The Frozen Dead Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Man Who Loved Horses

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2: Welcome to Hell

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 3: White

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  To the memory of my father

  To my wife, my daughter and my son

  To Jean-Pierre Schamber and Dominique Matos Ventura, who changed everything

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The French justice system is somewhat different from that elsewhere. Under French law, when it is believed that a crime has been committed, an officer of the crime unit will inform the district public prosecutor, who in turn appoints an examining magistrate to the case.

  Investigations are conducted under the supervision of these magistrates, who answer to the Ministry of Justice. Crimes may be investigated by police commissioners from the crime unit, along with commissioned officers of the gendarmerie.

  FROM:

  DIANE BERG

  GENEVA

  TO:

  DR WARGNIER

  WARGNIER PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE

  SAINT-MARTIN-DE-COMMINGES

  Diane Berg – Curriculum vitae

  Psychologist, Swiss Federation of Psychologists (FSP)

  Specialist in Forensic Psychology (SSPL)

  Date of Birth: 16 July 1976

  Nationality: Swiss

  DIPLOMAS:

  2002: Master of advanced studies in clinical psychology (DES), University of Geneva. Dissertation: ‘Instinctual Economy, Necrophilia and Dismembering among Compulsive Killers’.

  1999: Degree in psychology, University of Geneva. Dissertation: ‘Aspects of Childhood Fear among Children Eight to Twelve Years of Age’.

  1995: Secondary School Diploma in classical and Latin studies

  1994: Cambridge First Certificate in English as a foreign language

  PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

  2003 – present: Private Practice, psychotherapy and forensic psychology, Geneva

  2001 – present: Assistant to Professor Pierre Spitzner at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE), University of Geneva

  1999–2001: Intern in psychology, Institute of Forensic Psychology, University of Geneva

  Intern in psychology, Medical Services of Champ-Dollon Prison

  PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS:

  International Academy of Law and Mental Health (IALMH)

  Geneva Association of Psychologists-Psychotherapists (AGPP)

  Swiss Federation of Psychologists (FSP)

  Swiss Society of Forensic Psychology (SSPL)

  INTERESTS:

  Classical music (ten years of violin), jazz, reading

  Sports: swimming, running, diving, potholing, parachute jumping

  Prologue

  Dgdgdgdgdgd – taktaktak – ddgdgdgdgdg – taktaktak

  Sounds: the regular clicking of the cable and, intermittently, of wheels over towers as the cable car passed over, causing the cabin to judder. Then the ever-present wailing of the wind, a fluty sound, like the cries of children in distress. Finally the voices of the passengers in the cabin as they shouted to make themselves heard above the din. There were five of them, including Huysmans.

  Dgdgdgdgdgd – taktaktak – ddgdgdgdgdg – taktaktak

  ‘Shit! I don’t like going up there in this weather,’ one of them said.

  Huysmans watched in silence for the lower lake to appear, a thousand metres below, through the gusts of snow swirling round the cabin. The cables seemed peculiarly slack, tracing a double curve that drooped lazily into the grey background.

  The clouds parted. The lake appeared. Briefly. For a moment it looked like a puddle beneath the sky, a simple splash of water between the peaks and the strips of tattered cloud against the summits.

  ‘What the fuck does the weather have to do with it?’ said someone else. ‘We’re going to spend a week stuck underneath that fucking mountain no matter what.’

  The hydroelectric power station at Arruns: perched two thousand metres high with a series of halls and tunnels burrowed seventy metres underground. The longest tunnel stretched for eleven kilometres, feeding the water from the upper lake to the pressure pipelines: pipes a metre and a half in diameter that ran down the mountain to force the water from the upper lake to the thirsty turbines of the production facilities down in the valley. There was only one way into the station’s interior, deep in the mountain: through an access shaft from the top of the station, then down a hoist and along a tunnel on board two-seated tractors while the gates were closed. Eight kilometres of tunnels for a voyage lasting a good hour, into the heart of darkness.

  The other way to get to the station’s entrance was by helicopter – but only in emergencies. A pad had been built near the upper lake, accessible in good weather.

  ‘Joachim is right,’ said the oldest among them. ‘With weather like this, the chopper wouldn’t even be able to land.’

  They all knew what this meant. Once the gates were opened, thousands of cubic metres of water from the upper lake would come roaring down into the tunnel they had just used. In the event of an accident, it would take two hours to drain the tunnel again, another hour through the tunnel by tractor to get back to the access shaft, fifteen minutes to get back up to the open air, ten to go down by cable car to the production facility and another half-hour by road to reach Saint-Martin-de-Comminges – provided the road wasn’t blocked.

  If there were an accident, they wouldn’t be able to reach the hospital for four hours or more. And the power station was getting old … It had been in operation since the 1920s. Every winter, before the snows melted, they spent four weeks up there, cut off from the world, for the maintenance and repair of machines from another era. A difficult, dangerous job.

  Huysmans watched as an eagle glided on the belly of the wind, roughly a hundred metres from the cabin.

  Silence.

  He turned to gaze at the dizzying frozen expanses below.

  Three enormous pressure pipelines dropped vertiginously towards the abyss, moulded to the flank of the slope. The valley had vanished from their field of vision some time ago now. The last support tower was visible three hundred metres further down, standing there alone in the midst of the fog, where the flank of the mountain created an escarpment. Now the cable car was climbing straight to the access shaft. If the cable were to break, the cabin would fall several dozen metres before smashing like a nutshell against the rock face. In the blizzard it was swinging like a basket on a housewife’s arm.

  ‘Hey, chef! What’s
for dinner this time?’

  ‘Nothing organic, that’s for sure.’

  Only Huysmans did not laugh; he was watching a yellow minibus on the road to the power station’s offices down in the valley. The manager’s. Then the bus too disappeared from view, swallowed by banks of clouds like a stagecoach surrounded by Indians.

  Every time he went up there he felt he was on the verge of discovering some fundamental truth about his existence. But he could not determine what it was.

  Huysmans turned to look towards the peak.

  They were nearing the terminus of the cable car – a metal scaffold clinging to the start of the access shaft. Once the cabin had come to a halt, the men would set off down a series of footbridges and staircases until they came to the concrete blockhouse.

  The wind was howling violently. It must be at least minus ten degrees.

  Huysmans narrowed his gaze.

  There was something unusual about the shape of the scaffold.

  Something that shouldn’t be there …

  Like a shadow between the steel girders and cross-braces, swept by the gusts of wind.

  It’s an eagle, he thought; an eagle’s got caught in the cables and pulleys.

  No, that would be absurd. And yet that’s what it was: a huge bird, its wings spread wide. Maybe a vulture, imprisoned in the super-structure, tangled in the bars and railings.

  ‘Hey, look at that!’

  Joachim’s voice. He’d seen it, too. The others turned to look at the platform.

  ‘Christ almighty! What is it?’

  It’s no bird, that’s for sure, thought Huysmans.

  He felt a vague anxiety welling inside. The thing was hanging above the platform, just below the cables and pulleys, as if suspended in the air. It looked like a giant butterfly, a dark, evil butterfly staining the whiteness of snow and sky.

  ‘Fuck! What is that thing?’

  The cabin was preparing to stop. They were nearly there. The shape grew larger.

  ‘Holy mother of God!’

  It was no butterfly; nor was it a bird.

  The cabin stopped; the doors opened automatically.

  An icy gust thick with snowflakes whipped their faces. But no one got out. They stood there staring at this work of madness and death. They already knew that they would never forget what they had just seen.

  The wind was screaming around the platform. It was no longer children’s cries that Huysmans could hear, but something tormented, awful screams hidden by the howling of the wind. They all took a step further back into the cabin.

  Fear struck them head on like a locomotive at full steam. Huysmans rushed over to the headphones and rammed them over his ears.

  ‘Is that the main station? Huysmans here! Call the gendarmerie, quick! Tell them to get up here right away. There’s a dead body. The sickest thing you’ve ever seen!’

  PART 1

  The Man Who Loved Horses

  1

  The Pyrenees. Diane Berg watched them loom into sight as she drove over the hill. A white barrier, still quite far away, stretching the entire breadth of the horizon, hills breaking like waves against it. A raptor tracing circles in the sky.

  Nine o’clock in the morning, the tenth of December.

  Judging by the road map on the dashboard, she should take the next exit and head south, towards Spain. She had neither GPS nor sat nav on board her elderly Lancia. She saw a signpost above the motorway: ‘Exit 17, Montréjeau/Spain, 1,000 m.’

  Diane had spent the night in Toulouse. A budget hotel, a tiny room with a tiny television and a bath made of moulded plastic. During the night she had started awake to the sound of repeated screaming. Her heart pounding, she sat up at the head of the bed, on full alert, but the hotel remained perfectly silent, and she was beginning to think she had merely dreamt it when suddenly the screaming started again, louder than ever. Her stomach tied itself in knots until she realised it was only cats fighting below her window. She had trouble getting back to sleep after that. Only the day before she had still been in Geneva, celebrating her departure with colleagues and friends. She had gazed at her surroundings, there in her room at the university, and wondered what the view from her next room would be.

  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.