The Frozen Dead

by Bernard Minier

  When he came to, he was in the storage space under the stairs, nauseous and dazed, and the sound of his mother’s pleading voice behind the door filled him with fear. When he heard the two men’s growling voices threaten, reassure and make fun of her in turn, he could no longer control himself and he began to tremble. He wondered where his father had gone. He had known instinctively who these men were. They weren’t quite human; they were the bad guys from the cinema; they were evil beings, the super-villains in his comic books: the Tinkerer and the Green Goblin … He guessed his father must be tied up somewhere, powerless, the way comic-book heroes often were, because otherwise he would already have come to save them. Many years later, he told himself that neither Seneca nor Marcus Aurelius had been of much use to his father when it came time to reason with the two visitors. But can you really reason with two famished wolves? It wasn’t meat the two wolves were after; it was another flesh. If little Martin had had a watch, he would have seen that when he regained consciousness, it was twenty minutes past midnight, and five more hours would go by before the horror came to an end, five hours in which he heard his mother scream, sob, hiccup, swear and plead, almost without stopping. And as his mother’s cries gradually changed into unintelligible murmurs, as the snot ran from his nose and urine flowed down his thighs, as the first sounds of dawn came through the door of the storage space – a cock crowing early, a dog barking in the distance, a car going by not a hundred metres away – and a vague grey light began to filter along the ground, silence fell over the house – a total, definitive and strangely reassuring silence.

  Servaz had been in the police force for three years when he managed to get his hands on the autopsy report, fifteen years after it happened. With hindsight he could see this was a grave error. He had thought that the years would give him the necessary strength. He was wrong. It was with unspeakable horror that he had discovered in detail what his mother had been through that night. Once he had closed the report, he ran to the toilets and threw up.

  The facts, nothing but the facts.

  Which were as follows: his father had survived, but he had spent two months in hospital, while young Martin had been sent to stay with his aunt. Once he was out of hospital, his father had gone back to his teaching job. But it quickly became apparent that he could no longer fulfil his role: on numerous occasions he showed up drunk and dishevelled in front of his students, whom he then went on to insult fiercely. Finally the administration had placed him on indefinite leave and he had only sunk deeper. Little Martin was sent to stay with his aunt again. The facts, nothing but the facts. Two weeks after he met the woman who would become his wife, Servaz went to see his father, as summer was drawing near. When he got out of the car, he glanced briefly at the house. To one side the old barn was falling to ruin; the main part of the house seemed uninhabited; at least half of the shutters were closed. Servaz knocked on the front door. No answer. He went in. ‘Dad?’ Nothing but silence. The old man must be dead drunk again somewhere. Servaz threw his jacket and briefcase on a chair and went to drink a glass of water; once his thirst was quenched, he climbed the stairs. His father must be in his study. Young Martin was right: he was in his study. A faint music came through the closed door and he recognised it at once: Gustav Mahler, his father’s favourite composer.

  But he was wrong too: the old man wasn’t drunk. Nor was he reading one of his beloved Latin authors. He was slumped motionless in his chair, his eyes wide open and glassy, a white foam on his lips. Poison. Like Seneca, like Socrates. Two months later, Servaz passed his exams to become a police officer.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock that night, Diane switched off the light in her office. She took some work with her to finish before bed, and went back up to her room on the fourth floor. It was still just as cold up there and she put her dressing gown on before sitting down to read. As she went through her notes she visualised the first patient she had seen that day: a man of sixty-four who looked harmless enough, with a shrill, rasping voice as if his vocal cords had been filed. A former philosophy teacher. He had greeted her very politely when she came in. The interview had been held in a small lounge with tables and chairs that were riveted to the floor. There was a widescreen television sealed in a Plexiglas bubble, and all the corners and sharp edges of the furniture were padded with plastic. There was no one else in the lounge, but a nursing auxiliary was on guard at the entrance.

  ‘How do you feel today, Victor?’ Diane asked.

  ‘Like a fucking bag of shit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like a huge turd, excrement, dog poo, a lump of dung, a—’

  ‘Victor, why are you being so vulgar?’

  ‘I feel like the stuff that comes out of your arse, Doctor, when you go to the—’

  ‘Don’t you want to answer me?’

  ‘I feel like…’

  She reminded herself never again to ask him how he felt. Victor had killed his wife, his brother-in-law and his sister-in-law with an axe. According to the file, his wife and in-laws had treated him as if he were worthless, constantly making fun of him. In his ‘normal’ life, Victor had been a very well-educated and cultured individual. During his previous hospitalisation, he had assaulted a nurse who made the mistake of laughing in front of him. Fortunately he weighed only fifty kilos.

  No matter how she tried, Diane couldn’t manage to focus solely on the case. Something else was lurking at the edge of her awareness. She was eager to have done with this work in order to get back to the events at the Institute. She didn’t know what she was going to find, but she was determined to take her investigation further. And now she knew where to begin. The idea had occurred to her after she had surprised Xavier coming out of her office.

  When she opened the next folder, she immediately pictured the patient. A man in his forties with a feverish gaze, dirty hair and hollow cheeks beneath a scruffy beard. A former researcher specialising in marine biology, of Hungarian origin, and who spoke excellent French with a strong accent. György.

  ‘We are connected to the great depths,’ he had said at once. ‘You may not know it yet, Doctor, but we don’t really exist, we exist only as thoughts, we are emanations of the minds of the creatures of the deep, those that live at the bottom of the ocean, over two thousand metres below the surface. It is the realm of eternal darkness: daylight never reaches that far. It is dark there all the time.’

  On hearing the word, she felt an icy wind of fear pass over her.

  ‘And it’s cold, very, very cold. And the pressure there is colossal. It increases by one atmosphere every ten metres. No one can bear it, except those creatures. They look like monsters, you know. Like us. They have enormous eyes, and jaws full of sharp teeth, and luminous organs all down their bodies. They are carrion eaters; they feed on the corpses that drop down from the upper layers of the ocean; they are terrible predators who can swallow down their prey in one gulp. There is nothing but darkness and cruelty down there. Like here. There is the viperfish, Chauliodus sloani, with a head like a skull, teeth as long as knives and transparent as glass, with a serpent’s body that has hackles of luminous points. There are the Linophryne lucifer and the Photostomias guernei, uglier and more terrifying than piranhas. There are the pycnogonids, which look like spiders, and the hatchetfishes, which may look dead, but are alive. These creatures never see the light of day, never go up to the surface. Like us, Doctor. Can’t you see the analogy? It is because we do not truly exist here, unlike you. We are secreted by the mind of those creatures. Every time one of them dies down there at the bottom, one of us dies here too.’

  His eyes had glazed over while he was speaking, as if he had gone to the depths of the ocean darkness. His absurd speech had chilled Diane with its nightmarish beauty. She found it difficult to get rid of the images he had created.

  Everything in the Institute went by opposites, she thought. Beauty/ cruelty. Silence/screaming. Solitude/promiscuity. Fear/curiosity. Ever since she had arrived, she h
ad been in a constant turmoil of contradictory feelings.

  She closed the folder for the patient called György and concentrated on something else. All evening she had been thinking about the treatment Xavier was forcing some of his patients to undergo. The chemical straitjacket. And the clandestine visit he had paid to her office. Had Dimitri, the manager of the pharmacy, told Xavier that she seemed awfully interested in his treatment methods? It was unlikely. She had sensed that Dimitri felt a silent hostility towards the psychiatrist. She mustn’t forget that Xavier had only been there a few months, that he had come to replace the man who had founded the place. Was he finding it difficult to relate to the staff?

  She leafed through her notepad until she located the names of the three mysterious products Xavier had ordered. They were no more familiar to her than the first time.

  She opened her laptop and went on to Google.

  Keyed in the first two words of her search.

  With a start she discovered that Hypnosal was a brand name for sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that was one of the three products administered in the lethal injections used in the United States, as well as for euthanasia in the Netherlands. It was also marketed under a well-known name: Penthotal. For a time it had been used in narcoanalysis, which consisted of injecting an anaesthetic to help the patient retrieve supposedly repressed memories – a technique that had been criticised and abandoned long ago, as the existence of repressed trauma had never been scientifically proven.

  What was Xavier playing at?

  The second entry puzzled her even further. Xylazine was also an anaesthetic – but for veterinary use. Diane wondered if she had missed something, and she read further down the various hits provided by the search engine, but found no other known applications. She was more and more bewildered. What was a veterinary drug doing in the Institute’s pharmacy?

  She moved on quickly to the third product. Now her eyebrows lifted. Like the two previous drugs, halothane was an anaesthetic agent. But given its toxic effect on the heart and liver, it had gradually disappeared from the operating theatre, except in developing countries. All marketing for human use had been stopped in 2005; like xylazine, halothane was used only for veterinary purposes.

  Diane lay back against the pillows and thought. To the best of her knowledge, there were no animals at the Institute, not even a dog or a cat. (She had been led to understand that some of the residents had a pathological fear of pets.) She reached for her laptop and went back over the information she had, one element after another. Suddenly something caught her eye. She had almost missed the most important thing: the three products were not mentioned together except in one case. To anaesthetise a horse … The information was on a website for veterinarians. The author of the article, a specialist in equine medicine, recommended pre-medication with xylazine in a dose of 0.8 mg/kg, followed by an IV injection of sodium thiopental, and finally halothane at a dose of 2.5 per cent, for a horse weighing roughly 490 kilos.

  A horse …

  Something not unlike one of György’s deep-sea creatures began to stir in her gut. Xavier … She thought again of the conversation she had overheard through the air vent. He had seemed so distraught that day, so lost, when that cop informed him that someone in the Institute was involved in the death of the horse. She could not imagine a single reason why the psychiatrist might have gone up there and killed the animal. Besides, the cop had said something about two people. There was one other thing, though. If it was Xavier who had provided the drugs to anaesthetise the horse before killing it, no doubt he was behind Hirtmann’s DNA getting out.

  The thought of it made the living thing wriggle in the hollow of her stomach.

  To what end? What was Xavier’s role in all this?

  Had the psychiatrist known then that after the horse, a man would be killed? Why should he be an accomplice to the crimes if he had only been here for a few months?

  She could not get to sleep. She tossed and turned in her bed, first on her back, then on her stomach, gazing at the faint grey light beyond the window, where the wind was howling. Too many unpleasant questions were keeping her mind busily awake. At around three o’clock she took half a sleeping tablet.

  * * *

  Servaz sat in his armchair and listened to the flute in the first recitative of the ‘Farewell’. Someone had once compared it to a ‘dream nightingale’. Then the harp and clarinet joined in, like a beating of wings. Birdsong, he suddenly remembered. Why did the memory of these songs trouble him persistently? Chaperon loved nature and mountaineering. And so what? Why should those recordings have any importance whatsoever?

  No matter which way he turned it, he could not find the answer. But he was sure that there was something waiting to come to light. And it had to do with the recordings they had found at the mayor’s house. He was eager to know if it really was birdsong on the cassettes. But this was not the only thing bugging him. There was something else.

  He got up and walked out onto the balcony. It had stopped raining, but a faint mist clung to the wet pavement and left the streetlamps with vaporous halos. He thought again of Charlène Espérandieu, the surprising intimacy of her kiss on his cheek, and once again his stomach was in a knot.

  On coming back in through the French doors he realised his mistake: it wasn’t the birdsong, it was the tapes themselves that were significant. The knot in his stomach hardened as if someone had poured cement down his oesophagus. His pulse accelerated. He hunted through his notebook until he found the number, then rang it.

  ‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice.

  ‘May I come by your place in an hour and a half or so?’

  A silence.

  ‘But it will be after midnight!’

  ‘I’d like to have another look at Alice’s room.’

  ‘At this time of night? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

  The voice on the other end of the line sounded truly dismayed. Servaz could put himself in Gaspard Ferrand’s position: his daughter had been dead for fifteen years. How could anything suddenly be so urgent?

  ‘Still, I really would like to have a look tonight,’ he insisted.

  ‘Fine. I never go to bed before midnight, anyway. I’ll wait for you until half past. After that, I’m going to bed.’

  * * *

  At roughly twenty-five minutes past twelve he reached Saint-Martin, but instead of going into the town he took the road to the sleeping village five kilometres further along.

  Gaspard Ferrand opened the door the moment Servaz rang the bell. He seemed extremely curious.

  ‘Is there anything new?’

  ‘I’d like to see Alice’s bedroom again, if you don’t mind.’

  Ferrand shot him a questioning look. He was wearing a bathrobe over a jumper and an old pair of jeans and was barefoot in his slippers. He pointed to the stairs. Servaz thanked him and climbed them quickly. In the room he headed straight for the wooden shelf above the little orange desk.

  The cassette deck.

  It was neither a radio nor a CD player, unlike the stereo on the floor; it was an old cassette player that Alice must have found secondhand somewhere.

  Except that Servaz hadn’t seen any tapes the first time he visited. He picked up the cassette deck; it seemed a normal weight, but that didn’t mean anything. He went through all the drawers of the desk and night tables again, one by one. No tapes, anywhere. Perhaps there had been some at one point and Alice had thrown them all out when she switched to CDs?

  Then why would she have kept the bulky player? Alice’s room was like a museum of the 1990s, with one single anachronism: the cassette deck.

  Servaz grabbed it by the handle on the top and examined it from every angle. Then he pressed the button to open the compartment. Empty. He went back down to the ground floor. He could hear the sound of the television from the sitting room. A late-night cultural programme.

  ‘I need a Phillips screwdriver,’ said Servaz from the threshold. ‘Is that something you might have?�
��

  Ferrand was sitting on the sofa. This time, the look the literature professor gave him was frankly inquisitive.

  ‘What have you found?’

  His voice was imperious, impatient. He wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing,’ answered Servaz. ‘But if I do find something, I’ll be sure to let you know.’

  Ferrand got up and left the room, returning a minute later with a screwdriver. Servaz went back up under the eaves. The three screws were very easy to twist. As if they had been tightened by a child’s hand.

  Holding his breath, he removed the front panel.

  Found it.

  You had to hand it to her. Part of the device had been painstakingly emptied of its electronic components. Held in place against the plastic shell with thick brown tape were three little notebooks with blue covers.

  * * *

  Servaz gazed at them for a long time without reacting. Could he be dreaming? Alice’s diary. It had stayed here for years, unknown to everyone. And of course it was lucky that Gaspard Ferrand had kept his daughter’s room intact. Very gingerly Servaz peeled off the dried-up adhesive tape and took out the notebooks.

  ‘What is it?’ came a voice from behind.

  Servaz turned round. Ferrand was staring at the notebooks. His eyes were gleaming like a hawk’s, burning with an almost unhealthy curiosity. The policeman opened the first notebook and glanced at it. He read the first words. His heart began to pound: ‘Saturday, 12 August’… This is it.

  ‘It looks like a diary.’

  ‘It was in there?’ said Ferrand, stunned. ‘All these years, it was in there?!’

  Servaz nodded. He saw the professor’s eyes fill with tears and his face contort with grief and pain. Servaz suddenly felt very ill at ease.

  ‘I have to go over them,’ he said. ‘There might be some explanation for her act in these pages, who knows? Then I’ll give them back to you.’