The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜You don’t look very well.’
    â€˜No problem. Everything’s fine.’
    â€˜Do you suffer from vertigo?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Don’t you like horses?’ he said teasingly.
    â€˜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…’
    â€˜At the same time, if there’s someone out there capable of doing that to a horse…’
    â€˜Yes,’ she conceded, so forcefully that he thought she must share his fear.
    â€˜Fill me in on what happened up there.’
    â€˜Do you see the metal platform?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜How many workers?’
    â€˜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