The Frozen Dead (19 page)

‘That will be for the judge to decide,' said Servaz in the end. ‘Stick to what you know, not to what you suppose.'

*   *   *

That same Saturday he looked, bewildered, at the list his daughter had handed to him.

‘What's this?'

‘My Christmas list.'

‘All this?'

‘It's a list, Dad. You don't have to buy everything,' she teased him.

He looked at her. The fine silver ring was still in place on her lower lip, as was the ruby-coloured loop on her left eyebrow, but a fifth ring had come to join the four others on her left ear. Servaz was reminded of his teammate on the current investigation. He also noticed that Margot had bumped into something, because she had a bruise on her right cheekbone. Then he went over the list again: an iPod, a digital photo frame (this was a frame, she explained, where photographs stored in memory could be displayed on a screen), a Nintendo DS Lite game console (‘with Dr Kawashima's Brain Training'), a compact camera (with, if possible, a 7-megapixel sensor, a 3x zoom lens, a 2.5-inch screen and image stabilisation), a laptop computer with a 17-inch screen (preferably an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, a 250-GB hard drive and a CD-DVD burner). She had hesitated over an iPhone, but then decided that, at the end of the day, it might be ‘a bit expensive'. Servaz had no idea what these things cost nor what ‘2 GB of RAM', for example, might mean. But he did know one thing:
there were no innocent technologies.
In their interconnected technological world, moments of freedom and authentic thought were becoming increasingly rare. What did it all mean, this frenetic buying, this fascination with the most superfluous gadgets? Why did a member of a tribe in New Guinea now seem to him wiser and healthier than most of the people he spent his time with? Was it just him or was he, like the old philosopher in his barrel, gazing at a world that had lost its reason? He slipped the list into his pocket and kissed her on her forehead.

‘I'll think about it.'

In the course of the afternoon the weather had changed. It was raining, there was a strong wind, and they had taken shelter under a flapping canvas awning in front of one of the many brilliantly lit window displays in the town centre. The streets were full of people, cars and Christmas decorations.

What was the weather like up there? he suddenly wondered. Was it snowing at the Institute? Servaz pictured Julian Hirtmann in his cell, unfolding his long body to watch the snow falling silently outside his window. Ever since the previous day and Captain Ziegler's revelations in the car, the thought of Hirtmann had rarely left him.

‘Dad, are you listening to me?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘You won't forget my list, will you?'

He reassured her on that point. Then he suggested they go for a drink in a café on the Place du Capitole. To his great surprise, she ordered a beer. Until now she had always ordered Diet Coke. Servaz became brutally aware of the fact that his daughter was seventeen and that he still saw her, despite all evidence to the contrary, as if she were five years younger. Perhaps it was because of this shortsightedness that he hadn't known how to behave with her for some time now. His gaze fell again upon the bruise on her cheek. He studied her for a moment. She had shadows under her eyes, and as she looked down at her glass of beer her expression was sad. Suddenly the questions came pouring in. What was making her sad? Whose phone call had she been waiting for at one o'clock in the morning? What was that mark on her cheek?
A cop's questions,
he thought.
No: a father's questions …

‘How did you get that bruise?' he asked.

She looked up.

‘What?'

‘That bruise on your cheekbone … where did it come from?'

‘Uh … I bumped into something. Why?'

‘Where?'

‘Does it matter?'

Her tone was biting. He could not help but blush. Easier to question a suspect than his own daughter.

‘No,' he said.

‘Mum says your problem is that you see evil everywhere. That you've been conditioned by your job.'

‘She's probably right.'

It was his turn to look down at his beer.

‘I got up during the night to go to the loo and I walked into a door. Is that a good enough answer?'

He looked at her closely, wondering whether to believe her. It was a plausible explanation; he himself had cut his forehead that way, in the middle of the night. However, there was something about the aggressive tone of her response that made him uncomfortable. Or was he just imagining things? Why could he, as a rule, see so clearly into the people he was interrogating, while his own daughter remained so impenetrable? And, more generally, why was he like a fish in water when he was on a case and so useless when it came to relationships? He knew what a shrink would have said. He would have talked to him about his childhood …

‘Let's go see a film,' he said.

*   *   *

That night, after he had put a ready meal in the microwave and gulped down a coffee (he saw too late that he'd run out, and had to use an old jar of instant easily past the sell-by date), he reimmersed himself in the biography of Julian Alois Hirtmann. Night had fallen over Toulouse. Outside, there was a gusty wind and it was raining, but his study was filled with the strains of Gustav Mahler (Sixth Symphony) wafting through the room, and his intense concentration was aided by the late hour and a semi-darkness troubled only by a little desk lamp and the luminous computer screen. Servaz had got out his notebook and started adding to it. His notes already covered several pages. While the sound of violins rose from the sitting room, he returned to the career of the serial killer. The judge in Switzerland had requested a psychiatric evaluation to establish criminal responsibility, and the appointed experts concurred, after a long series of interviews, that the suspect was ‘fully irresponsible', invoking his fits of delirium, his hallucinations – intensive drug use having altered the subject's judgement and reinforced his schizophrenia – and a total absence of empathy. This final point was indisputable, even Servaz agreed on that. According to the reports, their patient did not have ‘the psychological means to control his acts, nor the degree of inner freedom that would enable him to make choices and decisions'.

According to certain Swiss forensic psychiatry websites, the appointed experts were nostalgic for a scientific method that left little room for personal interpretation: they had subjected Hirtmann to a battery of standard tests based on the DSM-IV, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Servaz wondered whether Hirtmann were not already as well acquainted with the manual as the appointed experts were.

Still, well aware of their subject's dangerousness, they had recommended a detention order and internment in a specialised establishment ‘for an indeterminate period'. Hirtmann had stayed in two Swiss psychiatric hospitals before landing at the Wargnier Institute. He was not the only inmate in Unit A who had come from abroad, for the Institute, unique in Europe, was an initial venture into psychiatric detention as part of a potential Europe-wide legal framework. Servaz frowned as he read this: what could that mean, when European legal systems were all so different in their laws, the length of sentences and the size of their budgets – where France spent half as much per head of population as Germany, the Netherlands or even Great Britain?

He got up to get a beer, and it occurred to him that there was a clear contradiction between Hirtmann's socially integrated and professionally recognised personality as described by the press, and the dark portrait established by the experts of a man prey to pathological jealousy and uncontrollable fantasies of murder. Jekyll and Hyde? Or had Hirtmann managed, thanks to his talent as a manipulator, to avoid a prison sentence? Servaz was ready to bet on this second hypothesis. He was convinced that when Hirtmann first appeared before them, he knew exactly how to behave and what to say to the experts. Did this mean that Servaz and his team, in turn, would be confronted with a peerless actor and manipulator? How could they see through him? Would the psychologist sent by the gendarmerie succeed where three Swiss specialists had been taken for a ride?

Then Servaz wondered what the link between Hirtmann and Lombard could be. The only obvious one was geography. Could Hirtmann have gone after the horse purely by chance? Had he hit upon the idea as he went by the riding academy? The stud farm was well off the main roads. There was no reason for Hirtmann to be there. And if he was the one who had killed the horse, why hadn't the dogs sensed his presence? And why hadn't he used the opportunity to escape? How could he have outsmarted the security system at the Institute? Every question led to a new one.

Servaz's mind suddenly switched gears:
his daughter had shadows under her eyes and a sad gaze.
Why? Why did she look so sad and tired? She had answered the phone at one o'clock in the morning. Whose call was she expecting? And that bruise on her cheek: he was far from convinced by Margot's explanation. He would talk about it with her mother.

Servaz went on digging into Julian Hirtmann's past life until the early hours of the morning. When he went to lie down, that Sunday, 14 December, it was with the impression that he was holding the pieces of two separate puzzles in his hands: they just didn't fit.

His daughter had shadows under her eyes and a sad gaze. And she had a bruise on her cheekbone.
What did it mean?

*   *   *

That same night, Diane Berg was thinking about her parents. Her father was a secretive man, middle class, a rigid, distant Calvinist of the sort Switzerland produced with the same regularity as chocolate and safes. Her mother lived in her own world, a secret, imaginary one where she heard the music of angels, a world where she was the centre of everything – her mood constantly vacillating between depression and euphoria. A mother who was far too self-absorbed to lavish on her children anything other than leftover crumbs of affection, and Diane had learned very early on that the bizarre world of her parents was not for her.

She had run away for the first time at fourteen. She didn't get very far. The Geneva police brought her home after she'd been caught red-handed stealing a Led Zeppelin CD together with a boy her own age whom she'd met two hours earlier. In such a ‘harmonious' environment rebellion was inevitable and Diane went through her ‘grunge', ‘neo-punk' and ‘Goth' phases before heading off to the psychology department of the university, where she learned to know herself and to know her parents, even if she could not understand them.

Her encounter with Spitzner had been decisive. Diane had not had many lovers before him, even though, from the outside, she gave the impression of a young woman who was forthcoming and sure of herself. But not to Spitzner. He had seen through her very quickly. Right from the start she had suspected that she was hardly his first conquest among his students, something he went on to confirm, but she didn't care. Just as she didn't care about the age difference or the fact he was married and the father of seven children. If she had had to apply her talents as a psychologist to her own case, she would have seen their relationship as pure cliché: Pierre Spitzner represented everything her parents were not. And everything they hated.

She recalled the long and very serious conversation they had once had.

‘I'm not your father,' he had said at the end. ‘Or your mother. Don't ask me for things I will never be able to give you.'

He was stretched out on the sofa in the little bachelor studio the university put at his disposal, a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand. He was unshaven and bare-chested, displaying not without a certain vanity a body that was remarkably fit for a man his age.

‘Such as?'

‘To be faithful.'

‘Are you sleeping with other women at the moment?'

‘Yes, my wife.'

‘I mean,
other
women.'

‘No, not at the moment. Satisfied?'

‘I don't care.'

‘You're lying.'

‘Oh, all right, I do care.'

‘Well, I don't give a damn who you sleep with,' he had replied.

But there was one thing that neither he nor anyone else had noticed: Diane had grown up with her mother's secrets in a house where there were closed doors, and rooms she was told ‘you mustn't go in', all of which had merely served to stimulate her overactive curiosity. A trait that was useful to her in her profession, but it had sometimes ended up getting her into uncomfortable situations. Diane emerged from her thoughts and watched the moon slipping behind clouds torn like shreds of gauze. It reappeared a few seconds later in a new tear in the clouds, then disappeared again. Near her window, for a brief moment the branch of a fir tree flocked with snow seemed phosphorescent in the white falling from the sky; then everything returned to darkness.

She turned away from the deep, narrow window. The red numbers on her clock radio shone in the obscurity. Twenty-five minutes past midnight. Everywhere was still. There must be one or two guards awake upstairs, that much she knew, but they were probably sprawling in their armchairs watching television at the far end of the building.

In this wing of the Institute reigned silence and sleep.

But not for everyone …

She went over to the door of her room. Because there was a gap of a few millimetres beneath the door itself, she had switched off the light. A caress of icy air brushed against her bare feet and she immediately began to shiver. Because of the cold, but also because of the adrenaline rush in her veins. Something had aroused her curiosity.

Half past midnight.

The sound was so faint she almost failed to hear it.

Like the night before. And the other nights.

A door opening. Very slowly. Then nothing more. Someone who did not want to be caught.