Free The Circle by Bernard Minier Page B

That person had set the scene, chosen the décor, the actors, and perhaps even the spectators … Servaz thought he could see a hidden shadow moving behind the drama and his anxiety returned, stronger than ever.
    Frowning, he went back into the house. He wiped his soaking feet on the doormat. In the little living room, the technicians had finished with the stereo.
    â€˜Do you want to take a look?’ one of them asked, handing him some latex gloves, shoe covers, and one of those ridiculous caps which made all the cops in the crime squad look as if they were customers at a ladies’ hairdresser’s.
    Servaz took them and slipped them on before lifting the tape.
    â€˜There’s something weird,’ said the technician.
    Servaz looked at him.
    â€˜We found the kid’s mobile in his pocket. But there is no trace of the victim’s. And yet we searched everywhere.’
    Servaz pulled out his notepad and wrote this down. He underlined the word telephone twice. He remembered they had found eighteen calls to the victim on Hugo’s mobile. Why would he have got rid of Claire Diemar’s and not his own?
    â€˜And did you find anything on this?’ he asked, gesturing towards the stereo with his chin.
    The technician shrugged.
    â€˜Nothing special. Fingerprints on the player and on the CDs, but they’re the victim’s.’
    â€˜No CD in the player?’
    The technician looked at him, not understanding. He was clearly wondering why that should matter. On a piece of furniture there was a small pile of transparent sealable plastic bags, waiting to be taken to the lab. The man picked up one of them and handed it to Servaz wordlessly. Servaz grabbed it.
    He looked at the case inside the bag.
    And recognised it.
    Gustav Mahler …
    The
Kindertotenlieder, ‘Songs on the Death of Children’.
The 1963 version conducted by Karl Böhm, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He had exactly the same one.

9
    Whiteness
    Hugo had mentioned music. But he hadn’t said exactly which music. Music that sent Servaz back to the investigation in 2008. Snow, wind, whiteness. Above all whiteness, outside and in. In the East, the colour of death and of mourning. The colour, too, of rites of passage. And it had been such a rite on that December day in 2008 – when they had gone up the valley buried in snow, among the fir trees, beneath the indifferent gaze of a sky as grey as a blade.
    And the place. Isolated. The Wargnier Institute. Stone walls typical of that early twentieth-century mountain architecture, used in that era for hotels and hydroelectric power plants alike. An era where things were built to last, and where people believed in the future. Deserted corridors, armoured doors and biometric security locks, cameras, guards. Although there were not so many guards after all, considering the dangerous nature and number of inmates. And the mountain all around: enormous, hostile, disturbing. Like a second prison.
    And then there was the man himself.
    Julian Alois Hirtmann. Born forty-five years earlier in Hermance, in the French part of Switzerland. He and Servaz had only one thing in common: a love of Mahler’s music. Both of them knew everything there was to know about the Austrian composer’s oeuvre. Beyond that, they shared nothing: one was a cop from the crime squad, and the other a serial killer. Hirtmann was a former prosecutor from Geneva, who organised orgies at his villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, and who had been arrested for the double murder of his wife and her lover on the night of 21 June 2004. Subsequently, documents had been discovered at his home suggesting that Hirtmann was the author of forty or more murders spread over a period of twenty-five years. Which made him one of the most feared serialkillers of modern times. He had been sent to several psychiatric establishments before ending up at the Wargnier Institute, a facility unique in all of Europe, where murderers