‘Which one is his son?’
‘The boy called Clément.’
The ringleader, thought Servaz. Like father like son. And the same disdain for others.
‘Their lawyer has contacted the examining magistrate,’ continued Espérandieu. ‘Obviously they’ve got their whole strategy worked out: they’re going to charge the eldest one.’
‘The son of the unemployed bloke.’
‘Yes.’
‘The weakest link.’
‘Those people make me want to puke,’ said Espérandieu.
He had a childish, drawling voice. Because of it, and his somewhat mannered air, some of his colleagues suspected him of being interested not only in women, even when they were as beautiful as his wife. Servaz had wondered as much himself when Espérandieu joined the department. The young man’s taste in clothes also caused the hackles to rise among some of the Cro-Magnon men on the squad, the ones who thought that if you were a cop, you were duty bound to display nothing but virility and machismo triumphant.
Life had been kind to Espérandieu. At the age of thirty he’d made an excellent marriage and he had a very pretty little five-year-old girl, the one whose smile lit up his computer screen. Servaz had quickly befriended him, and his assistant had invited him round to dinner half a dozen times in the two years since he’d joined the squad. Every time, Servaz had been completely overwhelmed by the charm and wit of Madame and Mademoiselle Espérandieu: they looked as if they belonged in the pages of a magazine – in adverts for toothpaste, travel or family holidays.
But then there’d been an incident between the newcomer and the veterans on the squad, whose homicidal tendencies seemed to be aroused by the fact of sharing their everyday life with a young and potentially bisexual colleague. Servaz had had to get involved, with the end result that he’d made himself a few lasting enemies. There were two blokes in particular, two macho and narrow-minded roughnecks, who would never forgive him. One of them had got a bit of an earful during their argument. But Servaz had also earned Espérandieu’s lasting recognition and respect: Charlène was pregnant again and they’d asked Servaz to be the godfather.
‘A reporter from France TV3 called, and several journalists from the papers. They wanted to know if we had any proof regarding the kids. But above all they wanted to know if they’d been beaten. “Rumours of police brutality towards minors”: that’s the expression they used. As usual, they’ve spread the word. Copy and paste, that’s all they know how to do. But someone must have started the rumour.’
Servaz frowned. If the journalists were on to something, the telephone would not stop ringing. There would be declarations, rebuttals, press conferences – and a minister would get on television and promise to ‘get to the bottom of it’. And even once it had been proven that everything had been done according to the rules, if they managed to prove it, the suspicion would remain.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ asked his assistant.
Servaz nodded. Espérandieu got up and went out. Servaz looked at the computer screens blinking in the semi-darkness. He thought about those three teenage boys again – what had pushed them to commit such a senseless act.
Those kids were being sold dreams and lies all day long. Sold, not given. Cynical salesmen had made adolescent frustration their stock in trade. Mediocrity, pornography, violence, lies, hatred, alcohol, drugs – everything was for sale in the flashy display windows of mass consumerism, and young people were a perfect target.
Espérandieu came back with the coffee.
‘The kids’ rooms?’ asked Servaz.
Samira Cheung came in. That morning their latest recruit was wearing a short leather jacket that was too light for the season, a sweatshirt that proclaimed, ‘I am an Anarchist,’ a pair of black leather trousers and thigh-high red vinyl boots.
‘Hey,’ she said, her iPod earphones dangling over her jacket, a steaming mug in her hand.
Servaz returned her greeting, not without a mixture of fascination and bewilderment at the sight of her unbelievable get-up. Samira Cheung was Chinese on her father’s side, and French-Moroccan on her mother’s. She had told Espérandieu (who in turn had wasted no time in telling Servaz) that twenty-six years ago her mother, an interior decorator with an international reputation, had fallen madly in love with a client from Hong Kong – a man whose beauty and intelligence were absolutely exceptional, according to Samira – but that she had come back to Paris, pregnant, once she discovered that Samira’s father was into hard drugs and visited prostitutes on an almost daily basis. It was weird: Samira Cheung combined a perfect body with one of the ugliest faces Servaz had ever seen. Protruding eyes accentuated by heavy eyeliner, a large mouth painted an aggressive red, and a pointed chin. One of the male chauvinists on the squad had summed up her look in one sentence: ‘With her, every day is Halloween.’ Samira Cheung had one feature, however, where her genes or education deserved full credit: her mind was sharp as a whip. And she did not hesitate to use it. She had quickly assimilated the basics of the profession and had proven her sense of initiative on more than one occasion. Servaz had entrusted her with increasingly complex tasks and she was not afraid to put in overtime to get them done.
Now she swung her boot heels up onto the edge of her desk and rocked back on her office chair before turning to look at them.
‘We’ve searched the three boys’ rooms,’ she said, in answer to Servaz’s question. ‘On the whole we didn’t find much – except for one detail.’
Servaz looked at her.
‘The first two boys had very violent video games at their house. The sort of thing where you have to blow off your opponent’s head to get a maximum number of points; or those ones where you have to bomb civilian populations or wipe out your enemies with all sorts of sophisticated weapons. Really gory stuff, you know, bloody as hell.’
Servaz recalled a recent debate in the press regarding these violent video games. The games’ manufacturers took offence, stating that they were ‘very aware of the issue of violence and mindful not to overstep the boundaries’. They considered that some of the accusations against them were ‘unacceptable’. And went right on selling games where the player could commit torture, robberies and murder. At that point the psychiatrists got involved, learnedly affirming that there was no correlation between video games and violence among young people. But other studies had shown that, on the contrary, young people who indulged in such displayed greater indifference towards other people’s suffering.
‘In contrast, we didn’t find any video games at the home of the one called Clément. And yet there was a console…’
‘As if someone had cleaned up beforehand,’ said Espérandieu.
‘The father,’ suggested Servaz.
‘Right,’ replied his assistant. ‘We suspect he made all the games disappear to give us a cleaner image of his son. And the better to accuse the other two.’
‘Did you put the rooms under seal?’
‘Yes, but the family’s lawyer has filed an appeal to have them removed, on the grounds that it’s not the crime scene.’
‘Have they got computers in their rooms?’
‘Yes, we looked at them, but someone did a crack job of erasing the data. We’ve ordered the parents not to touch anything. We have to get back there with an investigator to go over their hard drives.’
‘We can establish premeditation,’ said Samira, ‘if we can prove the kids planned the crime. That would reduce the notion of an accident to nothing.’
Servaz gave her a questioning look.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, up to now nothing proves they really wanted to kill him. The victim had a huge amount of alcohol in his blood. The lawyers for the defence might be able to cite drowning as the primary cause of death: it will depend on the results of the autopsy.’
‘Drowning in fifty centimetres of water?’
‘Why not? It’s happened before.’
Servaz thought for a moment: Samira was
right.
‘And the prints?’ he asked.
‘We’re waiting.’
She put her heels back down on the floor and stood up.
‘I have to go. I’ve got an appointment with the magistrate.’
‘A good recruit, right?’ said Espérandieu when she had left the room.
Servaz nodded and smiled. ‘You seem to like her.’
‘She works hard, she’s dependable, and she’s eager to learn.’
Servaz agreed. He had not hesitated to entrust the bulk of the investigation into the homeless man’s death to Vincent and Samira. They shared the same office, liked quite a few of the same things (particularly certain types of clothing), and they seemed to get along, in so far as one could expect two cops with strong characters to get along.
‘We’re having a little party on Saturday,’ said Vincent. ‘You’re invited. Charlène insists.’
Servaz thought about his assistant’s wife and her disturbing beauty. The last time he saw her, she was wearing a red party dress which enhanced her figure, while her long auburn hair danced in the light like flames, and he had felt his throat tighten. Charlène and Vincent had been perfect hosts, it had been a very enjoyable evening, but that did not mean he wanted to join their circle of friends. Now he declined the offer, on the pretext that he had promised to spend the evening with his daughter.
‘I put the kids’ file on your desk,’ called Espérandieu just as he was going out the door.
Back in his office, Servaz connected his phone to the charger and switched on his computer. Two seconds later his mobile informed him he had a text message, and he unlocked it. Reluctantly. For Servaz mobile phones were the ultimate stage of technological alienation. But Margot had forced him to get one after he arrived half an hour late to one of their appointments.
dad its me can u get sat am off? kisses
What the hell sort of language is this? he wondered. Are we climbing back up the tree when it’s taken us this long to get down it? He suddenly felt as if he had lost the key. That was the effect the modern world had on him these days: he felt as much a stranger here as if he had arrived straight from the eighteenth century in a time machine. He retrieved her number from the memory and heard his daughter’s voice explaining, in detail, that she would return the call if you left a message, to a background noise that led him to conclude that hell was peopled with bad musicians.
His gaze fell on the homeless guy’s file. Logically he should get to work on it straight away. He owed it to that poor man whose cock-up of a life had ended in the stupidest way imaginable. But he didn’t feel up to it.
Servaz had something else on his mind. He turned to his computer, went to Google and typed in a string of key words. The search engine provided no fewer than 20,800 results for ‘Éric Lombard Group Enterprises’. Less than if he’d typed Obama or the Beatles, of course, but it was nevertheless a significant figure. No surprise, either: Éric Lombard was a charismatic figure much loved by the media, and he must have had the fifth or sixth biggest fortune in the country.
Servaz skimmed the first pages. Several sites offered biographies of Éric Lombard, of his father, Henri, and his grandfather, Édouard; there were also articles from the business pages, the gossip columns and even the sporting press – because Éric Lombard had built up a stable of champions in the making. There were a few pages devoted to his own sporting feats. The man was a dedicated athlete and adventurer – an experienced mountain climber, marathon and triathlon runner and rally driver; he had also taken part in expeditions to the North Pole and the Amazon. There were a few pictures showing him on his motorcycle in the desert or at the controls of a commercial airliner. Scattered among the articles were several English words whose meaning completely escaped Servaz: free-ride, base-jump, kite-surf.
There was one photograph, almost always the same one, that accompanied some of the articles. A Viking. That’s what Servaz thought when he looked at him. Blond hair, blond beard, steel-blue gaze. Tanned. Healthy. Energetic. Virile. Sure of himself. Staring at the camera lens the way he must stare at everyone who came near him: with the impatience of someone who is expected and who has arrived.
A living advertisement for the Lombard Group.
Age: thirty-six.
From a legal point of view, the Lombard Group was an SCA, a limited joint-stock partnership, but the parent company – Lombard Enterprises – was a holding company.
The four main subsidiaries of the group were Lombard Media (books, press, distribution, audiovisual), Lombard Company (sporting equipment, clothing, travel and luxury products, fourth global purveyor of luxury items), Lombard Chemical (pharmaceuticals and chemicals) and AIR, specialising in aeronautics, defence and the space industry. The Lombard Group owned fifteen per cent of AIR, through the intermediary of the parent holding company, Lombard Enterprises. Éric Lombard himself was the CEO and managing partner of Lombard SCA, CEO of the Lombard Company and of Lombard Chemical, and chairman of the board of AIR. With a degree from a French business school and the London School of Economics, he began his career with one of the subsidiaries of the Lombard Company, a well-known sporting-goods manufacturer.
The group employed 78,000 people, spread over roughly 75 countries, and the previous year had a turnover of €17,928 million, for a gross receipt of €1,537 million and net profit of €677 million, while its financial debts totalled €3,458 million. Figures that would have dazed any normally constituted individual, but probably not specialists in international finance. As he read this, Servaz understood that if the group had hung on to the ageing little hydroelectric power plant, it could only be for historical and sentimental reasons. It was there, in the Pyrenees, that the Lombard empire had been born.
To string the horse up there was to target a symbol. The aim was to deal a blow to Éric Lombard where it would hurt: his family history and his consuming passion for horses.
For that is what stood out from all these articles: of all his passions, his love of horses came first. Éric Lombard owned stud farms in several countries – Argentina, France, Italy – but he was loyal to his first love: the riding academy where he had his start as a horseman, near the family chateau in the Comminges valley.
Servaz was suddenly convinced that the dramatic crime at the power plant was not the gesture of some lunatic who’d escaped from the Institute, but almost certainly a conscious, premeditated and planned act.
He paused to think. He hesitated to set off down a trail which would oblige him to take all of an industrial empire’s skeletons out of the closet just to explain the death of a horse. On the other hand, the terrifying sight of the decapitated animal being brought out of the cable car remained, along with the shock he had felt at the time. What was it Marchand had said? ‘Monsieur Lombard has a lot of enemies.’
The phone rang. Servaz picked up. It was d’Humières.
‘The watchmen have disappeared.’
* * *
‘Don’t ever turn your back on them,’ said Dr Xavier.
Beyond the huge picture windows the sun set the mountains ablaze, spreading a red lava of light into the room.
‘Be attentive. Every second. You’ve got to get it right in here. You will learn soon enough to recognise the signals: a fleeting gaze, a snarl of a smile, breathing that’s just a touch too rapid … Don’t ever let your guard down. And don’t ever turn your back on them.’
Diane nodded. A patient was walking towards them. One hand on his stomach.
‘Where’s the ambulance, Doctor?’
‘The ambulance?’ said Xavier, all smiles.
‘The one that’s supposed to take me to the maternity hospital. My waters have broken. It should be here by now.’
The patient was a man in his forties, well over six foot tall and weighing over twenty-three stone. Long hair, his face swallowed by a thick beard, tiny eyes shining feverishly. Next to him Xavier looked like a child. Yet he did not seem worried.
‘It will be here soon,’ he repl
ied. ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’
The little eyes stared at him.
‘It’s the Antichrist,’ said the man.
He walked away. Diane noticed that a male nurse was watching his every move. There were fifteen or more patients in the ward.
‘There are a fair number of gods and prophets here,’ said Xavier, still smiling. ‘Since time immemorial madness has drawn on religious and political sources. Not that long ago our residents saw communists everywhere. Now it’s terrorists. Come.’
The psychiatrist went up to a round table where three men were playing cards. One of them resembled a convict, with muscular, tattooed arms; the other two looked normal.
‘I’d like to introduce Antonio,’ said Xavier, indicating the tattooed man. ‘Antonio was in the French Foreign Legion. Unfortunately, he was convinced that the camp he’d been posted to was full of spies, and one night he ended up strangling one of them. Isn’t that right, Antonio?’
Antonio nodded without taking his eyes from the cards.
‘Mossad,’ he said. ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘As for Robert, he took it out on his parents. He didn’t kill them, no, just messed them up rather badly. It must be said that his parents had been forcing him to slave away on the family farm since he was seven, feeding him on bread and milk, and making him sleep in the cellar. Robert is thirty-seven. They’re the ones who should have been locked up, if you want my opinion.’
‘It’s the voices that told me to do it,’ said Robert.
‘And, finally, this is Greg. Possibly the most interesting case. Greg raped a dozen women in less than two years. He would spot them at the post office or the supermarket, follow them home and make a note of their address. Then he’d get into their place while they were asleep, hit them, tie them up and turn them on their stomach before he switched on the light. We’ll pass on the details of what he put them through: just bear in mind that his victims have been marked for life. But he didn’t kill them, no. Instead, he started writing to them. He was convinced that their … intercourse had made the women fall in love with him and that they were all carrying his child. So he left his name and address and it did not take the police long to track him down. Greg still goes on writing to them. Naturally we do not post the letters. I will show them to you. They are absolutely magnificent.’
The Frozen Dead Page 10