Free Bed of Nails by Antonin Varenne

level.”
    “Is that the racket I can hear?”
    “They’re in the café on the second floor, people are trying to calm them down. The cashier is asking for receipts for all the drinks and ice creams.”
    Lambert had joined the group standing under the skeleton, fascinated by the bloodstain which functioned in the opposite way from the one in the office. Guérin had lost interest in the firemen and the technical problems. He left the scene and went up to the first floor, where he walked through a procession of giraffes, buffalo, gazelles, lions and other animals who seemed to be fleeing from a forest fire. Stopping in the middle of the large platform, he breathed in the atmosphere. Amazed and on edge, he murmured to himself:
    “Weirder and weirder.”
    With small, quick steps, he walked round the rim of the gallerylooking for the best vantage point to view the whale. He passed a glass case of birds and winced as he noticed a couple of stuffed parrots, much older, but actually in better condition than Churchill. The idea that they could live in couples depressed him for a moment as he thought sadly of Churchill, a bitter fifty-year-old bachelor, alone on his perch. But the image was quickly swept away by the pregnant intuition which had taken hold of him as soon as he had entered the Great Gallery. A final leap, in full view of the public and of dozens of extinct or endangered species! What a way to go!
    As he was on his way up to the third level, he heard a shout: “Look out!” Then the thud of something soft hitting the ground, followed by a metallic clang, probably the ladder falling over. On the balcony of the third level, he found what he was looking for, the ideal vantage point. From here he could see all over the gallery, with a perfect view of the fourth-floor balcony, and down to the skeleton hanging below him. He went to the guard rail, looked searchingly at the wooden banister, then leaned over, taking care not to touch it: a pitiless sheer drop.
    Under the whale, confusion was apparent. The rib had finally given way, to the audible despair of the curator, and the dead man had ended up reunited with his blood along with a piece of whalebone two metres long. The pathologist was standing with his arms crossed and his head bowed, while the firemen were at a loss.
    Guérin ran back down towards the café. He went up to a policeman who seemed completely out of his depth, surrounded as he was by hysterical children who had started jabbering even more wildly on seeing the corpse fall to the floor.
    “Lieutenant Guérin from Police H.Q. I want you to cordon off the whole of the balcony from the third level up.”
    He pointed it out to the uniform, who was laden with sandwiches.
    “Just close all this off, and I’ll send you a lab team. I want the fingerprints from ten metres of the banister, either side of the column, see what I mean?”
    He was still pointing his finger at the place. “Understand?”
    “Yessir.”
    “Are there C.C.T.V. cameras here?”
    “I don’t know sir, we’ll have to ask the museum security people.”
    “Get working on that balcony right away.”
    The policeman put down the sandwiches, radioed his colleagues and hurried off, only too glad to get away from the schoolchildren.
    The security officer whom he ran to earth at the information desk, holding animated discussions with the staff, told him that no, there weren’t any cameras inside the museum, only at the entrance.
    Ten minutes later, Guérin was coming out of the video room, a hard disk under his arm and in a high state of excitement. His big eyes darted here and there looking for a fixed point.
    “Where’s Lambert?”
    The policeman the question was addressed to took a step backwards.
    “Who?”
    “My deputy. Fair hair, football jacket, mouth hanging open.”
    “Oh right, him. He went over there.”
    Guérin found Lambert in a corner of the ground floor admiring a badly lit creature: a small member of the whale family about