The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

  ‘Five p.m. On her way out the lycée. Talking with schoolmates.’

  Ten metres away, Margot was laughing and chatting. Then she pulled a tobacco pouch from her jacket. That’s not good for you, thought Espérandieu. She started rolling a cigarette as she listened to her friends. You seem to know what you’re doing. Must be a habit. He suddenly felt like some fucking voyeur ogling the cute chicks on their way out of school. Shit, Martin, this is bloody unfair! Twenty seconds later, a boy on a scooter pulled up to the little group.

  Espérandieu was immediately on the alert.

  The driver took off his helmet and spoke directly to his boss’s daughter. She tossed her cigarette on the pavement and crushed it under her heel. Then she straddled the seat of the scooter.

  Well, well. ‘Leaving on scooter with individual aged seventeen to eighteen. Black hair. Not from lycée.’

  Espérandieu hesitated to take a picture. Too close. Someone might see him. As far as he could tell, the boy was good-looking, his hair gelled in spikes. He put his helmet back on and handed one to Margot. Was he the little bastard who was hitting her and breaking her heart? The scooter took off. Espérandieu followed. The boy drove fast, and recklessly. He slalomed between the cars, causing his scooter to zigzag where he shouldn’t, while turning his head and shouting to make himself heard to his passenger. Sooner or later, you’ll be in for a nasty reality-check, amigo …

  Twice Espérandieu thought he’d lost him, but caught up again further along. He refused to use his siren; he didn’t want to be noticed for a start, and besides, there was absolutely nothing official about his mission.

  Finally the scooter stopped outside a villa surrounded by a garden and a tall thick hedge. Espérandieu immediately recognised the place: he had come here once with Servaz. This was where Alexandra, Martin’s ex-wife, lived, together with her bloody airline pilot.

  And, consequently, Margot.

  She climbed off the scooter and removed her helmet. The two young people talked calmly for a moment, her on the kerb, him on his scooter, and Espérandieu worried they might notice him: he was parked in the deserted street not five yards away from them. Fortunately they were far too absorbed in their conversation. Espérandieu saw that they were relaxed with each other. No shouts, no threats. On the contrary, they were laughing and nodding. What if Martin were wrong? Perhaps being a cop had made him paranoid, after all. Then Margot leaned forward and kissed the young man on both cheeks. He revved the engine so fiercely that Espérandieu felt like getting out and walking over to tell him off; then he pulled out and rode away.

  Shit! Not the right one! Vincent had just wasted an hour of his time. He cursed his boss in silence, turned round and went back the way he’d come.

  * * *

  Servaz observed the dark façade between the trees. White, imposing, unexpectedly tall, with chalet-style carved wooden balconies and shutters on every floor. A sloping, pointed roof with a triangular wooden pediment under the eaves. Typical mountain architecture. The house was set at the far end of a steep garden in the shadow of tall trees; the light from the streetlamps did not reach that far. There was something faintly threatening about the place – or was it his imagination? He remembered a passage from The Fall of the House of Usher: ‘I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.’

  He turned to Ziegler.

  ‘Is Confiant still not answering?’

  Ziegler put her mobile back in her pocket and shook her head. Servaz opened the creaking rusty gate. They walked up the drive. There were footprints in the snow; no one had bothered to clear it. Servaz climbed up the porch. Beneath the glass awning, he turned the door handle. Locked. No light inside. He turned round; the town was spread out below them, Christmas decorations pulsing like the living heart of the valley. There was a faraway sound of cars and horns, but here everything was silent. In this old hillside residential neighbourhood, there reigned the unfathomable sadness and crushing calm of stifling bourgeois lives.

  Ziegler joined him at the top of the steps.

  ‘What shall we do?’

  Servaz looked all around. The house rested on either side of the porch on a millstone base with small basement windows. There was no way to get in through the basement: the windows were protected by iron bars. But the shutters of the big windows on the ground floor were open. In a corner behind a bush he noticed a little garden shed shaped like a chalet. He went back down the steps and up to the shed. No lock. He opened the door. A smell of turned earth. In the dim light he could see rakes, shovels, flower boxes, a watering can, a wheelbarrow, a ladder … Servaz came back to the house with an aluminium ladder under his arm. He set it against the wall and climbed up to the height of the window.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Without answering, he pulled down his sleeve and smashed the windowpane with his fist. It took two tries.

  Then with his hand still buried in his sleeve he removed the pieces of glass, turned the handle of the window catch and pushed it open. He expected to hear the shrill blare of an alarm, but there was nothing.

  ‘Do you know that a lawyer could invalidate the entire procedure because of what you’ve just done?’ said Ziegler from the bottom of the ladder.

  ‘For the time being, the urgent thing is to find Chaperon alive. Not to convict him. We’ll just say we found the window like this and took advantage of—’

  ‘Don’t move!’

  They both turned round. Further down the drive, between two fir trees, a shadow was aiming a rifle at them.

  ‘Hands up! Don’t move!’

  Instead of complying, Servaz plunged his hand into his jacket and brandished his warrant card before climbing back down the ladder.

  ‘Steady, old man: police.’

  ‘Since when do the police go round breaking and entering?’ asked the man, lowering his gun.

  ‘Since we found out it’s urgent,’ said Servaz.

  ‘Are you looking for Chaperon? He’s not here. We haven’t seen him in two days.’

  Servaz knew the type: the ‘self-proclaimed concierge’. There was one in every street, or just about. The man who went nosing into other people’s lives, simply because they had moved in next door. He seemed to think he had the right to keep an eye on them, to spy on them from over the hedge, particularly if there was anything suspicious about them. Deemed worthy of suspicion in the eyes of the self-proclaimed concierge were all gay couples, single mothers, shy, reclusive old bachelors and, more generally, anyone who had ever given him a funny look or did not share his rigid ideas. Very useful for house-to-house enquiries. Even if Servaz felt nothing but the deepest contempt for the type.

  ‘You don’t know where he went?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What sort of person is he?’

  ‘Chaperon? He’s a good mayor. A regular bloke. Polite, smiling, always a friendly word. Always ready to stop for a chat. No-nonsense sort of guy. Not like the commie down there.’

  He pointed to a house down the street. Servaz supposed that the ‘commie down there’ had become the self-proclaimed concierge’s preferred target. You couldn’t have one without the other. He almost felt like saying that the ‘commie down there’ had surely never been charged with sexual blackmail. That was the problem with self-proclaimed concierges: they went by first impressions, and they often chose the wrong target. They were generally to be found in pairs, husband and wife – a formidable duo.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said the man, not hiding his curiosity. ‘With everything that’s been happening lately, everyone’s barricading themselves in. Except me. Bring him on, the nutter – I’m ready for him.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Servaz. ‘Go on home.’

  The man grumbled something and turned round.

  ‘If you need any other information, I live at number five!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘The name’s Lançonneur!’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to have him for a ne
ighbour,’ said Ziegler, watching him walk away.

  ‘You should take more interest in your neighbours,’ said Servaz. ‘I’ll bet you’ve got one just like him. They’re everywhere. Let’s go.’

  He climbed back up the ladder and went into the house.

  The broken glass cracked beneath his feet. In the half-light he could make out a leather sofa, rugs on a parquet floor, panelled walls, a desk. Servaz found the switch and turned on the overhead light. Ziegler appeared in the window and climbed over the sill. Behind her, the lights of the valley were visible between the trees. She looked around. They seemed to be in a study, either Chaperon’s or his ex-wife’s. There were bookshelves, and old photos on the walls depicting mountain landscapes or small Pyrenean towns from the turn of the previous century. Servaz recalled that there had been a time when the spas in the Pyrenees were popular with a certain Parisian elite who liked to come and take the waters, and the local mountain villages enjoyed a brief renown as elegant resorts, on a par with Chamonix, Saint-Moritz or Davos.

  ‘First of all, let’s try to find Chaperon,’ he said. ‘And hope he’s not hanging somewhere. Then we’ll search the place.’

  ‘What exactly are we looking for?’

  ‘We’ll know when we find it.’

  He left the study.

  A corridor.

  At the end, a stairway.

  He opened the doors, one by one. Drawing room. Kitchen. Bathroom. Dining room.

  An old carpet kept in place by metal rods muffled his steps as he went up the stairs. Like the study, the stairway was panelled with light wood. On the walls were old ice axes, crampons with metal spikes, leather boots and rudimentary skis: ancient mountaineering equipment from a pioneering era. Servaz stopped to take a closer look at one of the pictures: a climber standing at the top of a rocky spur, vertical and sheer. Servaz immediately felt his stomach twist. How could the man not feel dizzy? There he was, standing at the edge of the void, smiling at the photographer who must have been equally high up, as if it were nothing. Then he saw that the mountaineer defying the summits was none other than Chaperon himself. In another picture he was dangling beneath an overhang, sitting calmly in a harness like a bird on a branch, with hundreds of metres of space below him, protected from a fatal fall by the thinnest of ropes. Servaz could just make out a valley with a river and villages below him.

  Servaz would have liked to ask the mayor what it felt like to be sitting there. And, while they were at it, what it felt like to be the target of a killer. Was it the same sort of dizzy thrill? The entire interior of the house was a temple devoted to the mountain and the conquest of the self. The mayor was clearly made of stronger stuff than the chemist. Hewn from another wood altogether. This picture confirmed Servaz’s first impression, from that day at the power plant: Chaperon might be a small man, but he was solid as a rock, a lover of nature and physical activity, with his white lion’s mane and perpetual suntan.

  Then he pictured Chaperon as he had been on the bridge and in the car: someone who was scared to death, in desperate straits. Between those two meetings, the chemist had been murdered. Servaz took a moment to reflect: the death of the horse, however dreadful it may have been, had not had the same effect on the mayor. Why not? Was it because it was a horse? Or because he did not feel targeted at the time?

  Servaz went on exploring, tormented by the feeling of urgency that had gripped him ever since Perrault’s death. Upstairs he found a bathroom, WC and two bedrooms, one of them a master bedroom. He walked around it and was immediately overcome by a strange sensation. He studied the room, frowning. There was something he could not get out of his mind.

  A cupboard, a dresser. A double bed. But judging by the shape of the mattress, only one person had been sleeping there for a long time, and there was also only one chair and one night table.

  It was the bedroom of a divorced man who lived alone. Servaz opened the wardrobe.

  Women’s dresses, blouses, skirts, jumpers and coats. And just below, pairs of high heels.

  Then he ran his finger over the night table: a thick layer of dust – just like in Alice’s room.

  Chaperon didn’t sleep in this room.

  This had been the former Madame Chaperon’s bedroom, before their divorce.

  Just like the Grimms, the Chaperons had had separate bedrooms.

  Something wasn’t right. He felt instinctively he was on to something. The tension was there again and wouldn’t leave. This persistent impression of danger, of impending disaster. Once again he saw Perrault screaming like the damned in his cabin, and his head began to spin. He grabbed hold of a corner of the bed.

  Suddenly he heard a shout, ‘Martin!’

  He rushed out onto the landing. Ziegler’s voice, coming from below. His feet hardly touched the stairs. The door to the cellar was open. Servaz rushed through it and on down to a huge basement with rough stone walls. The boiler and laundry room. Plunged in darkness. There was a light further along … He hurried towards it. A big room lit by a bare light bulb. Its misty halo did not reach into the corners. A workbench, climbing gear hanging from big cork panels. Ziegler was standing in front of an open metal locker. A padlock was hanging from the door.

  ‘What the—’

  He broke off and went closer. Inside the cupboard was a black hooded waterproof cape and a pair of boots.

  ‘And that’s not everything,’ said Ziegler.

  She handed him a shoebox. Servaz opened it and held it under the dim light. He recognised it immediately: the ring. Stamped ‘C S’. And a single yellowing dog-eared photograph. An old one. In it you could see four men standing side by side wearing the same capes as the one hanging in the metal cupboard, the same black hooded cape found on Grimm’s corpse, the same cape that hung in the cabin by the river. The four men had their faces half hidden by the shadows of the hoods, but Servaz thought nevertheless that he could recognise Grimm’s flabby chin and Chaperon’s square jaw. The sun was shining on the four dark shapes, which made them seem even more sinister and out of place. A summer landscape, a bucolic vision all around – you could almost hear the birds singing. But the evil was there, thought Servaz. It was almost palpable: in that landscape flooded with sunlight, the form it had taken in the four figures, its presence, was even more obvious. Evil exists, he thought, and these four men were one of its countless incarnations.

  He was beginning to get an idea of their set-up, a possible pattern.

  The four men, in his opinion, had a shared passion: mountains, nature, hiking and camping rough. But there was something else, too, more secret. Deep in these valleys they were isolated from the world, in total impunity; they were exalted by the summits they knew so well, and they had finally come to believe they were untouchable. Servaz felt he was getting near the source from which everything flowed. Over the years, they had created a sort of mini-sect, living as they did in this remote part of the Pyrenees, where the outside world only reached them through television and newspapers; they were cut off both geographically and psychologically from the rest of the population, and even from their spouses – as the divorces and deep-rooted hatred proved.

  Until reality caught up with them.

  Until the first blood was spilled.

  When that happened, the group had scattered, terrified, like a flight of starlings. And they were being shown up for what they really were: pathetic, terrified cowards and losers. Knocked brutally from their pedestals.

  The mountains would no longer be the grandiose witness of their undetected crimes, but the theatre of their punishment. Who, now, was dispensing justice? What did he look like? Where was he hiding?

  Gilles Grimm.

  Serge Perrault.

  Gilbert Mourrenx – and Roland Chaperon.

  The ‘club’ of Saint-Martin.

  There was a question tormenting him. What was the exact nature of their crimes? Because Servaz no longer had any doubt that Ziegler was right: the blackmail they had threatened the girl with was only the tip
of the iceberg, and now he dreaded finding out what lay below the surface. At the same time he sensed there was an obstacle somewhere, a detail that did not fit with the pattern. It was too simple, too obvious, he thought. Somewhere there was a screen they couldn’t see, and the truth was hidden behind it.

  Servaz went over to the basement window that looked out onto the darkened garden. It was pitch black outside.

  They were out there, waiting to exact justice. In the night, ready to strike. No doubt searching for Chaperon, as he and Ziegler were. Where was the mayor hiding? Far away, or still nearby?

  Suddenly another question struck him. Did this club consist only of the four men in the photograph, or were there other members?

  * * *

  Espérandieu found the babysitter in the sitting room when he got home. She got reluctantly to her feet, apparently absorbed in an episode of House. Unless she had been hoping to make more money. A first-year law student with an exotic name like Barbara, Marina or perhaps Olga, he remembered. Lyudmila? Stella? Vanessa? He gave up on calling her by her first name and paid her for her two hours. He also found a note from Charlène under a magnet on the fridge: Private view. I’ll be late. Kisses. He got a cheeseburger out of the freezer, put it in the microwave, then plugged in his laptop. There were several messages in his inbox, including one from Kleim162. The subject of the message was ‘Re: Various questions about L.’ Espérandieu closed the kitchen door, put on some music (the Last Shadow Puppets album The Age of the Understatement), pulled over a chair and began reading.