The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

  ‘They’re on their way down,’ announced a subordinate.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘The body,’ explained Ziegler. ‘With the cable car. And the investigators. They’ve finished their work up there.’

  The crime scene investigators: the mobile laboratory belonged to them. In it would be photographic equipment, cases for storing biological swabs and sealed items to be sent for analysis to the IRCGN – the central Institute for Criminal Research of the Gendarmerie Nationale, in Rosny-sous-Bois, in the Paris region. There was bound to be a refrigerator, too, for the most perishable samples. All this fuss over a horse.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I want to see the star of the day, the winner of the Grand Prix de Saint-Martin.’

  As they went back out, Servaz was astonished to see how many reporters there were. He could have understood if they’d been there for a murder – but for a horse! It looked as if the private little worries of a billionaire like Éric Lombard were a newsworthy topic for the celebrity press.

  He tried as best he could to avoid getting his shoes wet as he walked along, and he sensed that Captain Ziegler was still watching him attentively.

  Then all of a sudden he saw it.

  A vision from hell … If hell could be made of ice.

  He forced himself to look, despite his disgust. The horse’s remains were held in place by wide straps looped round the carcass and attached to a big forklift truck equipped with a little motor and pneumatic jacks. Servaz knew that this same type of forklift might have been used by whoever hung the horse up there … They were taking it out of the cable car. Servaz saw that the cabin was very big. He recalled the vibrations a few moments ago. How could the watchmen have failed to notice anything?

  Reluctantly, he turned to focus his attention on the animal. He didn’t know anything about horses, but it seemed to him that this one must have been a fine specimen. His long tail was a brush of black, shining strands darker than the hair on his coat, which was the colour of roasted coffee, with cherry-red glints. The splendid beast seemed to have been sculpted from a smooth, polished exotic wood. His legs were the same coal-black colour as the tail and what was left of the mane. A multitude of little icicles whitened the corpse. Servaz assumed that if the temperature down here was below zero, it must be several degrees colder up there. Perhaps the gendarmes had used a blowtorch or soldering iron to melt the ice around the attachments. Other than that, the animal was no more than a wound – with two huge flaps of skin pulled back from the body and hanging along its flanks like folded wings.

  A dizzying fear had overcome everyone gathered there.

  Where the skin had been peeled back, the flesh was bared, every muscle distinctly visible, as in an anatomy diagram. Servaz glanced around him: Ziegler and Cathy d’Humières were pale; the plant manager looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Servaz himself had rarely seen anything so unbearable. To his great dismay he realised that he was so used to the sight of human suffering that he was far more shocked and disturbed by the sight of an animal’s pain.

  Then there was the head. Or rather its absence; instead, a huge gaping wound just above the throat. This absence made the whole picture so strange that it was hard to stomach. Like artwork proclaiming the utter madness of the artist. And indeed, this vision was indisputable proof of insanity – and Servaz could not help but think again of the Wargnier Institute: it was hard not to see a connection, in spite of the director’s assertion that none of his inmates could have escaped.

  Instinctively he had to admit that Cathy d’Humières’s fears were well founded: this was not just some business about a horse. It gave you shivers down your spine, the way the animal had been killed.

  The sudden roar of an engine caused them to turn round.

  A big Japanese four-wheel drive tore up the road and came to a sudden halt a few metres away. The cameras instantly turned to focus on the vehicle. In all likelihood they were hoping for a glimpse of Éric Lombard, but they could have spared themselves the trouble: the man who stepped out of the car was in his sixties, with an iron-grey crew-cut. His height and build were those of a military man or a retired lumberjack. He was also wearing a lumberjack’s checked flannel shirt. The sleeves were rolled up to reveal powerful forearms, and he did not seem to feel the cold. Servaz saw that he did not take his eyes off the carcass. He did not even notice their presence; circling their little group, he strode quickly over to the horse. Then Servaz saw his broad shoulders sag.

  When the man turned to look at them, his bloodshot eyes were shining. With pain – but also anger.

  ‘What bastard did this?’

  ‘Are you André Marchand, Monsieur Lombard’s steward?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you recognise this animal?’

  ‘Yes, it’s Freedom.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Could you be more explicit? His head is missing.’

  The man glared at him. Then he shrugged and turned back to the animal’s remains.

  ‘Do you think there are many bay yearlings like him in the region? He’s as recognisable to me as your brother or sister is to you. With or without his head.’ He pointed to the left foreleg. ‘He has this white stocking halfway up his pastern, for example.’

  ‘His what?’ asked Servaz.

  ‘The white stripe above the hoof,’ translated Ziegler. ‘Thank you, Monsieur Marchand. We’re going to have the carcass taken to the stud farm in Tarbes for an autopsy. Was Freedom receiving any kind of medical treatment?’

  Servaz could not believe his ears: they were going to perform a toxicology examination on a horse.

  ‘He was in perfect health.’

  ‘Did you bring his papers?’

  ‘They’re in the 4x4.’

  The steward went to rummage in the glove compartment and came back with a pile of papers.

  ‘Here is his registration card and the booklet that goes with it.’

  Ziegler looked through the documents. Over her shoulder Servaz could see a multitude of columns, boxes and slots filled in with a tight, precise handwriting. And sketches of horses, face on and in profile.

  ‘Monsieur Lombard adored this horse,’ said Marchand. ‘He was his favourite. He was born at the academy. A magnificent yearling.’

  His voice was filled with rage and sorrow.

  ‘Yearling?’ whispered Servaz to Ziegler.

  ‘A thoroughbred no older than a year.’

  While she was going through the documents, he could not help but admire her profile. She was attractive, with an aura of authority and competence. He thought she must be in her thirties. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Servaz wondered whether she had a boyfriend or was single. Unless she was divorced, like him.

  ‘Apparently you found the stall empty this morning,’ he said to the breeder.

  Marchand gave him another sharp look that reflected all the disdain an expert feels towards a philistine.

  ‘Most certainly not. None of our horses sleep in a stall,’ he sniffed. ‘They all have loose boxes. Or free stabling, or daytime paddocks with shelters, so they can be together. I did find his box empty, that is true. And signs that the stable had been broken into.’

  Servaz didn’t know the difference between a stall and a box, but it seemed fairly important to Marchand.

  ‘I hope you’re going to find the bastards who did this,’ said Marchand.

  ‘Why did you use the plural?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, do you think a man on his own could carry a horse up there? I thought there was supposed to be security round the power plant.’

  No one seemed prepared to answer that question. Cathy d’Humières, who had been standing to one side until now, walked up to the steward.

  ‘Please tell Monsieur Lombard that we will do everything in our power to find the perpetrator. He can call me at any time. Tell him that.’

  Marchand studied the high-ranking official standing
there before him as if he were an ethnologist and she the representative of some utterly bizarre Amazon tribe.

  ‘I will tell him,’ he said. ‘I would also like to recover the body after the autopsy. Monsieur Lombard will probably want to bury it on his land.’

  ‘Tarde venientibus ossa,’ declared Servaz.

  He thought he could detect a hint of astonishment in Captain Ziegler’s eyes.

  ‘That’s Latin,’ she said. ‘And it means?’

  ‘“Those who come late to dine will find only bones.” I’d like to go up there.’

  She looked deep into his eyes. She was almost as tall as he was. Servaz could tell that the body beneath her uniform was firm, supple, muscular. A beautiful, healthy, uncomplicated girl. He was reminded of his wife, Alexandra, when she was young.

  ‘Before or after you question the watchmen?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘I’ll take you there.’

  ‘I can go on my own,’ he said, pointing to the cable car station.

  She gave a vague wave of her hand.

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever met a cop who speaks Latin,’ she said with a smile. ‘The cable car has been cordoned off. We’ll take the chopper.’

  Servaz went pale.

  ‘Are you the pilot?’

  ‘Surprised?’

  3

  The helicopter aimed for the side of the mountain like a mosquito buzzing over an elephant. The huge slate roof of the power plant, the car park full of vehicles were both abruptly left behind – too suddenly for Servaz’s taste, as his stomach lurched.

  Below them, their white boiler suits barely visible against the whiteness of snow, the investigators went to and fro from the cable car station to the mobile lab, carrying the small cases with the samples they’d taken. Viewed from on high, their scurrying seemed ridiculous: the bustle of a colony of ants. Servaz hoped they knew their jobs. It wasn’t always the case: the training of crime scene investigators frequently left a lot to be desired. Lack of time, lack of means, insufficient budgets – always the same refrain, in spite of all the politicians’ speeches promising a rosier future. Then the horse’s body was wrapped in its bag, zipped up, placed on a huge gurney and rolled over to an ambulance, which sped off with its sirens wailing – as if there were some urgency for the poor beast.

  Servaz looked straight ahead through the Plexiglas bubble.

  The sky had cleared. The three giant pipelines that emerged from the back of the building climbed up the mountainside; the cable car followed the same path. He ventured another look downward – and instantly regretted it. The plant was already far below on the valley floor, and the cars and vans were shrinking before his eyes, insignificant spots of colour sucked up by the altitude. The pipes now plunged towards the valley like ski-jumpers from the top of their ski-jump: a dizziness of stone and ice to take your breath away. Servaz went pale, swallowed and concentrated on the summit ahead of him. The coffee he had drunk from the vending machine in the foyer was floating somewhere in his oesophagus.

  ‘You don’t look very well.’

  ‘No problem. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Do you suffer from vertigo?’

  ‘No…’

  Captain Ziegler smiled beneath her headphones. Servaz could no longer see her eyes behind her dark glasses – but he could admire her suntan and the faint blonde down on her cheeks shining in the harsh light reflecting from the ridge.

  ‘All this carry-on for a horse,’ she said suddenly.

  He understood that, like him, she did not think much of such an investment of resources, and she was taking the opportunity to let him know that while no one could hear. He wondered whether her superiors had twisted her arm. And whether she had complained.

  ‘Don’t you like horses?’ he said teasingly.

  ‘I like horses a great deal,’ she replied, not smiling, ‘but that’s not the problem. We have the same concerns as you: a lack of resources, material, staff – and the criminals are always two paces ahead. So, to spend this much energy on an animal…’

  ‘At the same time, if there’s someone out there capable of doing that to a horse…’

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded, so forcefully that he thought she must share his fear.

  ‘Fill me in on what happened up there.’

  ‘Do you see the metal platform?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s where the cable car arrives. That’s where the horse was hanging, from the support tower, just below the cables. They had really staged it. You’ll see, on the video. From a distance, the workers thought it was a bird.’

  ‘How many workers?’

  ‘Four, plus the cook. The upper platform of the cable car leads to the access shaft to the underground plant: that’s the concrete thing you can see behind the platform. With the help of a crane they can send equipment down the shaft and then load it onto tractors with trailers. Seventy metres below, the shaft opens out into a tunnel in the heart of the mountain. That’s quite a way down, seventy metres. They use the same tunnel that channels the water from the upper lake to the pressure pipelines in order to gain access to the plant: the floodgates are kept closed the time it takes for the men to go through.’

  Now the helicopter was flying directly above the platform wedged into the mountainside like a derrick. It was practically hanging in space – once again Servaz felt the vertigo tying knots in his stomach. And beneath the platform the slope took a sudden dizzying downward plunge. The lower lake was visible a thousand metres below, among the peaks, with its huge dam in the form of an arc.

  Servaz could see footprints in the snow around the platform where the investigators had taken their samples. Yellow plastic rectangles with black numbers wherever they had found clues. And halogen projectors still magnetised to the metal pillars. For once it hadn’t been difficult to cordon off the scene of the crime, he thought, but the cold must have given them some trouble.

  Captain Ziegler pointed to the support tower.

  ‘The workers didn’t even get out of the cable car. They called the main office and went straight back down. They were scared to death. It could be they were afraid the lunatic who did it was still somewhere nearby.’

  Servaz observed the young woman. The more he listened to her, the more he felt his interest growing, and the number of his questions with it.

  ‘In your opinion, could one man, unaided, hoist the body of a dead horse up to that height and attach it in the middle of the cables? It seems it would be difficult, no?’

  ‘Freedom was a yearling, so he would have weighed about two hundred kilos,’ she replied. ‘Even if you take off his head and neck, it would still mean nearly a hundred and fifty kilos of meat to carry around. Having said that, you saw the forklift just now: a device like that can move enormous loads. The thing is, even if you do suppose that a man could drag a horse around by means of a cart or a truck, he couldn’t have hung it to the tower like that by himself. And besides, you were right: he would have needed a vehicle to get it up there.’

  ‘And the night watchmen didn’t see anything.’

  ‘And there are two of them.’

  ‘And they didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘And there are two of them.’

  Neither Servaz nor Ziegler needed to be reminded that seventy per cent of those who commit a homicide are identified within twenty-four hours of the crime. But what if the victim is a horse? That was the type of question which probably didn’t figure in police statistics.

  ‘It’s too easy,’ said Ziegler. ‘It’s what you think. Too easy. Two watchmen and a horse. Why on earth would they want to do that? If they’d wanted to take it out on one of Éric Lombard’s horses, why would they go and stick the animal at the top of the cable car, in their own workplace, where they’d be the prime suspects?’

  Servaz thought about what she had just said. Why indeed? On the other hand, could they really not have heard a thing?

  ‘And besides, why would they do it?’r />
  ‘No one is simply a watchman, or a cop,’ he said. ‘Everyone has their secrets.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but there is the Wargnier Institute,’ she hastened to add, while manoeuvring the helicopter. (Servaz again held his breath.) ‘There is bound to be at least one guy in there who could do something like this.’

  ‘You mean someone who managed to slip out and back in again without the staff at the Institute noticing?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Go all the way to the riding academy, kill the horse, get it out of its box and load it onto a vehicle all by himself? And all the while no one notices a thing in either place? And then cut it up into pieces, get it up the mountain and—’

  ‘Right, OK, it’s absurd,’ she interrupted. ‘And it still brings us back to where we started: how on earth could someone, even a lunatic, manage to hang the horse up there without anyone’s help?’

  ‘Two lunatics, say, who escape without being seen, then go mildly back to their cells without trying to run away? It makes no sense!’

  ‘Nothing makes sense in this case.’

  The chopper suddenly banked to the right to go round the mountain – or was it the mountain that was leaning the opposite way? Servaz couldn’t really tell, and he gulped again. The platform and the blockhouse entrance vanished behind them. Masses of rock flashed by the Plexiglas bubble; then a lake appeared, much smaller than the one further down. Its surface, tucked in the hollow of the mountain, was covered with a thick crust of snow and ice; it resembled the crater of a frozen volcano.

  Servaz saw a house on the shore of the lake, built right up against the rock face, near a dam.

  ‘The upper lake,’ said Ziegler. ‘And the workers’ residential “chalet”. They get up here on a funicular which climbs straight from the depths of the mountain into the house; it’s connected to the underground plant. That’s where they sleep, eat and live once their work day is over. They spend five days here, then go back down to the valley for the weekend, for a period of three weeks. They have all the mod cons, even satellite television – but it’s still a pretty tough job.’