Authors: Bernard Minier
The Frozen Dead
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Contents
Part 1: The Man Who Loved Horses
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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.
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FROM:
DIANE BERG
GENEVA
TO:
DR WARGNIER
WARGNIER PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE
SAINT-MARTIN-DE-COMMINGES
Diane Berg â Curriculum vitae
Psychologist, Swiss Federation of Psychologists (FSP)
Specialist in Forensic Psychology (SSPL)
Date of Birth: 16 July 1976
Nationality: Swiss
D
IPLOMAS
:
2002: Master of advanced studies in clinical psychology (DES), University of Geneva. Dissertation: âInstinctual Economy, Necrophilia and Dismembering among Compulsive Killers'.
1999: Degree in psychology, University of Geneva. Dissertation: âAspects 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
P
ROFESSIONAL
E
XPERIENCE
:
2003 â present: Private Practice, psychotherapy and forensic psychology, Geneva
2001 â present: Assistant to Professor Pierre Spitzner at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE), University of Geneva
1999â2001: Intern in psychology, Institute of Forensic Psychology, University of Geneva
Intern in psychology, Medical Services of Champ-Dollon Prison
P
ROFESSIONAL
A
SSOCIATIONS
:
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)
I
NTERESTS
:
Classical music (ten years of violin), jazz, reading
Sports: swimming, running, diving, potholing, parachute jumping
Prologue
Dgdgdgdgdgd â taktaktak â ddgdgdgdgdg â 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 â taktaktak â ddgdgdgdgdg â taktaktak
âShit! 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.
âWhat the fuck does the weather have to do with it?' said someone else. âWe'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 â but only in emergencies. A pad had been built near the upper lake, accessible in good weather.
âJoachim is right,' said the oldest among them. âWith 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 â 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.
âHey, chef! What's for dinner this time?'
âNothing 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 â 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 â¦
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.
âHey, look at that!'
Joachim's voice. He'd seen it, too. The others turned to look at the platform.
âChrist 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.
âFuck! What is that thing?'
The cabin was preparing to stop. They were nearly there. The shape grew larger.
âHoly 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.
âIs 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: âExit 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.