The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

‘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.’

  ‘They won’t be here for another two weeks. It’s always quiet this time of year.’

  ‘Up above those cable cars,’ said Servaz, pointing to the double line of support towers on the mountain opposite, ‘is there a ski resort?’

  ‘Yes, Saint-Martin 2000. Forty kilometres and twenty-eight downhill runs, including six black, four chair lifts, ten tow lifts. But there’s also a resort at Peyragudes, fifteen kilometres from here. Do you ski?’

  A joking rabbit-like smile appeared on Servaz’s face.

  ‘The last time I put on a pair of skis, I was fourteen years old. It didn’t make for a very good memory. I’m not exactly … sporty.’

  ‘Yet you look fit,’ said Ziegler with a smile.

  ‘As do you.’

  Oddly enough, it made her blush. The conversation was hesitant. Last night they were two police officers deep in the same investigation, exchanging professional observations. This morning they were awkwardly trying to get acquainted.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yesterday you asked for a further inquiry into three of the workers. Why?’

  The waiter brought their order. He looked as old and sad as the hotel itself. Servaz waited until he had left to tell her about his interview with the five men.

  ‘That guy Tarrieu,’ she said, ‘what sort of impression did he make on you?’

  Servaz pictured the man’s flat, massive face, his cold stare.

  ‘An intelligent man, but full of anger.’

  ‘Intelligent. That’s interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘All the dramatic staging … this madness … I think whoever did it is not only mad but also intelligent. Highly intelligent.’

  ‘In that case, we can rule out the watchmen,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps. Unless one of them is faking.’

  She took her laptop from her bag and opened it on the table, between her orange juice and Servaz’s coffee. He had the same thought he’d had earlier: times were changing; a new generation of investigators was taking over. She might lack experience but she was also more in sync with her era – and the experience would come in any case.

  She typed something and he took a moment to look at her. She was very different from the day before, when he’d seen her in her uniform. He stared at the little tattoo on her neck, the Chinese ideogram that was just visible above her rollneck collar. He was reminded of Margot. What was it with this fashion for tattoos? That, and piercing. Should he allot some sort of significance to them? Ziegler had a tattoo and a ring in her nose. Maybe she had other secret jewels elsewhere: in her belly button, or even her nipples or down below; he’d read about that somewhere. The idea of it unsettled him. He suddenly wondered what the private life of a woman like her consisted of, yet he was only too aware that his own private life over the last few years had been a desert. He brushed the thought aside.

  ‘Why the gendarmerie?’ he asked.

  She looked up, hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you mean why did I go into the gendarmerie?’

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off her. She smiled.

  ‘Job security, I suppose. And to not be doing the same thing as everyone else.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I was at university, studying sociology. I hung out with a very free-thinking crowd. I even lived in a squat. Cops, gendarmes, they were the enemy: fascists, guard dogs for the people in power, the outpost of reactionary thinking – the police were the ones who protected bourgeois comfort and oppressed the immigrants, the homeless or just people who were down on their luck … My father was a gendarme. I knew he wasn’t like that, but I still thought my university friends were right and my father was the exception, that was all. And then after university, when I saw my revolutionary friends becoming doctors, solicitors, bank workers or HR managers, talking more and more about money, investments, rates of return and all that, I started to ask myself questions. Since I was unemployed at the time, I ended up taking the entrance exam.’

  As simple as that, he thought.

  ‘Servaz, that’s not a name from round here,’ she said.

  ‘Nor is Ziegler.’

  ‘I was born in Lingolsheim, not far from Strasbourg.’

  He was going to reply in turn when Ziegler’s mobile began to vibrate. She made a gesture of apology and answered. He saw her frown as she listened. She switched off the phone and looked at him blankly.

  ‘That was Marchand. He’s found the horse’s head.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the riding academy.’

  * * *

  They left Saint-Martin by a different road from the one he had come in on. At the edge of town they drove past the headquarters of the mountain gendarmerie, whose representatives were called on with increasing frequency to help with the media coverage of high-risk sports.

  Three kilometres further along they left the main road for a secondary route. Now they were driving across a wide plain surrounded by mountains, still a certain distance away, and Servaz felt that he could breathe a bit. Before long the land on either side of the road began to be fenced off. The sun was shining, dazzling on the snow.

  ‘This is the estate of the Lombard family,’ announced Irène Ziegler.

  She drove fast, despite the bumps. They came to a crossing that led to a forest track. Two horsemen wearing riding caps watched them go by, a man and a woman. Their mounts had the same black and brown coat as the dead horse. Bay, recalled Servaz. Further along a sign indicating ‘RIDING ACADEMY’ told them to turn left.

  The forest receded.

  They went by several squat buildings that looked like barns, and Servaz saw some large rectangular enclosures scattered with jumps, a long, low sta
ble, a paddock and a more imposing building that might be an indoor riding ring. A van from the gendarmerie was parked outside.

  ‘A lovely place,’ said Ziegler, climbing out of the car. She cast a gaze around the enclosures. ‘Two outdoor schools, including one for showjumping and one for dressage, a cross-country course and, best of all, over there at the back, a galloping track.’

  A gendarme came to meet them. Servaz and Ziegler followed him. They were greeted by nervous neighing and the sound of scraping hooves, as if the horses knew that something was going on. A cold sweat immediately trickled down Servaz’s back. As a young man he had tried riding. A bitter failure. Horses frightened him. As did speed, height or even major crowds.

  When they reached the far end of the stables, they came upon a yellow ‘gendarmerie nationale’ tape stretching along the side of the building roughly two metres from the wall. They had to walk through the snow to go round. Marchand and Captain Maillard were waiting for them at the back with two other gendarmes, outside the cordon. In the shade of the brick wall was a huge pile of snow. Servaz stared at it for a moment before he made out some brown spots. He shuddered when it dawned on him that two of the spots were a horse’s ears, and the third one the lowered lid of its closed eye. Maillard and his men had done a good job: as soon as they had seen what they were about to uncover, they had roped off the surroundings without going any closer to the pile of snow. The snow was bound to have been disturbed before they got there, by the footprints of the person who’d found the head for a start, but they had avoided adding their own. The crime scene investigators hadn’t arrived yet. No one was allowed into the area until they had finished their work.

  ‘Who found it?’ asked Ziegler.

  ‘I did,’ said Marchand. ‘This morning, as I walked past the boxes, I noticed footprints in the snow around the building. I followed them and came upon this mound. I knew immediately what it was.’

  ‘You followed them?’ said Ziegler.

  ‘Yes. But given the circumstances, I immediately thought of you, so I was careful not to trample them and to keep at a distance.’