cassettes out of his pocket and handed them to Ziegler.

‘Have someone listen to this. And not just the first few seconds. The whole thing.'

She gave him a surprised look.

‘I want to know if it really is birdsong on the tape. Or something else.'

His mobile vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the caller ID: Antoine Canter, his boss.

‘Excuse me,' he said, going down the steps. ‘Servaz here,' he replied, trampling on the snow in the garden.

‘Martin? It's Antoine. Vilmer wants to see you.'

Divisional Commissioner Vilmer, the head of the Toulouse crime unit. A man Servaz did not like, and who returned the feeling. In Vilmer's opinion, Servaz was the sort of cop who had had his day: resistant to innovation, individualistic, working by instinct and refusing to follow the latest directives from the ministry to the letter. Vilmer dreamt of pliable, trained, interchangeable civil servants.

‘I'll stop by tomorrow,' he said, glancing over at Ziegler, who was waiting by the gate.

‘No. Vilmer wants you in his office tonight. He's waiting for you. Don't go pulling a fast one, Martin. You've got two hours to get there.'

*   *   *

Servaz left Saint-Martin shortly after eight o'clock. Half an hour later, he left the
départementale
825 for the A64. He was overcome by fatigue as he tore down the motorway, with his headlights dipped, dazzled by the oncoming traffic. He pulled off into a service area for a coffee. After that he bought a can of Red Bull, opened it and drank the entire thing before he went back to the car.

A fine drizzle was falling when he reached Toulouse. He greeted the security guard, parked his car and hurried to the lift. It was half past nine when he pressed the button for the top floor. Ordinarily Servaz avoided coming here. The corridors were too vivid a reminder of his early days in the force, in the General Directorate of the National Police, which was full of people to whom ‘police' was little more than a word to be typed, and who greeted any request on the part of a policeman in uniform as if it were a new strain of the Ebola virus. At this time of day most of the staff had gone home and the offices were deserted. He compared the atmosphere in these muffled corridors with the chaotic one of permanent tension that reigned in his own unit. Of course Servaz had also encountered a good number of competent, efficient people in the directorate. They were rarely the pushy sort. Even rarer among them was any tendency to wear the latest fashion. With a smile he recalled Espérandieu's theory, which posited that once you had a certain number of suits and ties per square metre, you entered a zone he called ‘the zone of rarefied competence', and which he further subdivided into zones of ‘absurd decisions', ‘hogging the stage' or ‘taking cover'.

He checked his watch and decided to let Vilmer wait five more minutes. It wasn't every day he had the opportunity to keep a navel-gazer like Vilmer hanging about. He took the time to go to the coffee room, and dropped a coin into the machine. Two men and a woman sat chatting around a table. When he came in, the volume of conversation dropped a few decibels; one of them told a joke in a low voice.
A sense of humour,
thought Servaz. One day his ex-wife had told him it was something he didn't have. Maybe it was true. But did that mean he was any less intelligent? Not if you went by the number of idiots who excelled at it. But it was certainly the sign of a psychological weakness. He would ask Propp. Servaz was beginning to like the shrink, despite his tendency to pontificate.

When he'd finished his umpteenth coffee, he left the room and the conversation resumed. The woman behind him burst out laughing. An artificial, graceless laugh, which grated on his nerves.

Vilmer's office was a few metres further down the hall. His secretary greeted Servaz with a friendly smile.

‘Go on in. He's expecting you.'

Servaz told himself that this did not bode well, and wondered at the same time whether Vilmer's secretary was able to claim overtime.

Vilmer was a thin man with a neatly groomed goatee, an impeccable haircut and a commanding smile glued to his lips like a stubborn cold sore. He always wore the latest thing in shirts, ties, suits and shoes, and had an obvious penchant for hues of chocolate, chestnut and violet. Servaz viewed him as living proof that a moron can go far provided he has other morons ranked above him.

‘Have a seat,' he said.

Servaz collapsed in the black leather armchair. Vilmer seemed cross. He joined his fingers beneath his chin and studied him wordlessly for a moment, as if to convey both profundity and disapproval. He would never have won an Oscar for his performance, and Servaz stared right back at him with a little smile. Which merely served to exasperate the commissioner.

‘You find this situation amusing?'

Like everyone else, Servaz knew that Vilmer had spent his entire career cosily ensconced behind a desk. Apart from a brief early spell in vice, he had no idea what it was like out there. There were rumours that he had been the whipping boy, the laughing stock of his colleagues.

‘No, sir.'

‘Three murders in eight days!'

‘Two,' corrected Servaz. ‘Two murders and one horse.'

‘What's the latest on the investigation?'

‘We've been at it for a week. And we nearly caught the killer this morning, but he managed to escape.'

‘You let him escape,' specified the commissioner, before hastening to add, ‘Confiant has been complaining about you.'

Servaz shuddered. ‘What do you mean?'

‘He complained to me personally and to the Ministry of Justice. Who immediately informed the private secretary of the Ministry of the Interior. Who then called me.'

He paused for effect, then said, ‘You have put me in a very awkward situation, Commandant.'

Servaz was stunned. Confiant had gone behind d'Humières's back. The judge wasn't wasting any time.

‘Are you taking me off the case?'

‘Of course not,' replied Vilmer, as if the thought had not even occurred to him. ‘Besides, Catherine d'Humières came to your defence rather eloquently, I must say. She reckons that you and Captain Ziegler are doing a good job.'

Vilmer sniffed, as if it cost him to repeat something so inane.

‘But I'm warning you: there are people in high places who are following the matter. We are in the eye of the storm. For the time being everything is calm. But if you fail, there will be consequences.'

Servaz could not help but smile. Sitting there in his chic little suit, Vilmer acted as if it were nothing, but he was shitting himself. Because he knew very well that the ‘consequences' would concern not only the investigators.

‘This is a sensitive case, don't forget that.'

Because of a horse,
thought Servaz.
It's the horse they're after.
He repressed his anger.