The Frozen Dead Read Free Page B

the car.
    Then she backed round to leave the lay-by.
    A tunnel. The beam of her headlights glanced over the black, streaming walls. No overhead lighting, a bend immediately beyond it. And the first sign, at last, on a white fence: ‘CHARLES WARGNIER INSTITUTE FOR FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY.’ She turned slowly and drove over a bridge. The road climbed suddenly and sharply, following a few hairpin bends through the fir trees and the snowdrifts – she was afraid her old banger might skid on the icy slope. She had neither snow tyres nor chains. But quickly enough the road flattened out.
    One last bend and they were there, very close now.
    She pressed deeper into her seat when the buildings came to meet her through the snow, mist and woods.
    Eleven fifteen in the morning, Wednesday, the tenth of December.

2
    Snow-covered fir trees. Imagine them from above, from a sheer, vertical perspective. A ribbon of road leading straight and deep between these same fir trees, trunks wrapped in mist. Treetops hurtling by. At the end of the road, among the trees, a Cherokee Jeep like a plump beetle was driving beneath the tall conifers. Its headlights pierced the swirling mists. The snow plough had left huge drifts on either side. In the distance white mountains blocked the horizon. The forest came to an abrupt end. The road wound in a tight bend round a rocky slope before continuing alongside a quick-running stream. The stream met a small weir covered in a rush of roiling water. Beyond the other bank, the black mouth of a hydroelectric power station was visible in the gaping side of the mountain. On the verge, a road sign: ‘SAINT-MARTIN-DE-COMMINGES: BEAR COUNTRY – 7 KM.’
    Servaz looked at the sign as he drove past.
    A Pyrenean bear painted against a background of mountains and fir trees.
    Pyrenean bears, yeah, right! Newly introduced Slovenian bears, more like, which the local shepherds would be only too happy to have at the other end of their rifle.
    According to the shepherds, the bears strayed too close to inhabited areas; they attacked the herds; they were even becoming a danger to humans. The only species that is dangerous to humans is other humans, thought Servaz. With each passing year he saw more and more corpses in the morgue in Toulouse. And they hadn’t been killed by bears. Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probat. ‘A wise man asserts nothing he cannot prove,’ he mused. He slowed down as the road curved before leading back into the woods – no longer tall conifers, this time, more like a nondescript undergrowth full of thickets. He could hear the burbling mountain stream through the car window, slightly open despite the chill. Its clear song almost drowned the music from the CD player: Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the allegro. A music full of anxiety and feverishness, which seemed appropriate for what lay ahead.
    Suddenly there before him were the revolving lights of the squad cars, and figures silhouetted against the road, waving their luminous batons.
    Those useless gendarmes … When the gendarmerie had no clue how to start an investigation, they set up roadblocks.
    He remembered what Antoine Canter had said to him that very morning, at the regional crime unit in Toulouse: ‘It happened last night, in the Pyrenees. A few kilometres from Saint-Martin-de-Comminges. Cathy d’Humières called it in. I think you’ve worked with her before, right?’
    Canter was a colossus of a man, with the rugged accent of the Southwest, a former rugby player with a vicious streak who liked to dominate his opponents in the scrum, a cop who’d worked his way up from the bottom to become deputy chief of the local crime unit. The skin on his cheeks was pockmarked with little craters, like sand pitted by rain; his huge iguana’s eyes watched Servaz closely.
    â€˜ It happened? What happened?’ Servaz asked.
    The corners of Canter’s mouth were sealed with a white deposit, and