The Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

long, and it was deep – so deep that Servaz had to walk the last metre from where he stood to be able to see into the bottom.
    He took another step. Wanted to recoil, repressed the urge.
    She was in there, looking at him with her blue eyes wide open, as if she were waiting for him. She also had her mouth open, which made it seem as if she were about to say something. But of course that was impossible, because her expression was dead. There was nothing living left in it.
    Bécker and Castaing had been right: even Servaz had rarely seen anything so horrifying. Except perhaps the decapitated horse on the mountainside … But unlike them, he knew how to control his emotions. Claire Diemar had been tied with an absolutely unbelievable length of rope, wound many times over around her torso, her legs, her ankles, her neck and her arms, passing under her armpits, between her thighs, and crushing her chest, the rough rope biting deep into the victim’s skin in every place. Espérandieu stepped forward in turn and looked over his boss’s shoulder. One word immediately sprang to mind:
bondage.
There were so many knots and loops in some places, so complicated and tight, that Servaz figured it would take the pathologist hours to cut through them, then examine them once he got back to the lab. He had never seen such a tangled skein. Trussing her up like that would not have taken that long, however; whoever had done this could have acted in brutal haste before laying her in the bath and opening the tap.
    He hadn’t turned it off properly, because it was still dripping.
    A deafening noise in the silent room every time a drop fell on the surface of the water.
    Perhaps he had beaten her first. Servaz would have liked to put one hand into the bath, lift her head out of the water and hold up her skull to feel the occipital and the parietal – two of the eight flat bones that make up the cranium – through her long brown hair. But that was the pathologist’s job.
    The light from his torch rebounded on the water. He switched it off and there was only one source of light now.
It was as if the water had sequins in it
…
    Servaz closed his eyes, counted to three, then opened them again: the light was not in the bath, but in the victim’s mouth. A tiny littletorch, no more than two centimetres in diameter. It had been rammed down her throat. Only the end emerged, and it lit up the dead woman’s palate, tongue, gums and teeth, while its beam was diffracted through the surrounding water.
    Like a lamp with a human lampshade …
    Puzzled, Servaz wondered what the meaning of this final gesture might be. A signature? Its pointlessness and its undeniable importance left him thoughtful. The symbol remained to be found. He thought about what he could see there before him, as well as the dolls in the swimming pool, and tried to determine how significant each element might be.
    Water
…
    Water was the main thing. And he could also make out organic substances at the bottom of the bath, a faint whiff of urine. She must have died in that cold water.
    Water here and water outside.
It was raining.
Had the murderer waited for this stormy night to act?
    He considered how he had not seen any traces on the stairs on his way up. If the body had been tied up somewhere else, then dragged up here, in all likelihood there would have been scrapes on the skirting boards, or twists and tears in the carpet. He would ask the technicians to examine the stairway and take samples, but he already knew the answer.
    He looked at the young woman again. He felt dizzy. She had had a future. Who deserved to die so young? Her expression in the water told him what else had happened: that before she died she had been afraid, terribly afraid. She had understood that it was all over, that she had used up all her credit before she’d even had a chance to find out what getting older was about. What had she been thinking about? About the