The Frozen Dead (3 page)

‘You'll be up to it, I'm sure. You have the dream profile for the job. I'm not saying it'll be easy, but you'll manage, I know you will.'

‘You're right,' she said. ‘I'm being ridiculous.'

‘Not at all. Anyone in your shoes would react the same way. I know the reputation that place has. Don't let that get to you. Focus on your work. And when you come back to us, you will be the greatest specialist on psychopathic disorders in all the cantons. I have to let you go now, Diane. The dean's expecting me, to talk about finances. You know what he's like: I'm going to need all my wits about me. Good luck. Keep me posted.'

Dial tone. He'd hung up.

The silence, interrupted only by the sound of the stream, draped itself over her like a wet canvas. The
plop
of a big clump of snow falling from a branch made her jump. She put her mobile into the pocket of her down jacket, folded the map and climbed back into the car.

Then she backed round to leave the lay-by.

A tunnel. The beam of her headlights glanced over the black, streaming walls. No overhead lighting, a bend immediately beyond it. And the first sign, at last, on a white fence: ‘CHARLES WARGNIER INSTITUTE FOR FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY.' She turned slowly and drove over a bridge. The road climbed suddenly and sharply, following a few hairpin bends through the fir trees and the snowdrifts – she was afraid her old banger might skid on the icy slope. She had neither snow tyres nor chains. But quickly enough the road flattened out.

One last bend and they were there, very close now.

She pressed deeper into her seat when the buildings came to meet her through the snow, mist and woods.

Eleven fifteen in the morning, Wednesday, the tenth of December.

2

Snow-covered fir trees. Imagine them from above, from a sheer, vertical perspective. A ribbon of road leading straight and deep between these same fir trees, trunks wrapped in mist. Treetops hurtling by. At the end of the road, among the trees, a Cherokee Jeep like a plump beetle was driving beneath the tall conifers. Its headlights pierced the swirling mists. The snow plough had left huge drifts on either side. In the distance white mountains blocked the horizon. The forest came to an abrupt end. The road wound in a tight bend round a rocky slope before continuing alongside a quick-running stream. The stream met a small weir covered in a rush of roiling water. Beyond the other bank, the black mouth of a hydroelectric power station was visible in the gaping side of the mountain. On the verge, a road sign: ‘SAINT-MARTIN-DE-COMMINGES: BEAR COUNTRY – 7 KM.'

Servaz looked at the sign as he drove past.

A Pyrenean bear painted against a background of mountains and fir trees.

Pyrenean bears, yeah, right! Newly introduced Slovenian bears, more like, which the local shepherds would be only too happy to have at the other end of their rifle.

According to the shepherds, the bears strayed too close to inhabited areas; they attacked the herds; they were even becoming a danger to humans.
The only species that is dangerous to humans is other humans,
thought Servaz. With each passing year he saw more and more corpses in the morgue in Toulouse. And they hadn't been killed by bears.
Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probat.
‘A wise man asserts nothing he cannot prove,' he mused. He slowed down as the road curved before leading back into the woods – no longer tall conifers, this time, more like a nondescript undergrowth full of thickets. He could hear the burbling mountain stream through the car window, slightly open despite the chill. Its clear song almost drowned the music from the CD player: Mahler's Fifth Symphony, the allegro. A music full of anxiety and feverishness, which seemed appropriate for what lay ahead.

Suddenly there before him were the revolving lights of the squad cars, and figures silhouetted against the road, waving their luminous batons.

Those useless gendarmes … When the gendarmerie had no clue how to start an investigation, they set up roadblocks.

He remembered what Antoine Canter had said to him that very morning, at the regional crime unit in Toulouse: ‘It happened last night, in the Pyrenees. A few kilometres from Saint-Martin-de-Comminges. Cathy d'Humières called it in. I think you've worked with her before, right?'

Canter was a colossus of a man, with the rugged accent of the Southwest, a former rugby player with a vicious streak who liked to dominate his opponents in the scrum, a cop who'd worked his way up from the bottom to become deputy chief of the local crime unit. The skin on his cheeks was pockmarked with little craters, like sand pitted by rain; his huge iguana's eyes watched Servaz closely.

‘
It
happened? What happened?' Servaz asked.

The corners of Canter's mouth were sealed with a white deposit, and now he parted his lips: ‘No idea.'

Servaz stared at him, taken aback.

‘What do you mean?'

‘She wouldn't say on the phone, just that she was waiting for you, and she wants the utmost discretion in the matter.'

‘And that's it?'

‘Yes.'

Servaz looked at his boss, bewildered.

‘Saint-Martin, isn't that where that asylum is?'

‘The Wargnier Institute,' confirmed Canter, ‘a psychiatric establishment unique in France, even in Europe. That's where they lock up murderers who've been judged insane.'

Someone had escaped, committed a crime while on the run? That would explain the roadblocks. Servaz slowed down. He recognised the MAT 49 sub-machine guns and the Browning BPS-SP shotguns among the weapons the officers were carrying. He rolled down his window. Scores of snowflakes drifted on the cold air. He waved his card in the gendarme's face.

‘Which way?'

‘You have to go to the hydroelectric station.' The man raised his voice to talk over the messages spurting from the radios, his breath a cloud of white condensation. ‘A dozen kilometres or so from here, in the mountains. At the first roundabout on the way into Saint-Martin, you take a right. Then right again at the next roundabout. Follow the signs for Lac d'Astau. Then just keep going.'

‘Whose idea were these roadblocks?'

‘Public prosecutor. Routine procedure. We open the boot, check their papers. You never know.'

‘Uh-huh,' said Servaz doubtfully.

He started the car again, turned up the volume on the CD player. The horns of the scherzo filled the small space. He took his eyes from the road for a moment to grab the cold coffee he had stashed in the drinks holder. The same ritual, every time: he always prepared himself in the same way. He knew from experience that the first day, the first hour of an investigation are decisive. That it's when he must be awake, focused and open-minded. Coffee to wake up, music to focus – and to empty his mind.
Caffeine and music … And today, fir trees and snow,
he thought, looking at the side of the road with the first flutterings of a cramp in his stomach. Servaz was a city-dweller at heart. Mountains felt like hostile territory to him. He remembered that it had not always been like that, however; when he was a child, his father used to take him walking in these valleys every year. Like a good teacher, he explained all about the trees and rocks and clouds, and young Martin Servaz listened while his mother spread a blanket on the springtime grass and opened the picnic basket, calling her husband a pedant and a crushing bore. Halcyon days when innocence reigned over the world. As he stared at the road, Servaz wondered whether the real reason he had never come back here was because his memory of these valleys was inextricably connected to that of his parents.

When will you get round to some spring-cleaning up there, for Christ's sake?

For a while he'd been seeing a shrink. After three years had gone by, however, the shrink himself had thrown in the towel: ‘I'm sorry, I wanted to help you but I can't. I have never met such resistance.' Servaz had smiled and answered that it didn't matter. At the time he was thinking mostly of the positive impact the end of his treatment would have on his budget.

He looked around him again. So much for the frame; only the painting was missing. Canter said he knew nothing. And Cathy d'Humières, the public prosecutor for Saint-Martin, had insisted he come alone.
Why is that?
He hadn't told her, however, that it suited him; he led an investigation team of seven, and his men (in fact six men and one woman) had enough to deal with already. The day before, they had wound up an investigation into the murder of a homeless man. His battered and half-drowned body had been found in a pond, not far from the motorway Servaz had just taken near the village of Noé. They hadn't needed more than forty-eight hours to find the culprits: the tramp, who was sixty or more, had been spotted a few hours before his death in the company of three adolescents from the village. The eldest was seventeen, the youngest twelve. To begin with they had denied it, then, fairly quickly, confessed. No motive. And no remorse, either. The eldest just said, ‘He was a social reject, a bum…' Not one of them had a file with the police or the social services. Kids from good families. Normal educations, none of them running with a bad crowd. Everyone taking part in the investigation said the boys' indifference made their blood run cold. Servaz could still see their chubby faces, their large, pale, attentive eyes staring at him fearlessly, even defiantly. He had tried to work out which one was the ringleader – in this sort of thing there is always a leader – and he thought he had figured it out. It wasn't the eldest boy, but the middle one. A boy whose name, ironically, was Clément …

‘Who told on us?' the kid had asked in the presence of his lawyer, who was baffled because the boy had refused to talk to him, as was his right, under the pretext that the man was ‘a moron'.

‘I'm the one who asks the questions round here,' said the policeman.

‘I'll bet it's that old cow Schmitz. She's such a slag.'

‘Calm down and watch your language,' said the lawyer; he'd been hired by the boy's father.

‘You're not in the playground,' Servaz pointed out. ‘You know what you risk, you and your mates?'

‘This is premature,' protested the lawyer feebly.

‘She'll get her head bashed in, that bitch. Watch if she doesn't get killed. I'm fucking mad.'

‘Stop swearing,' shouted the lawyer, beside himself.

‘Are you listening to me?' said Servaz, getting annoyed. ‘You risk twenty years in prison. Do the maths: when you get out, you'll be old.'

‘Please,' said the lawyer. ‘No—'

‘Old like you, you mean? How old are you? Thirty? Forty? It's not bad, your velvet jacket! Must be worth a fortune. Why are you picking on me, huh? We didn't do it! We didn't fucking do anything! Honestly we didn't. Are you idiots or what?'

To defuse his rising anger, Servaz reminded himself that this was an adolescent who'd never been in trouble. Who'd never run foul of the police. No trouble at school, either. The lawyer had turned very pale and was sweating profusely.

‘You're not in some TV series here,' said Servaz calmly. ‘You're not going to get out of it. It's already wrapped up. You're the idiot here.'

Any other teenager would have reacted. But not this one. Not this boy named Clément; the boy named Clément did not even seem to realise what he'd been accused of. Servaz had already read articles about minors like this who raped, killed and tortured, and who seemed perfectly unaware of the horror of their deeds. As if they'd been involved in some video game or role play that had simply gone wrong. Until that day Servaz had refused to believe they existed. The media, exaggerating as usual. And now here he was, faced full on with the phenomenon. And what was even more terrifying than the apathy of the three young murderers was the fact that there was nothing at all exceptional anymore about the case. The world had become a huge laboratory for increasingly demented experimentation, where God, the devil or random luck stirred the contents of the test-tubes.

*   *   *

Once he got home, Servaz took a long time scrubbing his hands, got undressed and stayed in the shower until all the hot water was gone, as if to decontaminate himself. After that, he took his Juvenal down from the bookshelf and opened it to Satire XIII: ‘What day is there, however festive, which fails to disclose theft, treachery and fraud: gain made out of every kind of crime, and money won by the dagger or the bowl? For honest men are scarce; hardly so numerous as the gates of Thebes.'

These kids, we're the ones who've made them the way they are,
he'd thought, closing the book.
What sort of future do they have? None. Everything's going to the dogs. You have bastards who fill their pockets and waltz round on TV while these kids' parents get the sack and look like losers to their children. Why don't they rebel? Why don't they set fire to banks, luxury boutiques and the corridors of power, instead of schools and buses?

I'm reasoning like an old fart,
he told himself afterwards. Was it because he was about to turn forty in a few weeks? He'd left his team in charge of the three kids. This would be a welcome diversion – even if he didn't know what lay ahead.

*   *   *

He followed the gendarme's instruction and bypassed Saint-Martin. Immediately after the second roundabout the road began to climb, and he caught a glimpse of the white roofs of the town below him. He pulled over onto the verge and climbed out. The town spread further across the valley than he'd thought. Through the gloom he could just make out the huge snowy fields he'd driven past on his way in, as well as an industrial zone and some campsites to the east, on the other side of the river. There were also some council estates, long low buildings. The town centre, with its skein of little streets, was spread at the foot of the highest of the surrounding mountains. Along the fir-covered slopes a double row of cable cars inscribed a vertical fault.