The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

  ‘Please,’ said the lawyer. ‘No—’

  ‘Old like you, you mean? How old are you? Thirty? Forty? It’s not bad, your velvet jacket! Must be worth a fortune. Why are you picking on me, huh? We didn’t do it! We didn’t fucking do anything! Honestly we didn’t. Are you idiots or what?’

  To defuse his rising anger, Servaz reminded himself that this was an adolescent who’d never been in trouble. Who’d never run foul of the police. No trouble at school, either. The lawyer had turned very pale and was sweating profusely.

  ‘You’re not in some TV series here,’ said Servaz calmly. ‘You’re not going to get out of it. It’s already wrapped up. You’re the idiot here.’

  Any other teenager would have reacted. But not this one. Not this boy named Clément; the boy named Clément did not even seem to realise what he’d been accused of. Servaz had already read articles about minors like this who raped, killed and tortured, and who seemed perfectly unaware of the horror of their deeds. As if they’d been involved in some video game or role play that had simply gone wrong. Until that day Servaz had refused to believe they existed. The media, exaggerating as usual. And now here he was, faced full on with the phenomenon. And what was even more terrifying than the apathy of the three young murderers was the fact that there was nothing at all exceptional anymore about the case. The world had become a huge laboratory for increasingly demented experimentation, where God, the devil or random luck stirred the contents of the test-tubes.

  * * *

  Once he got home, Servaz took a long time scrubbing his hands, got undressed and stayed in the shower until all the hot water was gone, as if to decontaminate himself. After that, he took his Juvenal down from the bookshelf and opened it to Satire XIII: ‘What day is there, however festive, which fails to disclose theft, treachery and fraud: gain made out of every kind of crime, and money won by the dagger or the bowl? For honest men are scarce; hardly so numerous as the gates of Thebes.’

  These kids, we’re the ones who’ve made them the way they are, he’d thought, closing the book. What sort of future do they have? None. Everything’s going to the dogs. You have bastards who fill their pockets and waltz round on TV while these kids’ parents get the sack and look like losers to their children. Why don’t they rebel? Why don’t they set fire to banks, luxury boutiques and the corridors of power, instead of schools and buses?

  I’m reasoning like an old fart, he told himself afterwards. Was it because he was about to turn forty in a few weeks? He’d left his team in charge of the three kids. This would be a welcome diversion – even if he didn’t know what lay ahead.

  * * *

  He followed the gendarme’s instruction and bypassed Saint-Martin. Immediately after the second roundabout the road began to climb, and he caught a glimpse of the white roofs of the town below him. He pulled over onto the verge and climbed out. The town spread further across the valley than he’d thought. Through the gloom he could just make out the huge snowy fields he’d driven past on his way in, as well as an industrial zone and some campsites to the east, on the other side of the river. There were also some council estates, long low buildings. The town centre, with its skein of little streets, was spread at the foot of the highest of the surrounding mountains. Along the fir-covered slopes a double row of cable cars inscribed a vertical fault.

  The mist and the snowflakes created a distance between the town and him, blurring the details, and Servaz sensed that Saint-Martin was not a town that gave itself easily to strangers, that you had to approach from an angle, not face on.

  He climbed back into the Jeep. The road still headed up. In summer, there would be luxuriant vegetation, an overabundance of greenery, thorns, moss, which even the snow could not hide in winter. And everywhere the sound of water: springs, torrents, streams … With the window down, he went through a few villages where half the houses were boarded up. A new road sign: ‘HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANT, 4 KM.’

  The fir trees vanished. As did the mist. No more nature, only walls of ice the height of a man by the side of the road, and a violent, boreal light. He put the Cherokee on the black-ice setting.

  At last the power plant appeared, with its typical industrial-age architecture: a titanic stone building with tall, narrow windows, crowned with a wide slate roof holding back huge drifts of snow. Behind it, three gigantic pipes headed up the mountain as if to conquer it. The car park was busy. Vehicles, men in uniform – and journalists. A van from the regional TV channel with a big satellite dish on its roof and a few unmarked cars. Servaz noticed the press badges on the windscreens. A Land Rover, three Peugeot estate cars, two Transit vans, all of them in the colours of the gendarmerie, and one van with an elevated roof, which he recognised as a mobile laboratory. There was also a helicopter waiting on a landing pad.

  Before leaving the car, he gave himself a quick glance in the rearview mirror. He had circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were hollow, as usual – he looked like a guy who’d spent the night on the town, and yet that was hardly the case – but he figured, too, that no one would think he was forty years old. With his fingers he combed his thick brown hair as best he could, rubbed his two-day beard to wake himself up and gave a tug to his trousers. Good Lord, he’d lost some more weight.

  A few snowflakes caressed his cheeks, but it was nothing like down in the valley. It was very cold. He should have put on warmer clothes. The reporters and the cameras and microphones turned to look at him – but no one recognised him and their curiosity faded at once. He headed for the building, climbed three steps and showed his card.

  ‘Servaz!’

  A voice rolling through the foyer like a snow cannon. Servaz turned towards the figure heading in his direction. A tall, slender woman in her fifties, elegantly dressed. Hair dyed blonde, a scarf tossed over an alpaca coat. Catherine d’Humières had come in person, instead of sending one of her deputies: Servaz felt a sudden rush of adrenaline.

  Her profile, her sparkling eyes, like a raptor’s. People who did not know her were intimidated. As were those who did know her. Someone told Servaz one day that she made incredible spaghetti alla puttanesca. Servaz wondered what she put in it. Human blood? She took his hand briefly, a firm handshake as powerful as a man’s.

  ‘Remind me – what sign are you, Martin?’

  Servaz smiled. At their very first meeting, when he had just started at the Toulouse crime unit and she was still only one deputy public prosecutor among others, she had asked him that same question.

  ‘Capricorn.’

  She acted as if she hadn’t noticed his smile.

  ‘Well, that explains your cautious, controlled and phlegmatic side, doesn’t it?’ She gave him an intense, searching look. ‘So much the better. We’ll find out whether you’ll still be controlled and calm after this.’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘Follow me, I’ll introduce you.’

  She led him across the foyer, their steps ringing out in the vast space. For whom had all these buildings in the mountain been constructed? Some imminent race of supermen? Everything about them seemed to proclaim confidence in a radiant, colossal industrial future; an era of faith that had disappeared long ago, he mused. They headed towards a glassed-in cubicle. Inside there were filing cabinets and a dozen or so desks. They wove their way past them to join a little group in the middle. D’Humières made the introductions: Captain Rémi Maillard, head of the gendarmerie in Saint-Martin; Captain Irène Ziegler, from the research unit in Pau; the mayor of Saint-Martin – a short, broad-shouldered fellow with a lion’s mane and a burnished face – and the manager of the power plant, an engineer who looked like an engineer: short hair, glasses and a sporty air in his rollneck jumper and lined parka.

  ‘I’ve asked Commandant Servaz to give us a hand. When I was a deputy public prosecutor in Toulouse, I often had reason to call on his services. His team assisted us in getting to the bottom of several sticky cases.’

  ‘Assisted us in getting to the bottom of…’ That was
d’Humières all over. It was just like her to want to get right in the middle of the photograph. But he immediately told himself that it wasn’t really fair to think like that: he knew she was a woman who loved her job – and who did not keep track of either her time or her sweat. That was something he appreciated. Servaz liked conscientious people. He thought that he too belonged to this category: conscientious, tough, probably boring.

  ‘Commandant Servaz and Captain Ziegler will be handling the investigation jointly.’

  Servaz saw Captain Ziegler’s fine face crumple. Once again he told himself that this must be a major incident. An investigation that was handled jointly by the police and the gendarmerie was an inexhaustible source of quarrels, rivalry and withholding of evidence – but that too was a sign of the times. And Cathy d’Humières was sufficiently ambitious never to lose sight of the political angle. She had climbed up all the rungs: assistant public prosecutor, deputy public prosecutor … She had become head of the public prosecutor’s office in Saint-Martin five years earlier and Servaz was sure she did not intend to stop there when she was doing so well: the office in Saint-Martin was too small, too far from the spotlight, for someone whose ambition was as consuming as hers. He was convinced that in the next year or two she would make presiding judge at a more important tribunal.

  Now he asked, ‘Was the body found here, at the power plant?’

  ‘No,’ answered Maillard, pointing to the ceiling, ‘up there, at the cable car terminus, two thousand metres up.’

  ‘Who uses the cable car?’

  ‘The workers who go up to maintain the machines,’ answered the plant manager. ‘It’s a sort of underground factory that functions by itself; it channels the water from the upper lake into the three pressure pipelines you can see outside. The cable car is the only way to get up there under normal circumstances. There is of course the helicopter pad – but that’s only used in the event of a medical emergency.’

  ‘There’s no path, no road?’

  ‘There’s a path that goes up there in the summer. In the winter it’s buried under metres of snow.’

  ‘You mean that whoever did this used the cable car? How does it work?’

  ‘Nothing could be simpler: there’s a key; then you press a button to start it. And another big red button to bring everything to a halt if there’s a problem.’

  ‘The keys are kept in a locker, here,’ Maillard interrupted, pointing to a metal box on the wall. ‘It seems to have been forced open. The body had been strung up on the last support tower, at the very top. There can be no doubt: the perpetrator must have used the cable car to transport it.’

  ‘No fingerprints?’

  ‘No visible traces, in any case. We’ve got hundreds of latent prints in the cabin. The samples have been sent to the lab. We’re in the process of getting all the employees’ prints to compare them.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And what was the body like?’

  ‘Decapitated. And dismembered: the skin peeled back on either side like great wings. You’ll see it on the video: a truly macabre sight. The workers still haven’t recovered.’

  Servaz stared at the gendarme, all his senses suddenly on alert. Even though this was an era of extreme violence, this incident was far from ordinary. He noticed that Captain Ziegler wasn’t saying anything, just listening attentively.

  ‘Any make-up?’ He shook his hand. ‘Fingertips cut?’

  In French police jargon, ‘make-up’ meant hindering identification of the victim by destroying or removing anything that could be used for ID: face, fingers, teeth …

  The officer opened his eyes wide, astonished.

  ‘What … you mean they didn’t tell you?’

  Servaz frowned.

  ‘Tell me what?’

  He saw Maillard cast a panicked look at Ziegler, then the prosecutor.

  ‘The body,’ stammered the gendarme.

  Servaz felt he was about to lose his patience – but he waited for what came next.

  ‘It was a horse.’

  * * *

  ‘A horse?’

  Servaz looked at the rest of the group, incredulous.

  ‘Yes. A horse. A thoroughbred, probably a year old, according to what we know.’

  Now it was Servaz’s turn to look at Cathy d’Humières.

  ‘You made me come all the way up here for a horse?’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ she said defensively. ‘Didn’t Canter tell you anything?’

  Servaz thought back to Canter in his office and the way he’d feigned ignorance. He knew. And he also knew that Servaz would have refused to come all this way for a horse, since he had the murder of the homeless man on his hands.

  ‘I’ve got three kids who’ve murdered a homeless bloke and you drag me up here for a nag?’

  D’Humières’s reply was instantaneous, conciliatory but firm.

  ‘It’s not just any horse. A thoroughbred. A very expensive animal. Which in all likelihood belonged to Éric Lombard.’

  So that’s it, he thought. Éric Lombard, the son of Henri Lombard and grandson of Édouard Lombard … A financial dynasty, captains of industry, entrepreneurs who had reigned over this patch of the Pyrenees, over the département and even over the region, for six decades or more. With obviously unlimited access to all the antechambers of power. In this part of the world, Éric Lombard’s thoroughbreds were indisputably more important than some murdered homeless man.

  ‘And bear in mind that not far from here there’s an asylum full of dangerous lunatics. If one of them did this, it means he’s roaming around somewhere out there.’

  ‘The Wargnier Institute … Have you called them?’

  ‘Yes. They say that none of their inmates are missing. And in any case none of them are allowed out, even temporarily. They swear that it’s impossible to get over the wall, that the security is draconian – several restraining walls, biometric security measures, staff who’ve been hand-picked and so on … We’ll double-check it all, naturally. But the Institute has a good reputation – given both its notoriety and the unusual nature of its inmates.’

  ‘A horse!’ said Servaz again.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Captain Ziegler emerge at last from her reserve with a faint smile. That smile, which he alone had noticed, went some way towards defusing his growing anger. Captain Ziegler had lake-deep green eyes, and beneath the cap of her uniform her blonde hair was pulled back into a chignon: he suspected it must be quite beautiful. On her lips, only a trace of colour.

  ‘So what is the purpose of all the roadblocks?’

  ‘We’ll keep them there until we are sure that none of the inmates from the Wargnier Institute have escaped,’ answered d’Humières. ‘I don’t want to be accused of negligence.’

  Servaz said nothing. But his thoughts were racing. D’Humières and Canter had got their orders from high up. It was always the same. No matter how good they were as bosses, far superior to the majority of careerists who filled the prosecutors’ offices and ministries, they, like everyone else, had developed an acute sense of danger. Someone at the top, perhaps the minister himself, had decided this whole ridiculous production would be a good idea, in order to be of service to Éric Lombard, a personal friend to the highest authorities of the State.

  ‘And where is Lombard now?’

  ‘In the US, a business trip. We want to be sure it’s one of his horses before we contact him.’

  ‘One of his stewards did report the disappearance of a horse this morning,’ explained Maillard. ‘The stall was empty. The description matches. He should be here shortly.’

  ‘Who found the horse? The workers?’

  ‘Yes, on their way up there.’

  ‘Do they go up there often?’

  ‘At least twice a year: at the beginning of winter and just before the snows melt,’ answered the plant manager. ‘It’s an old factory, with old machines. They have to have regular maintenance, even if they do operate automatically. The last tim
e the workers went up there was three months ago.’

  Servaz noticed that Captain Ziegler hadn’t taken her eyes off him.

  ‘Do we know the time of death?’

  ‘According to the initial examination, sometime during the night,’ said Maillard. ‘The autopsy will give us more exact details. In any event, it looks as though whoever put the horse up there knew that the workers were about to go up there too.’

  ‘And at night? Isn’t there any security at the plant?’

  ‘There is. Two watchmen, with an office at the end of this building. They say they didn’t see or hear anything.’

  Servaz hesitated, frowning.

  ‘Yet you can’t just move a horse like that, can you? Even dead. You need something to tow it with at the very least. A van. There were no visitors, no cars? Nothing at all? Maybe they were asleep and they don’t dare say as much? Or maybe they were watching a match on the telly. Or a film. And how are you supposed to load the carcass onto the cable car, get it up there, string it up, get back down – that all takes time. How many people would it take to carry a horse, anyway? Does the cable car make a noise when it’s operating?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Captain Ziegler, intervening for the first time. ‘You can’t help but hear it.’

  Servaz turned his head. Captain Ziegler was wondering the same thing as he was. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘Do you have an explanation?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We’ll have to interrogate the watchmen separately,’ he said. ‘That means today, before we let them go.’

  ‘We’ve already separated them,’ answered Ziegler calmly, with authority. ‘They’re in two different rooms; we’ve got an eye on them. They … were waiting for you.’

  Servaz noticed the icy glance Ziegler gave d’Humières. Suddenly the ground began to vibrate. It was as if the vibration were spreading through the entire building. For a moment, his mind completely elsewhere, he thought it might be an avalanche or an earthquake, and then he understood: it was the cable car. Ziegler was right: you could not help but hear it. The door to the cubicle opened.