‘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.
Silence again.
Like her, the person was waiting.
The clicking of a switch, then a ray of light beneath her door. Footsteps in the corridor. So muffled they were almost drowned by the pounding of her heart. For a moment a shadow blocked the light filtering into her room. She hesitated. Then she suddenly made up her mind and opened it. Too late. The shadow had disappeared.
Silence fell once again; the light went out.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, freezing despite her winter pyjamas and hooded dressing gown. Once again she wondered who could be walking around the Institute every night. Above all, for what purpose? It was clearly something that must remain discreet, because they took a great many precautions to avoid being heard.
The first night, Diane had thought it must be one of the auxiliaries or a nurse with a sudden hunger who didn’t want anyone to know that he or she was on a midnight raid of the refrigerator. But her insomnia had kept her awake, and the light in the corridor had passed by again a full two hours later. The following night, exhausted, she had fallen asleep. But last night, the same thing again: her insomnia was back, and with it the infinitesimal creaking of the door, the light in the corridor and the shadow sliding furtively towards the stairway.
Vanquished by fatigue, she nevertheless fell asleep before their return. She slipped under her duvet and looked in the pale rectangle of the window at the reflection of her icy little room with its bathroom and toilet. She had to get some sleep. The next day was Sunday; she’d be off duty. She’d use the time to go over her notes; then she’d go down into Saint-Martin. But Monday was an important day: Dr Xavier had informed her that on Monday he would take her to visit Unit A …
She had to get some sleep.
Four days … She had been at the Institute for four days and it seemed to her that in this short period of time her senses had been sharpened. Was it possible to change in so little time? If so, what would it be like a year from now, when she left to go back home? She scolded herself. She had to stop thinking about that. She had months ahead of her.
She still could not understand why they had locked criminal madmen away somewhere like this, undoubtedly the most sinister and uncommon place she had ever been.
But this will be your home for a year, girl.
With that thought, all desire for sleep evaporated.
She sat at the head of her bed and switched on her bedside lamp. Then she plugged in her computer, opened it and waited for it to boot up so that she could check her inbox. Fortunately, the Institute had wireless Internet connection.
You have no new messages.
She had mixed feelings. Had she really expected him to write? After what had happened? She was the one who had taken the decision to end it, even though it had devastated her. He had accepted with his usual stoicism and she had felt wounded. The depths of her distress had surprised even her.
She hesitated for a moment before tapping away on the keyboard.
She knew he would not understand her silence. She had promised to give him details and write to him soon. Like any expert in forensic psychiatry, Pierre Spitzner was dying to find out everything he could about the Wargnier Institute. When he had heard that Diane’s application had been accepted, not only had he seen this as a chance for her, but also as an opportunity for him to learn more about the place that was the source of so many rumours.
She typed the first few words:
Dear Pierre,
I’m doing fine. This place—
Her hand stopped.
An image had suddenly appeared … A clear, sharp flash, like ice …
Spitzner’s place overlooking the lake, the room in the half-light, the silence of the empty house. Pierre and herself in the big bed. They had only come to pick up a file he had forgotten. His wife was at the airport, waiting for her flight to Paris, where she would be giving a talk entitled Characters and Points of View. (Spitzner’s wife was the author of a dozen complicated, bloody crime thrillers with a heavy sexual component that had met with a certain success.) Pierre had taken the opportunity to show her his home. When they arrived outside the couple’s bedroom, he had opened the door and taken Diane by the hand. At first she had refused to make love there, but he had insisted in that childlike manner of his that always broke down her resistance. He had also insisted that Diane put on his wife’s underwear. Underwear from the most expensive boutiques in Geneva … Diane had hesitated. But the transgressive atmosphere, the spice of the taboo were too tempting for her to obey her scruples for long. She had noticed that she wore the same size as her lover’s wife. She lay under him, her eyes closed, their bodies perfectly bonded and in tune, Pierre’s scarlet face above her, when a voice – detached, sharp, biting – came from the threshold of the room:
‘Get your whore out of here.’
She closed the computer; any desire to write had fled. She turned her head to switch off the light. And shuddered. The shadow was beneath her door … motionless … She held her breath, unable to move even an inch. Then curiosity and irritation got the better of her and she leapt towards the door.
But the shadow had disappeared once again.
PART 2
Welcome to Hell
10
On Sunday, 14 December, at a quarter to eight in the morning, Damien Ryck, known as Rico, twenty-eight years old, left his house for a solitary hike on the mountain. The sky was grey, and he already knew the sun wouldn’t come out that day. As soon as he woke up, he went out on the big terrace and saw a thick fog had enveloped the roofs and streets of Saint-Martin; above the town, the clouds wrapped sooty scrolls round the peaks.
Given the weather forecast, he decided on a simple stroll to clear his mind, and took a path he knew by heart. The night before, or, to be more precise, a few hours earlier, he had unsteadily made his way home after a party where he had smoked several joints, and he had gone to sleep with all his clothes on. Once he was awake, after a shower, a mug of black coffee and another joint, he decided that the pure upland air would do him the world of good. It was Rico’s intention to finish inking in a plate sometime later that morning, a delicate task which required a steady hand.
Rico was an author of graphic novels.
A marvellous profession which allowed him to work at home and make a living doing what he loved. His very dark works had found an appreciative audience among connoisseurs, and his renown was growing in the small world of independent graphic novels. As he was a great enthusiast of off-piste skiing, mountain climbing, paragliding, mountain biking and world travel in general, he had discovered that Saint-Martin was an ideal place to come home to. His profession, combined with modern technology, meant that he didn’t need to live in Paris, where the offices of his publisher, Éditions d’Enfer, were located and which he visited half a dozen times a year. In the beginning, the inhabitants of Saint-Martin had some difficulty getting used to his caricature alter-globalisation look, with his black and yellow dreadlocks, bandana, orange poncho, numerous piercings and pink beard. In the summertime they could also admire the dozen or more tattoos on his quasi-anorexic body: his shoulders, arms, back,
neck, calves and thighs were covered with veritable works of art. Yet it was worth the effort to get to know Rico: not only was he a talented artist, he was also a charming man with a deadpan sense of humour, extremely considerate towards children and old people and all his neighbours.
That morning Rico put on his special lightweight walking boots, and a hat with ear flaps of the kind worn by peasants in the High Andean plateaus. Then he set off at an easy trot towards the hiking trail, which started just beyond the supermarket 200 metres below his house.
The fog had not lifted. He made a loop round the rows of abandoned shopping trolleys in the deserted supermarket car park, and lengthened his stride once he reached the path. Behind him, the church bells rang eight o’clock. Their tolling seemed to reach him through several layers of cotton.
He had to be careful not to twist an ankle on the uneven ground scattered with roots and big stones. He ran two kilometres over deceptively flat terrain, to the roar of a torrent, which he crossed and recrossed over solid little bridges made of fir bark boards. Then the slope grew steeper and he could feel his hamstrings working. The mist had lifted slightly. He saw the metal bridge that crossed the water a short way up, just before it fell in a roaring tumult. This was the toughest part of the trail. Once he was up there, the ground would be nearly flat again. He raised his head, pacing himself, and noticed that there was something hanging below the bridge. Some large bag or other object, fixed to the metal structure.
He lowered his head as he covered the last bends in the trail and only lifted it again when he reached the bridge. His heart was beating 150. But when he looked up, it raced: that was no bag hanging from the bridge! Rico froze. The violent shock, together with the climb, had taken his breath away. With his mouth wide open, he stared at the body; he walked the last few metres, his hands on his hips.
The Frozen Dead Page 15