The Frozen Dead (28 page)

‘Who has these keys?' asked Servaz.

‘Twenty people or so,' said Xavier, walking through the glass doors. ‘The staff members in charge of the care units, the three supervisors on the ground floor, the head nurse, the head chef, myself … But if one of those doors were unbolted, it would immediately set off an alarm in the control room.'

‘We need the list of everyone who has keys,' said Ziegler.

‘Is there always someone on duty in the control room?' asked Servaz.

‘Yes. You'll see, it's just here.'

They had entered a large foyer. To the right they could see what looked like a waiting room, with green pot plants and a row of plastic seats. Directly opposite was a semicircular glassed-in cubicle of the kind found in banks or reception areas. There was no one there. To the left was a vast space whose glossy white walls were decorated with drawings and paintings. Tortured faces baring teeth as sharp as knives; twisted bodies; garish colours. Servaz knew this must be the residents' artwork.

Then his gaze went from the drawings to a steel door with a small round window. The control room. Xavier crossed the foyer to the room. He took one of the keys hanging on a chain from his belt, inserted it and pushed open the armoured door. There were two guards inside, watching dozens of screens. They wore orange boiler suits over white T-shirts. Handcuffs and rings full of keys jangled from their belts whenever they moved. Servaz also noticed canisters of tear gas hanging on the wall. But no firearms.

The screens displayed long, deserted corridors, stairways, common rooms and a cafeteria. The two men looked at them indifferently; their expressions were as blank as the watchmen's had been.

‘The Institute is equipped with forty-eight cameras,' explained Xavier. ‘Forty-two on the inside, six on the outside, and all of them, obviously, set in strategic places.'

He pointed to the two men.

‘There is always at least one person on duty at night. Two during the day.'

‘One person to keep an eye on over forty screens,' said Servaz emphatically.

‘We don't only have cameras,' replied Xavier. ‘The establishment is divided into several sectors, each of which has a greater or lesser level of security, depending on how dangerous the occupants are. Unauthorised passage from one sector to another will automatically set off an alarm.'

He pointed to a row of little red lamps above the screens.

‘Appropriate biometric measures also correspond to each level of security. In order to have access to Unit A, where the most dangerous residents are, one must go through a door which has a twenty-four-hour security guard.'

‘Do all staff members have access to Unit A?' asked Ziegler.

‘Of course not. Only the therapeutic team in charge of Unit A has access, along with the head nurse, the two guards from the fourth floor, our physician, the chaplain and myself. And more recently, a psychologist from Switzerland.'

‘We will need that list as well,' said Ziegler. ‘With each person's job description and relevant skills.'

‘Is it all computerised?' asked Servaz.

‘Yes.'

‘Who installed the system?'

‘A private security firm.'

‘And who takes care of the maintenance?'

‘The same firm.'

‘Do you have plans somewhere?'

The psychiatrist seemed disconcerted.

‘What sort of plans?'

‘Showing the building's installations, cables, biometric devices…'

‘I suppose the security company must have them,' ventured Xavier.

‘We'll need their address, business name and phone number. Do they send someone to do regular checks on the equipment?'

‘They check everything remotely. If something breaks down or there's a glitch somewhere, their computers inform them immediately.'

‘Don't you think that's dangerous? That the security locks can be controlled from outside by someone you don't know?'

Xavier frowned.

‘They have no way of unbolting the doors. Or of disabling the security systems. All they can do is observe what is going on and check whether everything is working properly.'

‘What about the guards?' asked Servaz, looking at the two men. ‘Are they sent by the same company?'

‘Yes,' said Xavier, leaving the control room. ‘But they don't intervene in the event of a crisis with any of the patients; that would be the auxiliaries' job. As you know, the trend everywhere is towards “outsourcing”, as they say in the ministries.'

He stopped in the middle of the hall to look at them.

‘Like everyone else, we make do with what we have available – and we seem to have less and less of everything. In the last twenty years each successive government has discreetly done away with over fifty thousand beds in psychiatry units and cut thousands of jobs. And yet on the outside, in the name of economic imperatives and the free market, the pressure on individuals has never been greater; there are more crazy, psychotic, paranoid, schizophrenic people wandering around than ever.'

He headed towards a long corridor at the end of the hall. The endless corridor seemed to run the entire length of the building, but from time to time they had to stop at a metal gate, which, Servaz supposed, would be locked at nightfall. He also saw doors with copper plates displaying the doctors' names, including one with Xavier's own name, then another which said, ‘Élisabeth Ferney, Head Nurse.'

‘But I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky, all the same,' added Xavier as he ushered them through another metal door. ‘To compensate for the lack of personnel, we are fortunate to have the most sophisticated security and surveillance systems possible. That is far from being the case elsewhere. In France, when someone wants to hide the fact that budgets are tight and the workforce has been slashed, they come up with the most preposterous concepts: pure semantic fraud, as someone recently pointed out, expressions such as “quality progress”, or “annual performance projects”, or “nursing diagnosis”. Do you know what a nursing diagnosis is? It consists in making nurses think they are capable of offering a diagnosis in the doctor's place, which, obviously, allows for fewer hospital doctors. For example, one of my colleagues witnessed a case where nurses sent a patient to psychiatry after labelling him a “dangerous paranoid”, on the grounds that he was very irritable and in open conflict with his employer, and he was threatening to take him to court! Fortunately for the poor man, my colleague, who was present at the time of admission, immediately reversed the diagnosis and sent him straight home.'

Dr Xavier stopped right in the middle of the corridor and gave them a surprisingly grave look.

‘We are in the midst of an era of unprecedented political mendacity and institutionalised violence towards the weakest in society,' he said ominously. ‘Our current governments and their minions are all pursuing a dual purpose: social control and the commodification of individuals.'

Servaz looked at the psychiatrist. His own conclusions were not that different. But he wondered, nevertheless, whether back in the days when they were all-powerful, psychiatrists had not pulled the rug from under their own feet by indulging in all sorts of experiments whose foundations were more ideological than scientific – often with destructive consequences, where human beings were used as guinea pigs.

As they went past, Servaz noticed two more orange-clad guards in their glass cubicle.

Then on the right was the cafeteria they had glimpsed on the screens.

‘The staff cafeteria,' explained Xavier.

Tall picture windows looked out onto a snowy landscape, and the walls were painted with warm colours. A handful of people sat chatting and drinking coffee. They then went into a room with a high ceiling and salmon-coloured walls. Cheap, comfy armchairs were set about here and there, creating quiet, cosy nooks.

‘This is the visitors' room,' said the psychiatrist, ‘where families can speak in private with their relatives. Of course, this facility is only available to the least dangerous residents, which does not mean a great deal, here. There is constant camera surveillance, and the auxiliaries are never far away.'

‘And the others?' asked Propp, opening his mouth for the first time.

Xavier looked closely and cautiously at the psychologist.

‘Most of them never receive any visits,' he replied. ‘This is neither a psychiatric hospital nor your usual model prison. This is a pilot establishment, unique in Europe. We get patients from all over. And all of them are very violent individuals: abuse, rape, torture, murder. Committed on their families or on strangers. All repeat offenders. All on a knife's edge. We have only the crème de la crème here,' added Xavier with a curious smile. ‘Not many people care to remember that our patients exist. Perhaps that is why the establishment is located in such an isolated place. We are their final family.'

Servaz found this last sentence a touch melodramatic, like everything else about Dr Xavier, in fact.

‘How many security levels are there?'

‘Three. Depending on the dangerousness of the clientele: low, medium and high, which determines not only the intensity of the security systems and the number of guards, but also the nature of the treatment and the relationships between the staff and the residents.'

‘Who determines how dangerous a newcomer is?'

‘Our teams. We combine clinical interviews, questionnaires and the case files our colleagues send us with a revolutionary new method imported from my country. Actually, we have a newcomer who is being evaluated at this very moment. Follow me.'

He led them towards a stairway of wide concrete steps. Once they reached the first floor, they found themselves outside a door reinforced by fine metal mesh.

This time, in addition to the code he typed on a little keyboard, Xavier had to place his hand on a biometric sensor.

A sign above the door informed them: ‘Sector C: Low-level danger – Restricted to Personnel Categories C, B and A.'

‘Is this the only access to this zone?' asked Ziegler.

‘No, there is a second security door at the end of the corridor that provides access from this zone to the next one – medium security – an area which, consequently, is reserved only for staff members authorised for levels B and A.'

He led them along another corridor. Then he stopped outside a door labelled ‘Evaluation', and opened it.

Xavier stood back to let them go past.

A windowless room, so narrow that they had to squeeze together inside. Two people were seated in front of a computer screen, a man and a woman. The screen showed both an image from a video camera and several other windows where diagrams and lines of information were scrolling past. The camera was filming a young man sitting on a stool in another windowless room hardly bigger than a broom closet. Servaz saw that the man was wearing a virtual-reality helmet. Then his gaze was drawn further down and he gave a slight shudder: the man's trousers were pulled down onto his thighs, and a strange tube connected to electric wires had been placed round his penis.

‘This new method for evaluating sexual deviancy is based on virtual reality, using a system of oculomotor observation and penile plethysmography,' explained the psychiatrist. ‘That is the device you can see attached to his genitals: it allows us to measure the physiological proportion of excitement in response to various stimuli – his erection, in other words. In conjunction with the erectile response, the movements of the subject's eye muscles are measured with the help of an infrared tracking device which determines how long the images coming from the virtual-reality mask are observed, as well as the exact spot in each scene where his attention is focused.'

The psychiatrist bent down and pointed at one of the windows on the screen. Servaz saw coloured lines going up and down. Beneath each line the category of stimulus was indicated: ‘male adult', ‘female adult', ‘male child' and so on.

‘The stimuli that are sent into the mask alternate between an adult man, an adult woman, a nine-year-old girl, a little boy the same age and finally a control character that is sexless and neutral. Each short film lasts three minutes. Each time, we measure the physical response.'

He stood up straight.

‘It must be said that the majority of our clientele is made up of sex abusers. We have eighty-eight beds altogether: fifty-three in Sector C, twenty-eight in B and the seven residents in Unit A.'

Servaz leaned against the wall. He was sweating, and shivers were running through him. His throat was on fire. It was the vision of that man sitting in a position both humiliating and surreal while his deviant fantasies were aroused in order to be measured: it was making him feel physically unwell.

‘How many of them are murderers?' he asked in an unsteady voice.

Xavier gave him an intense stare.

‘Thirty-five. The entire contingent of patients in Sectors B and A.'

*   *   *

Diane watched them cross the huge foyer and take the corridor to the service stairway. Three men and a woman. Xavier was talking to them, but he looked tense, on the defensive. The man and the woman who were on either side of him were bombarding him with questions. She waited until they were gone; then she went over to the glass doors. A 4x4 was parked in the snow a dozen metres from there.

The word ‘gendarmerie' was painted on it.

Diane remembered the conversation she had had with Alex about the murdered chemist: apparently the police had also made the connection with the Institute.

Then something else occurred to her: the air vent in her office, the conversation she'd overheard between Lisa and Xavier. And that strange business with the horse. Even then, Lisa Ferney had mentioned the possibility the police might call. Could there be a connection between the two events? The police must be wondering the same thing. Then her thoughts returned to the air vent.