The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜And the night watchmen didn’t see anything.’
    â€˜And there are two of them.’
    â€˜And they didn’t hear anything.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?
    â€˜And besides, why would they do it?’
    â€˜No one is simply a watchman, or a cop,’ he said. ‘Everyone has their secrets.’
    â€˜Do you?’
    â€˜Don’t you?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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—’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Two lunatics, say, who escape without being seen, then go mildly back to their cells without trying to run away? It makes no sense!’
    â€˜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