The Frozen Dead (11 page)

‘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 stable, 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.'

Servaz suddenly focused his attention.

‘Do you mean that these traces are intact, that no one has stepped on them?'

‘I would not allow my colleagues to come anywhere near the area or to walk in the snow,' answered the steward. ‘There are only two sorts of footsteps here: mine, and the ones belonging to the bastard who decapitated my horse.'

‘If I dared, Monsieur Marchand, I would kiss you,' said Ziegler. Servaz saw the old stable boss blush and he smiled. They retraced their steps and looked over the yellow tape.

‘There,' said Marchand, pointing to the footprints that ran along the wall, sharp and clear, the dream of any crime scene investigator. ‘Those are his prints; these are mine, there.'

Marchand had kept his footsteps a good metre away from his predecessor's. At no point did their paths cross. He had not, however, been able to resist the temptation of going over to the mound, as the path of his steps showed.

‘You didn't touch the mound?' asked Ziegler when she saw where his footprints led.

He lowered his head.

‘I did. I'm the one who brushed the snow off the ears and eye. As I already told your colleagues, I nearly went on to brush off all the snow, but then I realised what I was doing and stopped in time.'

‘You did the right thing, Monsieur Marchand,' said Ziegler, congratulating him.

Marchand turned to them with a dazed expression, full of fear and bemusement.

‘What sort of person could do this to a horse? Maybe you understand something about this society we live in – because I certainly don't. Are we all going mad?'

‘Madness is contagious,' replied Servaz. ‘Like the flu. That's something psychiatrists should have figured out a long time ago.'

‘Contagious?' asked Marchand, disconcerted.

‘It doesn't jump from one individual to the next the way flu does,' explained Servaz, ‘but from one sector of the population to another. It contaminates an entire generation. The carrier of malaria is the mosquito. The carrier of madness, or at least its preferred carrier, is the media.'

Marchand and Ziegler looked at him, stunned. Servaz gave a little wave of the hand, as if to say, ‘Don't mind me,' and walked away. Ziegler checked her watch. Nine forty-three. She looked at the sun blazing brilliantly above the trees.

‘For God's sake! What are they doing? The snow is going to melt all this before long.'

The sun had turned and some of the footprints, which had been in the shade when they arrived, were now exposed to its rays. It was still cold enough to stop the snow from melting, but it would not stay that way for much longer. At last they heard the sound of a siren coming from the forest. The crime scene investigators' lab van pulled up in the courtyard one minute later.

*   *   *

A yellow plastic tab with a black number had been stuck into the snow next to every clue or print to be photographed. Squatting down by one of the prints, an investigator was taking pictures with a flash, enlarging or reducing the depth of field with each shot. A small, graduated black vinyl ruler lay on the snow next to the print. A second man came over and opened a briefcase, which Servaz recognised as a footprint moulding kit. The first investigator came to lend him a hand, for they had to act quickly: the snow was already melting in several places. While they were busy, the third man was uncovering the horse's head. The back wall faced north so, unlike his colleagues, he could take his time. Servaz felt as if he were watching the patient labour of an archaeologist unearthing a particularly precious artefact. At last the entire head appeared. Servaz didn't know anything about horses, but he could have sworn that even a specialist would have said Freedom was a splendid specimen. The animal had his eyes closed, as if he were sleeping.

‘It looks as if he were put to sleep before he was killed and beheaded,' remarked Marchand. ‘If that's the case, at least he won't have suffered. And that would explain why no one heard anything.'

Servaz exchanged a glance with Ziegler: the toxicology test would confirm it, but this already went some way towards answering one of their questions. On the other side of the tape the investigators were taking their last samples with the help of tweezers, sealing them in tubes. Servaz knew that fewer than seven per cent of all criminal investigations were solved thanks to the material evidence found at the scene of the crime, but that in no way diminished his admiration for the men's patience and perseverance.

When they had finished, Servaz was the first to step over the tape, and he bent down over the footprints.

‘Size forty-five or forty-six,' he reckoned. ‘Ninety nine per cent sure it's a man.'

‘According to the investigator, those are hiking boots,' said Ziegler. ‘And the guy wearing them tends to lean a bit too much on the heel and the outside of his foot. Imperceptible, though. Except to a podiatrist. There are also some characteristic defects – there, there and there.'

Like fingerprints, the marks left by a pair of shoes were distinctive, not only because of the size and the pattern on the sole, but also due to an entire range of tiny telltale signs acquired through wear: everyday damage, tiny pieces of gravel embedded in the sole, gashes, holes and cuts caused by branches, nails, pieces of glass or metal or by sharp stones … Except that, unlike fingerprints, these signs had a limited lifespan. Only a rapid comparison with the original pair could ensure positive identification, before kilometres of walking, over all sorts of terrain, would erase these tiny defects and replace them with others.

‘Have you informed Monsieur Lombard?' he asked Marchand.

‘Yes, he's crushed. He is going to cut short his stay in the US to come back as soon as possible. He'll be on the plane tonight.'

‘Are you the one who's in charge of the stables?'

‘The riding academy, yes.'

‘How many people work here?'

‘It's not a very big academy. In the winter there are four of us. Between us we do everything, more or less. But let's say there's one groom, there's me, there's Hermine – she's the most distraught of all – who works mainly as a stablehand for Freedom and two other horses, and then there's a riding instructor. In the summer we hire additional staff: two instructors, guides for trekking, seasonal workers.'