The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

  What exactly was he looking for? His gaze lingered on one of the photographs. A dozen or so young people, including Alice, standing next to a rusty sign. Les Isards Holiday Camp … Alice was one of those who had stayed at the camp. He also noticed that on the photographs where she appeared, Alice was always in the centre. The prettiest girl, the most luminous – the centre of attention.

  The mirror.

  It was cracked.

  Someone had thrown something at it, and the projectile had left a crazed impact with a long crack. Was it Alice? Or her father, in a moment of despair?

  There were yellowed postcards stuck between the frame and the mirror, sent from destinations like the Île de Ré, Venice, Greece or Barcelona. Over time, some had fallen onto the dresser or the carpet. One of them drew his attention. ‘Rotten weather, I miss you.’ Signed Emma. A Palestinian scarf on the dresser, along with trinkets, round cotton make-up pads and a blue shoebox. Servaz opened it. Letters … A tremor went through him as he remembered the letters from the suicide victims that were in Saint-Cyr’s box. He examined them one by one. Naive or funny letters written in purple or violet ink. Always the same signatures. He could not find the slightest reference to what was about to happen. He would have to compare the handwriting with that of the letters in the box; then he told himself it must have been done already. Now for the dresser drawers. He lifted up piles of T-shirts, underwear, sheets and blankets. Then he knelt on the carpet and looked under the bed. Huge dustballs, enough to stuff an entire quilt, and a guitar case.

  He pulled the case out into the light and opened it. There were scratches on the finish of the instrument, and the B string was broken. Servaz glanced inside it: nothing. A quilt made of coloured lozenges covered the bed. He lingered over the CDs scattered on top: Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, U2. The room was like a museum devoted to the 1990s. No Internet, no computer, no mobile phone. The world is changing too quickly now for a single lifespan, he thought. He lifted the pillows, sheets and bedspread, and ran his hand under the mattress. No perfume, no particular scent emanated from the bed, other than the dust that covered it and drifted to the ceiling.

  There was a little Voltaire chair next to the bed. Someone (Alice?) had painted it orange as well. An old military jacket lay over the back. He patted under the seat but did not manage to disturb anything other than a new cloud of dust; then he sat down and looked around him, trying to let his thoughts wander.

  What did he see?

  A young girl’s bedroom; a young girl who was typical for her time but also mature for her age.

  Among the books, Servaz had noticed The Possessed and Crime and Punishment, as well as Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Who had recommended these books to her? Surely not her little classmates with their chubby faces. Then he remembered that her father was a literature professor. Once again he looked around.

  The dominant feature in this room, he thought, is the texts, the words. The words in the books, on the postcards, in the letters … All written by other people. Where were Alice’s words? Would a girl who expressed herself through her guitar and her drawings, who devoured books really never have felt the need to express herself in words as well? Alice’s life had ended on 2 May, and there was no trace anywhere of the final days of her life. It’s impossible, he thought. No diary, nothing: something didn’t fit. How could a curious, intelligent girl that age, who must have had an almost inexhaustible reserve of profound questions, particularly if she were desperate enough to put an end to her life, not have kept some sort of journal? Surely she would have recorded her thoughts somewhere? These days teenagers had blogs, noticeboards and pages on social networks, but in the old days only paper and ink could provide a space for their questioning, their doubts and their secrets.

  He stood up and went through all Alice’s notebooks and drawers one by one. Nothing but schoolwork. He glanced at her essays. Nothing but the highest marks, 15–19 out of 20. The teachers’ comments were as full of praise as the marks themselves. But there were no personal words.

  Had Alice’s father gone through and cleaned up?

  He had welcomed Servaz quite spontaneously, and told him that he was convinced the children had put an end to it all for a specific reason. Why would he hide anything that might have helped them to discover the truth? Servaz had found no mention of any diaries in the official papers, either. There was nothing to show that Alice had even kept one. But in spite of that, the impression was stronger than ever: something, in this room, was missing.

  A hiding place … All young girls had one, didn’t they? Where was Alice’s?

  Servaz got up and opened the wardrobe. On the hangers were coats, dresses, jackets, jeans and a white judo outfit with a brown belt. He spread them apart, one by one, and went through all the pockets. A row of shoes and boots along the bottom: Servaz checked inside with the beam of his little pocket torch. Above the hangers was a shelf with several suitcases and a backpack. He set them down on the carpet, freeing up a veritable tornado of dust, then searched them methodically.

  Nothing. He paused to think.

  The room must have been gone over by crack investigators – perhaps by Alice’s parents themselves. Could it be they hadn’t found a hiding place, if there was one? Had they even looked for one? Everyone had agreed, Alice was a brilliant girl. Had she devised the ultimate undetectable hiding place? Or was he headed down the wrong path?

  What did he really know about the thoughts and dreams of a sixteen-year-old girl? His own daughter had turned seventeen a few months earlier, and he would have been at a loss to describe her room – for the simple reason that he had never set foot in it. The very thought made him feel queasy. At the edge of his brain something was tickling him, an itch. There was something he had missed while exploring the room. Or there was something that should have been here and wasn’t. Think! It was there, so close, he could feel it. His instinct told him that something was missing. What? What? He looked all around the room again. He went over every single possibility. He had examined everything, including the skirting boards and the slats of the parquet floor underneath the white carpet. There was nothing. Yet his unconscious had sensed something, of that he was sure – even if he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  He sneezed from all the dust floating in the air, and pulled out a tissue.

  Then Servaz remembered his mobile.

  There had been no calls! An hour had gone by and not a single call. He felt his stomach form a knot. Damn it, what the fuck was the strange caller doing? Why hadn’t he rung?

  Servaz took his mobile out of his pocket and looked at it. He stifled a sense of panic: the stupid thing was switched off. He tried to turn it on: no battery! Shit!

  He rushed out of the room and hurried noisily down the stairs. Gaspard Ferrand peered out of the kitchen as Servaz bolted past him in the corridor.

  ‘I’ll be back!’ he shouted, opening the front door without stopping.

  Outside a blizzard was raging. The wind had picked up. The pavement was white and the snowflakes were whirling.

  He hurried to unlock the Jeep, and rummaged in the glove compartment for the charger. Then he ran back to the house.

  ‘It’s nothing!’ he said to a stunned Ferrand.

  He hunted for a socket, found one in the corridor and plugged in the charger.

  He waited five seconds and switched on the phone. Four messages!

  He was about to read the first one when the telephone rang.

  ‘Servaz!’ he shouted.

  ‘Where have you been, for fuck’s sake!’

  A voice in a total panic, almost as panicked as his own. His ears were buzzing with the blood pounding in his temples. The man wasn’t disguising his voice, this time – but he didn’t recognise it.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My name is Serge Perrault. I’m a friend of—’

  Perrault!

  ‘I know who you are!’ he interrupted.

  There was a brief silence.

  �
�I have to speak to you right away!’ shouted Perrault.

  His voice was hysterical.

  ‘Where are you?’ shouted Servaz. ‘Where?’

  ‘Meet me at the top of the cable cars in fifteen minutes. Hurry!’

  Servaz felt another surge of panic.

  ‘Which cable cars?’

  ‘The ones up in Saint-Martin 2000, near the ski lifts! I’ll be there. Get a move on, bloody hell! Don’t you understand, it’s my turn! Come alone!’

  19

  The sky was dark and the streets were white when Servaz turned the ignition. Outside the snow was coming down heavily. He started the windscreen wipers. Then he rang Ziegler.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked as soon as she picked up.

  ‘With the parents,’ she said, lowering her voice, and he understood she was not alone.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘At the edge of town, why?’

  In a few words, he summed up Perrault’s call for help.

  ‘You’re closer than I am,’ he concluded. ‘Get there as quickly as you can! There’s not a minute to lose. He’s waiting for us up there.’

  ‘Why not alert the gendarmerie?’

  ‘There’s no time. Hurry!’

  Servaz hung up. He pulled down the sun visor stamped ‘Police,’ and stuck the magnetic revolving light on the roof. He turned on the siren. How long would it take him to get up there? Gaspard Ferrand did not live in Saint-Martin but in a village five kilometres away. The streets were covered in snow. Servaz figured a good quarter of an hour to get to the car park that was right in the centre of town by the cable car station. How long would it take him to get up there? Fifteen, twenty minutes?

  He took off like a shot, siren howling, before the eyes of an astonished Ferrand standing in his doorway. There was a traffic light at the end of the street. It was red. He had started to go through it when he saw an enormous lorry coming from the right. He slammed on the brakes and immediately felt the car skid out of control. The Jeep swerved sideways right in the middle of the crossroads; the steel juggernaut narrowly missed him, horns blaring. The roar seemed to burst his eardrums just as the fear struck him like a fist in his gut. It took his breath away. His knuckles went white on the wheel. He put the car into first and set off again. No time to think! Maybe it was better that way. It was not just thirty-eight tons of steel that had narrowly missed him; it was death in a tin can.

  At the following crossroads he took a right and left the village. The white fields stretched away in the distance; the sky was just as threatening, but it had stopped snowing. He accelerated.

  He entered Saint-Martin from the east. At the first roundabout he took the wrong exit. He turned back, swearing and hitting the steering wheel; other drivers stared at him incredulously. Fortunately there was not much traffic. Two more roundabouts. He went by a church and found himself on the avenue d’Étigny, the commercial and cultural heart of the town with hotels, chic boutiques, plane trees, a cinema and cafés. There were cars parked all along the avenue. On the sides and down the middle of the road the snow had been transformed into a dark slush by dozens of passing vehicles. Just before the cinema he turned right. An arrow indicated, ‘CABLE CARS.’

  At the end of the street was a large car park, a vast esplanade in the looming shadow of the mountain. Opposite the car park its slopes rose to the sky, and a long white scar of the hanging gondolas sliced its way through the fir trees. He drove as fast as he dared past the rows of cars until he reached the lower station, where he braked abruptly, skidding again. A moment later he was outside, running up the steps to the building set on two huge concrete pillars. He hurried to the ticket window; a couple were buying tickets. Servaz flashed his card.

  ‘Police! How long does it take to get up there?’

  The man behind the window gave him a disparaging look.

  ‘Nine minutes.’

  ‘Any way you can speed it up a bit?’

  The man stared at him as if his request were completely insane.

  ‘To do what?’ he asked.

  Servaz tried to stay calm.

  ‘I don’t have time to argue. Well?’

  ‘The maximum speed is five metres a second,’ said the man with a scowl. ‘Eighteen kilometres an hour.’

  ‘Then move it, top speed!’ said Servaz, jumping into one of the cabins, an egg-shaped shell with large Plexiglas windows and four tiny seats.

  A pivoting arm closed the door behind him. Servaz swallowed his saliva. The car juddered on leaving the guiding rail, then dangled in space. Servaz decided it would be preferable to sit rather than stand in this unsteady shell; it rose quickly towards the first support tower, leaving the white roofs of Saint-Martin far below. He glanced briefly behind him and, as in the helicopter, he immediately regretted it. The cable was so steep that it struck him as one of those bold enterprises so common to men which are eloquent proof of their irresponsibility; and the cable was far too thin to reassure him. The roofs and streets were shrinking at an alarming rate. The gondolas ahead of him were separated from each other by thirty metres or so and swung to and fro in the wind.

  He saw, down below, that the couple had decided not to go up and were headed back to their car. He was alone. No one was coming up; no one was going down. The gondolas were empty. Everything was silent, except for the wind moaning louder than ever.

  Halfway up the slope they were suddenly surrounded by fog, and before he even knew what was happening, Servaz found himself in a surreal landscape of vague contours, his only company the fir trees standing in the mist like a ghostly army, and the blizzard that sent the snowflakes swirling round the gondola.

  He had forgotten his weapon! In his haste, he had left it in the car. What would happen if he found himself face to face with the killer up there? Not to mention the fact that if someone was waiting for him at the top of the gondolas and was armed, Servaz would be a sitting duck. There was nowhere to hide. This plastic shell wasn’t about to stop any bullets.

  He found himself praying that Ziegler had got there before him. She should be ahead of him. She’s not the sort who forgets her weapon. How would Perrault react on seeing her? He had told Servaz to come alone.

  He should have asked the know-it-all at the ticket window if he had seen her. Too late now. He was headed into the unknown at an exasperating rate of five metres a second. He took out his mobile and dialled Perrault’s number; he got his voicemail.

  Shit! Why had he switched off his phone?

  He could make out two dark figures in a gondola on its way down, roughly two hundred metres uphill. It was the first human presence he had seen since leaving the station below. He dialled Ziegler’s number.

  ‘Ziegler.’

  ‘Are you up there?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m on my way.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry, Martin, my motorcycle skidded on the snow and I went flying. Nothing but scratches, but I had to borrow another car. Where are you?’

  Shit!

  ‘Roughly halfway up.’

  The cabin with the two occupants seemed to be going faster and faster, the closer it came.

  ‘You know there’s a blizzard up there?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know. Perrault’s not answering.’

  ‘Are you armed?’

  Even from this distance, he could see that one of the people in the opposite car was staring at him, just as he was staring at them.

  ‘I forgot my weapon in the car.’

  An oppressive silence followed.

  ‘Be care—’

  Her words were cut off. He looked at his mobile. Nothing! He dialled the number again. No network. That’s all he needed! He tried twice more, to no avail. Servaz could not believe his eyes. When he looked up again, the occupied gondola was even closer. One of the men was wearing a black balaclava. All he could see were his eyes and mouth. The other man was bareheaded, wearing glasses. Both of them were staring at Servaz through the glass and fog. The first one was glaring.

>   And the other one was terrified.

  In a split second Servaz understood, and the full horror of the situation became clear.

  Perrault – the tall thin fellow from the photograph, with the thick glasses.

  Servaz’s heart leapt in his chest. As if in a dream, the gondola was coming towards him, terrifyingly quickly now. Less than twenty metres away. In two seconds it would pass him. Another detail caught his attention: on the far side the windowpane was missing.

  Perrault was staring at Servaz, his mouth gaping, his eyes wide with fear. He was screaming. Servaz could hear his screams even through the windows, in spite of the wind and the noise of the pulleys and cables. He had never seen anyone look so terrified. It was if the man was going to shatter into pieces, to split apart from one second to the next.

  Servaz swallowed. The moment the gondola went by his own and moved away behind him, all the details became clear: Perrault had a rope round his neck, and the rope went through the open window and into a sort of hook on the outside, just above. Perhaps the hook was used to rappel any injured passengers down to the ground when the gondola was at a standstill, thought Servaz in a flash. The man in the balaclava was holding the other end of the rope. Servaz had tried to see his eyes, but he’d thrown himself behind his victim just as the two gondolas passed each other.