The Frozen Dead (6 page)

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?'

‘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.'

‘Why don't they come up this way to get to the plant, rather than closing down the underground river?'

‘The power plant doesn't have a helicopter. This pad, like the landing area down below, is only used by mountain rescue in extreme emergencies. And even then only when the weather allows it.'

The helicopter began a gentle descent towards a flat surface carved out amid a chaos of scattered patches of fresh snow and moraines. They were surrounded by a cloud of powdery snow. Servaz could just make out a huge H beneath the drifts.

‘We're lucky,' she said into the headset. ‘Five hours ago, when the workers discovered the body, we couldn't have got this far, because of the awful weather!'

The helicopter's landing skids touched down. Servaz felt alive again. Solid ground – even at more than two thousand metres. But they'd have to go back down again the same way, and the very thought of it made his stomach churn.

‘If I've understood correctly, when the weather's bad, once the tunnel is filled with water, the workers are prisoners of the mountain. What do they do if there's an accident?'

Captain Ziegler made an eloquent grimace.

‘They have to empty out the tunnel again and go back to the cable car through the access shaft. It takes at least two hours, maybe three, to get to the main station.'

Servaz would have liked to know what sort of bonuses these guys got for taking such risks.

‘Who does the plant belong to?'

‘The Lombard Group.'

The Lombard Group.
The investigation was only just getting started and this was the second time the name had come up. Servaz imagined a loose conglomeration of enterprises, subsidiaries, holding companies, not just in France but in all likelihood abroad as well, an octopus whose tentacles reached everywhere, with money in its limbs instead of blood, flowing by the billions from the extremities to the heart. Servaz was no expert on business, but like most people nowadays he knew more or less what the word ‘multinational' meant. Could an old factory like this one still be profitable to a group like Lombard's?

The rotation of the blades slowed and the whistling of the turbine faded and died.

Silence.

Ziegler put down her headset, opened the door and stepped out. Servaz followed. They walked slowly towards the frozen lake.

‘We're at two thousand metres up here,' said the young woman. ‘You can tell, can't you?'

Servaz took a deep breath of pure ether, intoxicating, icy. His head was spinning slightly – perhaps because of the helicopter ride, or the altitude. But it was a sensation more exalting than it was disturbing, not unlike, he supposed, the thrill that deep-sea diving could bring. He wondered if there was a similar thrill at high altitude. He was awed by the beauty and wildness of the place. The mineral solitude, a white, luminous desert. The shutters to the house were closed. Servaz imagined what the workers must feel every morning as they opened the windows onto the lake before they went down into the darkness. But perhaps that was all they could think about, in fact: the day ahead down there in the depths of the mountain, the deafening noise and artificial light, the long, trying hours in store.

‘Are you coming? The tunnels were dug in 1929, and the plant was built the following year,' she explained, as they walked towards the house.

The eaves of the roof were supported by thick, rough stone pillars, forming a porch which all the windows looked out onto except one, on the side. Servaz noticed a retaining sleeve for a satellite dish on one of the pillars.

‘Have you had a look in the tunnels?'

‘Of course. Our men are still in there. But I don't think we're going to find anything up here. The man – or men – didn't come this far. It was enough to get the horse into the cable car, hang it up there and then go back down.'

She opened the wooden door. Inside, all the lamps were on. All the rooms were furnished: the bedrooms had two beds; the living room had a television, two sofas and a dresser; there was a large kitchen with a refectory table. Ziegler led Servaz to the back of the house, where it became part of the rock face; there was a small room that seemed to serve both as a security door and a hall, with metal lockers and coat pegs on the wall. Servaz could see the yellow wire-mesh gate to the funicular at the back of the room and behind it the black hole of a tunnel dug into the dark bowels of the mountain.

She motioned to him to climb on board, closed the gate behind them, then pressed a button. The motor immediately got underway and the cabin shuddered. It began to move slowly along the shining rails down a forty-five-degree slope, vibrating slightly. Along the wall of black rock, visible through the fence, neon lights punctuated their descent at regular intervals. Eventually they came out into a large room built in the rock, brilliantly lit by more rows of neon lights. A workshop full of machine tools, pipes and cables. Technicians wearing white boiler suits, like the men down at the main facility, were bustling about here and there.

‘I'd like to question these workers right away. Don't let them go home.'

‘What do you have in mind?'

‘Nothing special at the moment. At this stage an investigation is like a crossroads in the forest: all the paths look alike, but there's only one right one. To stay up here like this in the mountain, cut off, far from everything, it must create bonds but tension as well. They have to have strong nerves.'

‘Could it be former workers with a grudge against Lombard? But then why go to so much trouble? When someone wants to take revenge on their employer, they show up at the workplace all of a sudden with a weapon; then they take it out on their boss or colleagues before they do themselves in. They don't go to the bother of stringing a horse up on top of a cable car.'

Servaz knew she was right.

‘Let's find out if anyone now working or who has worked at the power plant over the last few years has a history of mental disorders,' he said. ‘Especially anyone who's in the crews that come up here.'

‘Good idea!' she shouted, to make herself heard above the noise. ‘And the watchmen?'

‘Workers first, then the watchmen. We'll spend the night on it if need be.'

‘For a horse!'

‘For a horse,' he echoed.

‘We're lucky. As a rule the racket here is infernal! But they've closed the floodgates and the lake water isn't flowing.'

Servaz thought that, as far as noise went, it was already pretty bad.

‘How does it work?' he asked, raising his voice.

‘I don't really know! The dam at the upper lake fills when the snows melt. The water goes through the underground tunnels into the pressure pipelines, which then channel the water to the hydraulic generating sets in the plant, down in the valley. The power from the falling water drives the turbines. They say the water is put through the turbines “in a cascade”, something like that. The turbines convert the driving force of the water into mechanical energy; then the alternators transform that energy into electricity, which is sent out onto high-tension lines. The power plant produces fifty-four million kilowatt hours per year – in other words, enough for a town of thirty thousand inhabitants.'

Servaz could not help but smile at her learned presentation.

‘For someone who says they don't know, you seem to be very informed.'

He swept his gaze over the cavern of black rock lined with wire-mesh and metal structures fitted with bundles of cables, rows of neon lights, ventilation pipes, then the enormous machines from another age, control panels, the concrete floor …

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Let's go back up: we won't find anything here.'

The sky had darkened by the time they went back out. Sombre, shifting clouds passed above the frozen crater, which suddenly took on a sinister air. A violent wind drove the snowflakes before it. The surroundings, quite abruptly, had come to reflect the crime: something dark, chill, chaotic – where the desperate neighing of a horse could easily go unheard in the howling wind.

‘We'd better hurry,' Ziegler urged. ‘The weather's turning.'

Her blonde hair danced in the gusts, unruly strands coming loose from her chignon.

4

‘Mademoiselle Berg, I will not hide the fact that I am puzzled as to why Dr Wargnier insisted on hiring you. What I mean is, clinical psychology, genetic psychology, Freudian theory – all this …
hotchpotch.
On balance, I would have preferred even the Anglo-Saxon clinical method.'

Dr Francis Xavier was sitting behind a big desk. He was a small man, still young, very well groomed; his hair was dyed, and he wore extravagant red glasses; beneath his lab coat was a tie with an exuberant floral pattern. He spoke with a slight Quebecois accent.

Diane let her gaze wander over to the DSM-IV, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
published by the American Psychiatric Association, the only book on his desk. She frowned slightly. She did not like the way the discussion was going, but she waited for the little man to finish showing his hand.