The Frozen Dead (2 page)

In the hotel car park, as she was unlocking her Lancia, melted snow sliding from car roofs all around her, she grasped that she was leaving her youth behind. And she knew that before a week or two had gone by she would have forgotten her life from before. A few months from now she would have changed, utterly and profoundly. In light of where she would be staying for the next twelve months, how could it be otherwise? ‘Just be yourself,' her father had advised. As she pulled out of the little rest area back onto the motorway, already busy with traffic, she wondered if the changes would be positive ones. Someone once said that there are adaptations that are more like amputations, and she could only hope that this would not be the case for her.

She could not stop thinking about the Institute.

All those people shut away in there.

All day long the previous day, Diane had been haunted by this thought:
I'll never manage. I won't be up to it. Even though I've prepared myself, and I'm the best person for the job, I have absolutely no idea what to expect. And the people there will see right through me.

She was thinking of them as people, human beings, and not …
monsters.

And yet that is what they were: individuals who were genuine monsters, people as far removed from her own self and her parents and everyone she knew as a tiger is from a cat.

Tigers …

That was how she had to think of them: unpredictable, dangerous, capable of inconceivable cruelty.
Tigers shut away in the mountain …

When she came to the tollbooth, she discovered she'd been so absorbed by her thoughts that she had no clue where she'd put her ticket. The operator gave her an exasperated look as she searched frantically through the glove box and her handbag. Yet there was no hurry: there was no one in sight.

At the next roundabout she headed for Spain and the mountains. After a few kilometres the flat plain came to an abrupt end. The first foothills of the Pyrenees rose from the earth and the road was surrounded by round, wooded knolls that were nothing like the high, ridged summits she could see in the distance. The weather changed, too; the snowflakes were falling more thickly.

She came out of a bend and the road suddenly gave onto a landscape of rivers, forests and white plains. There was a Gothic cathedral perched on the summit of a hill, with a little town surrounding it. Through the swishing of the windscreen wipers the landscape began to resemble an old etching.

Spitzner had warned her: ‘The Pyrenees are nothing like Switzerland.'

Along the side of the road the snowdrifts rose ever higher.

*   *   *

Diane saw the flashing lights through the snowflakes before she came upon the roadblock. The snow was falling heavily now. Policemen stood in the thick of it, waving their luminous batons. Diane noticed that they were armed. One van and two motorcycles were parked in the dirty slush on the verge, beneath two tall pine trees. She rolled down her window and in no time her seat was wet from the thick, fluffy snowflakes.

‘Your papers, please, mademoiselle.'

She leaned over to the glove compartment. She could hear a string of messages crackling on their radios, blending with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the sharp accusations of her exhaust pipe. She felt the chill damp upon her face.

‘Are you a reporter?'

‘Psychologist. I'm on my way to the Wargnier Institute.'

The gendarme studied her, leaning on her open window. A tall, blond fellow, who must have been well over six foot. Beneath the fabric of sounds woven by the radios she could make out the river rushing through the forest.

‘What are you doing in this part of the world? Switzerland isn't exactly next door.'

‘The Institute is a psychiatric hospital; I'm a psychologist. Do you see the connection?'

He handed back her papers.

‘Here you are, you can go.'

As she turned the ignition, she wondered whether the French police always checked on motorists in this way, or if something had happened. The road wound its way round several bends, following the meandering river (known as a ‘
gave
', according to her guidebook) as it flowed through the trees. Then the forest vanished, giving way to a plain that must have been at least five kilometres wide. A long, straight avenue took her past petrol stations and deserted campsites, banners flapping sadly in the wind, fine houses with the air of Alpine chalets, and a string of advertising hoardings vaunting the merits of the nearby ski resorts.

‘IN THE HEART OF THE VALLEY, SAINT-MARTIN-DE-COMMINGES, POPULATION 20,863' – according to the brightly coloured sign. Above the town, grey clouds obscured the peaks, torn here and there by a glow that sculpted the ridge of a summit or the profile of a pass like the sweep of a beam of light. At the first roundabout, Diane drove past the sign for the town centre and took a little street on the right, behind a building where a large display window proclaimed in neon letters, ‘Sport & Nature.' ‘It's not a very entertaining place for a young woman.' She recalled Spitzner's words as she drove down the streets to the familiar, reassuring monologue of her windscreen wipers.

The road headed uphill. She caught a brief glimpse of huddled roofs at the bottom of the slope. On the ground the snow was turning into a black slush that splattered the underneath of the car. ‘Are you sure you want to go there, Diane? It won't have much in common with Champ-Dollon.' Champ-Dollon was the name of the Swiss prison where, after she had graduated, she had conducted a number of forensic assessments and taken on casework dealing with sex offenders. She'd had to assess serial rapists, paedophiles, cases of interfamilial sexual abuse – an administrative euphemism for incestuous rape. She had also been called on as a joint evaluator to conduct credibility tests on minors who claimed to be the victims of sexual abuse, and she had discovered, to her horror, how easily such an undertaking could be skewed by the evaluator's own ideological and moral prejudices, often to the detriment of all objectivity.

‘I've heard strange things about the Wargnier Institute,' Spitzner had said.

‘I spoke to Dr Wargnier on the telephone. He made an excellent impression on me.'

‘Wargnier is very good,' Spitzner conceded.

She knew, however, that Wargnier would not be there to welcome her, that it would be his successor as head of the Institute, Dr Xavier, a Quebecois from the Pinel Institute in Montreal. Wargnier had retired six months earlier. He was the one who had gone over her application and given it his approval, before leaving his post; he had also warned her in the course of their numerous telephone conversations how difficult her task would be.

‘It's not an easy place for a young woman, Dr Berg. And I'm not just referring to the Institute; I mean the area around it. That valley … Saint-Martin … You're in the Pyrenees, the Comminges region. The winters are long, and there's not much to do. Unless you like winter sports, of course.'

‘I am Swiss, don't forget,' she replied, a touch of humour in her voice.

‘In that case, I have one piece of advice: don't let yourself get too absorbed in your work, keep some time for yourself – and spend your free hours outside. It's a place that can become …
disturbing
 … after a while.'

‘I'll bear that in mind.'

‘And another thing: I won't be here to help you get settled. My successor, Dr Xavier from Montreal, will have that honour. He's a practitioner with a very good reputation, very enthusiastic. He's due to arrive here next week. As you know, they're ahead of us over there with regard to the treatment of aggressive patients. I think it will be very interesting for you to compare your points of view.'

‘I agree.'

‘In any case, we've needed an assistant to the director of the establishment for quite a while now. I didn't delegate enough.'

Diane was once again driving under a canopy of trees. The road continued to climb until it reached a narrow wooded valley that seemed to be enveloped in a stifling, noxious intimacy. She cracked her window open and a penetrating fragrance of leaves, moss, needles and wet snow tickled her nostrils. The sound of a nearby torrent almost drowned the purr of the engine.

‘A lonely place,' she said out loud, to give herself courage.

She drove cautiously through the gloom of the winter morning. Her headlights grazed the trunks of fir and beech trees. An electricity cable followed the road; branches leaned against it as if they no longer had the strength to support themselves. From time to time the forest opened out to reveal a barn with a moss-covered slate roof – closed, abandoned.

She glimpsed some buildings further along, past a bend in the road. They reappeared as she came out of the bend – several houses of concrete and wood with large picture windows, backed up against a forest. To reach them, a drive led down from the road, over a metal bridge above the water then across a snowy meadow. Obviously deserted, run down. She did not know why, but those empty buildings, lost deep in this valley, caused her to shiver.

Then a rusting sign at the entrance to the drive: ‘LES ISARDS HOLIDAY CAMP.'

Still no hint of the Institute. Not even a signpost. It looked as if the Wargnier was not exactly looking for publicity. Diane began to wonder if she had taken the wrong road. The National Geographical Institute map, scale 1/25,000, lay open on the passenger seat next to her. One kilometre and a dozen bends further along she spotted a lay-by bordered by a stone parapet. She slowed down and turned the wheel. The Lancia bounced over the potholes, churning up splatters of mud. She grabbed the map and got out of the car. The damp air enveloped her like a clammy sheet.

Heedless of the falling snow, she unfolded the map. The buildings of the holiday camp were designated by three little rectangles. She gauged the approximate distance she had come, following the winding thread of the
départementale
road. Two more rectangles appeared slightly further along; they met in the shape of a T, and although there were no indications as to the nature of the buildings, it could hardly be anything else, for the road came to an end at that point, and there were no other symbols on the map.

She was almost there …

She turned round, walked as far as the parapet – and saw them.

Further upstream, on the opposite shore, higher up on the slope: two long stone buildings. In spite of the distance she could tell how huge they were. A giant's architecture. The same Cyclopean style that was everywhere in the mountains, be it power plants or dams or hotels from an earlier century. That's what it was: the lair of a Cyclops.
Except that there is not just one Polyphemus deep inside that cave – there are several.

Diane wasn't the type to be easily daunted; she had often travelled to places where tourists were warned not to go; since adolescence she had taken up sports that entailed a certain amount of risk. As a child and then an adult she had always had a taste for adventure. But something about the view there before her made her stomach lurch. It wasn't a question of physical risk. No, it was something else. A leap into the unknown …

She took out her mobile and dialled. She didn't know whether there would be a mast in the area to relay her call, but after three rings a familiar voice replied.

‘Spitzner here.'

Her sense of relief was instantaneous. His warm, firm, calm voice had always been able to soothe her and banish her doubts. It was Pierre Spitzner – her mentor in the department – who had first got her interested in forensic psychology. An intensive SOCRATES course on children's rights had brought her closer to this discreet, charming man, devoted husband and father of seven children. The famous psychologist had taken her under his wing in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences; he had enabled the chrysalis to become a butterfly – even if such an image would undoubtedly have seemed far too conventional to Spitzner's demanding mind.

‘It's Diane. Am I disturbing you?'

‘Of course not. How is it going?'

‘I'm not there yet … I'm on the road … I can see the Institute from here.'

‘Is something wrong?'

Good old Pierre. Even over the telephone he could tell from the slightest shift in her voice.

‘No, everything's fine. It's just that … their aim was to isolate these guys from the outside world. They've stuck them in the most sinister, remote place they could find. This valley gives me goosebumps…'

She was immediately sorry she'd said that. She was behaving like an adolescent left to her own resources for the first time – or a frustrated student in love with her supervisor and doing everything she could to attract his attention. She told herself he must be wondering how she'd manage to cope if the mere sight of the buildings was causing her to panic.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘You've already seen your fair share of paranoids and schizophrenics and sex offenders, right? Tell yourself that it won't be any different there.'

‘They weren't all murderers. In fact, only one of them was.'

His image sprang to mind: a thin face, irises the colour of honey staring at her with a predator's greed. Kurtz was a genuine sociopath. The only one she had ever met. Cold, manipulative, unstable. Not a trace of remorse. He had raped and killed three mothers; the youngest was forty-six and the eldest seventy-five. That was his thing, mature women. Not to mention the ropes, ties, gags, slipknots … Every time she struggled
not
to think about him, he would settle into her consciousness, with his ambiguous smile and wildcat gaze. This reminded her of the sign Spitzner had nailed to the door of his office: ‘Don't think of an elephant.'

‘It's a bit late in the game to be doubting yourself, don't you think, Diane?'

His words made her blush.