The Frozen Dead (17 page)

‘What's going on?'

‘That was Rosny-sous-Bois on the line. They've got the DNA back.'

He looked at her, incredulous. The swabs had been taken no more than forty-eight hours ago. DNA analyses simply were not completed in so little time: the labs were swamped! Someone very high up must have had the case moved to the top of the pile.

‘Most of the DNA traces found in the cabin – hair, saliva, nails – match the workers from the power plant. But they also found a trace of saliva on one of the windows. A trace belonging to someone outside the power plant, with a profile in the FNAEG.
Someone who should never have been there
…'

Servaz stiffened. The FNAEG was the national DNA database. A controversial thing: it contained the DNA profiles not only of rapists, murderers and paedophiles, but also of people who had committed all sorts of minor crimes, everything from shoplifting to the possession of a few grams of cannabis. Consequently, the previous year the number of profiles in the database had reached 470,492. The database may well have been under the most stringent control of any in France, but such excess was a legitimate source of concern to lawyers and magistrates. At the same time, the tendency for the FNAEG to go beyond its natural bounds had already enabled investigators to make some significant arrests, because criminality often spilled over beyond the neat categories used to define it: a ‘nonce' – the term for a paedophile in prison slang – might also be a cat burglar or a robber. And DNA traces found on the site of a burglary had led to the arrest of more than one serial sex offender.

‘Who is it?' he asked.

Ziegler gave him a disconcerted look.

‘Have you ever heard of Julian Hirtmann?'

A few snowflakes had begun to fall again. A sudden smell of madness in the car.
It can't be,
cried his brain.

Servaz remembered reading several articles in
La Dépêche du Midi
when the notorious Swiss serial killer was being transferred to the Pyrenees. Articles that described at length the exceptional security measures being taken for the transfer. How could Hirtmann have managed to scale the walls of the Institute, commit such an insane act and then return to his cell?

‘It can't be,' whispered Ziegler, echoing his thoughts.

He gazed at her, still just as incredulous. Then he looked through the windscreen at the snow.

‘
Credo quia absurdum,
' he said at last.

‘Latin again,' she said. ‘And it means?'

‘“I believe it because it's absurd.”'

9

Diane had been sitting at her desk for an hour when suddenly her door opened and closed. She looked up, wondering who would come in like that without knocking: she expected to see Xavier or Lisa Ferney standing there.

No one.

She gazed at the closed door, puzzled. Footsteps echoed in the room, but the room was empty … The blue-grey light coming through the frosted window illuminated nothing but the faded wallpaper and a metal filing cabinet. The footsteps stopped and someone pulled out a chair. More steps – a woman's heels this time – stopped in turn.

‘How are our residents doing today?' asked a voice.

She stared at the wall. It was Xavier. The sounds were coming from his room next door. Yet there was a very thick wall between the two offices. It took her a moment to understand. Her gaze landed on the air vent in a corner beneath the ceiling: that was why she could hear the voices.

‘Nervous,' answered Lisa Ferney. ‘All anyone can talk about is this horse business. It's getting them all excited, by the looks of it.'

The strange acoustic phenomenon made every word, every syllable the head nurse said perfectly audible.

‘Increase their doses if need be,' said Xavier.

‘I have already.'

‘Very good.'

Diane could grasp the slightest nuance, the slightest inflection, even when their voices were hardly above a murmur. She wondered whether Xavier was aware of this. He had probably never noticed. There had never been anyone in this room before Diane, and she didn't make much noise. Perhaps the sound only travelled in one direction. Her office was a small, dusty space, two metres by four, which had been used as a storage room: there were still some boxes of archives piled up in a corner. It smelled of dust and something else, an indefinable but unpleasant odour. Despite the fact that, in something of a rush, they had set up a desk, computer and an armchair for her, she nevertheless felt as if her office was in the place where the rubbish bins were kept.

‘What do you think of the new woman?' asked Élisabeth Ferney.

Diane sat up straight, straining to hear.

‘And you, what do you think?'

‘I don't know, that's the problem. Do you suppose the police will come here because of that horse?'

‘And if they do?'

‘They'll go sticking their noses everywhere. You're not afraid?'

‘Afraid of what?' said Xavier.

A silence.

‘Why should I be afraid? I have nothing to hide.'

But the psychiatrist's voice, even through an air vent, implied just the opposite. Diane suddenly felt very ill at ease. She was eavesdropping in spite of herself on a conversation that would take an extremely embarrassing turn if she were caught. She took her mobile phone from her lab coat and hurriedly switched it off, although it was unlikely that anyone would call her there.

‘If I were you, I would fix it so that they see as little as possible,' said Lisa Ferney. ‘Do you plan on showing them Julian?'

‘Only if they ask.'

‘Perhaps I should go pay him a little visit, in that case.'

‘Yes.'

Diane could hear the rustling of Lisa Ferney's lab coat. Then silence once again.

‘Stop it,' said Xavier after a moment, ‘this is not the right time.'

‘You are too tense. I could help you.'

The nurse's voice had become coaxing, caressing.

‘Oh dear Lord, Lisa … what if someone comes…?'

‘You dirty little pig, it doesn't take much to get you going.'

‘Lisa, Lisa, please … not here …
Oh God, Lisa
…'

Diane felt her cheeks blush bright red. How long had Xavier and Lisa been lovers? The psychiatrist had only been at the Institute for six months. But then, hadn't she and Spitzner … Yet she couldn't place what she was hearing on the same level. Perhaps it was because of the asylum itself, all the impulses, hatred, psychoses, anger and mania stewing together like some filthy gruel: there was something distinctly unsavoury about their conversation.

‘You want me to stop, is that it?' whispered Lisa Ferney from the other side of the wall. ‘Say it. Say it and I'll stop.'

‘Noooo…'

*   *   *

‘Let's get going. We're being watched.'

Night had fallen. Ziegler turned her head and also saw Lombard at the window. On his own now.

She turned the ignition and backed round in the lane. As before, the gates opened in front of them. Servaz glanced in the rear-view mirror. He thought he could see Lombard pull away from the window as it too receded behind them.

‘What about the fingerprints and the other swabs?' he asked.

‘Nothing conclusive for the moment. But they've still got quite a way to go. There are hundreds of fingerprints and traces. It will take days. Up to now everything seems to belong to the staff. Our suspect used gloves, that's obvious.'

‘But he did leave some saliva on the window.'

‘Do you think it's some sort of message on his part?'

For a moment she took her eyes from the road to look at him.

‘A challenge … Who knows?' he said. ‘We can't rule anything out.'

‘Or it might have been simply accidental. It happens more often than you'd think; all he had to do was sneeze next to the window.'

‘What do you know about this Hirtmann?'

Ziegler started the windscreen wipers: the snow was coming down faster, thick in the dark sky.

‘He's an organised killer. Not the psychotic, delirious type, like some of the inmates at the Institute; he's a major psychopathic pervert, a particularly intelligent and formidable social predator. He was convicted for the murder, in atrocious circumstances, of his wife and her lover, but he is also suspected of the murder of over forty people. All women. In Switzerland, Savoie, northern Italy, Austria … five countries altogether. The trouble is, he has never confessed. And they've never been able to prove anything. Even in the case of his wife, he would never have been caught were it not for a combination of chance events.'

‘You seem well acquainted with the case.'

‘I took something of an interest sixteen months ago, in my spare time, when he was transferred to the Wargnier Institute. There was a lot of talk in the papers. But I never saw him.'

‘Whatever the case, this changes everything. From now on we have to base things on the assumption that Hirtmann is the man we are after. Even if, at first glance, it seems impossible. What do we know about him? What are the conditions of his detention at the Institute? We have to start with that.'

She nodded, her eyes on the road.

‘We also have to think about what we're going to say,' added Servaz. ‘About the questions we're going to ask him. We'll have to prepare the visit. I don't know the case as well as you do, but it's obvious that Hirtmann is no ordinary killer.'

‘There's also the question of whether he had any accomplices inside the Institute,' Ziegler pointed out. ‘And whether there were any breaches in security.'

Servaz nodded.

‘We'll organise a preparatory meeting. Things are clearer, but more complicated. We have to picture every possible aspect of the problem before we go there.'

Ziegler agreed. The Institute was now top priority, but they did not have all the necessary resources; they did not yet hold all the cards.

‘The shrink is supposed to get here from Paris on Monday,' she said. ‘And I have to give a press conference in Bordeaux tomorrow. I'm not about to cancel because of a horse. I suggest we wait until Monday to go to the Institute.'

‘On the other hand,' said Servaz, ‘if Hirtmann really is behind this, and he was able to get out of the Institute, we must make sure at all costs that the other inmates cannot do likewise.'

‘I've asked for reinforcements from the regional unit at Saint-Gaudens. They're on their way.'

‘We'll have to set up checkpoints at all the entrances to the Institute, search all the cars that go in and out, even the ones belonging to staff. And have surveillance teams posted on the mountain to keep an eye on the surrounding area.'

Ziegler nodded.

‘The reinforcements will take over tonight. I also asked for some night-vision goggles and infrared scanners. And permission to double our resources on the ground, but I'd be surprised if we get it. We're also adding two canine units to the operation. Anyway, some of the mountains around the Institute are impassable without equipment. The only real way in there is along the road or the valley. This time, even if Hirtmann manages to get past the Institute's security system, he won't get past us.'

It's no longer just about a horse,
he thought.
It's suddenly a lot more serious.

‘There's another issue we'll have to deal with.'

She looked at him questioningly.

‘What is the connection between Hirtmann and Lombard? Why the devil did he go after that horse?'

*   *   *

At midnight Servaz still wasn't asleep. He switched off his PC and his desk lamp – the computer was a dinosaur of a machine that still ran on Windows 98, which he had inherited in the divorce – before closing the door behind him. He walked through the living room, opened the glass door and went out onto the balcony. Three floors down, the street was deserted. Except for a solitary car, which from time to time made its way through the double row of vehicles parked bumper to bumper. Like most cities, this one had an acute sense of the limited space it had. And like most cities, even when its inhabitants were asleep, the city itself was never really sleeping. At all hours, it purred and vibrated like a machine. From a restaurant kitchen below rose the clatter of dishes. There were echoes of a conversation from somewhere, or rather an argument, between a man and a woman. A man in the street let his dog pee against a car. Servaz went back into the sitting room, rummaged through his CDs and put on Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Bernstein conducting, at a respectable volume. At this time of night his downstairs neighbours, always early to bed, would be fast asleep: even the terrible hammer blows of the Sixth, or the major discordant chord of the Tenth would not rouse them from their sleep.

Julian Hirtmann …

The name resonating, yet again. Ever since Irène Ziegler had uttered it several hours earlier in the car, it had been in the air. Over these last few hours Servaz had been trying to find out as much as possible about the inmate at the Wargnier Institute. It was not without some surprise that he learned that Julian Hirtmann, like himself, was partial to Mahler. That was something they had in common. He spent several hours on the Internet, taking notes. As with Éric Lombard, but for other reasons, there were hundreds of web pages devoted to Hirtmann.

The uneasy premonition Servaz had felt right from the start was spreading like a toxic cloud. Up until now they had merely been dealing with a strange affair – the death of a horse in unusual circumstances – which would never have taken on such proportions if the horse's owner had been a local farmer rather than a billionaire. And now the case was connected – although he could not understand how or why – with one of the most formidable killers in recent history. Servaz suddenly felt as if he were in a long corridor full of closed doors. Behind each door another unsuspected and frightening aspect of the investigation awaited. He dreaded walking down that corridor, opening those doors. In his mind, the corridor was strangely lit by a red lamp – red like blood, red like fury, red like a beating heart. He retreated back inside. While he was splashing his face with cold water, a knot of anxiety in his guts, he became certain that many other doors would open soon, to reveal a series of rooms each one more obscure and sinister than the next.
And this was just the beginning …