The Frozen Dead (50 page)

*   *   *

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.'

‘You did it,' murmured Ferrand in a flat voice. ‘You did it where we all failed … It's incredible … How – how did you guess?'

‘Not yet,' said Servaz to calm him. ‘It's too soon.'

22

It was eight o'clock in the morning and the sky was growing pale above the mountains when he finished reading. He closed the last notebook and went out onto the balcony to breathe in the cold, sharp dawn air. Exhausted. Physically sick. Near breaking point. First the boy called Clément, and now this.

It had stopped snowing. The temperature had even risen slightly, but heaped layers of clouds drifted above the town. The roofs and streets shone with a silvery brilliance, and Servaz could feel the first raindrops on his face. They pitted the snow that had settled in a corner of the balcony, and he went back inside. He wasn't hungry, but he had to have at least a hot coffee. He went down to the large veranda that overlooked a town blurred with rain. The waitress brought him fresh bread, coffee, a glass of orange juice, butter and jam. To his surprise, he devoured everything. Eating felt like an exorcism; eating meant that he was alive, that the hell he had found in the pages of those notebooks did not concern him. Or that he could keep it at a distance at least a moment longer.

My name is Alice. I'm fifteen years old. I don't know what I'm going to do with these pages, or whether someone will read them someday. Maybe I'll tear them up or burn them as soon as I've written them. Or maybe I won't. But if I don't write them now, fuck, I'll go crazy. I've been raped. It wasn't just one bastard, either, but
several
disgusting pigs. On a summer night. Raped.

Alice's diary was one of the most difficult things he had ever had to read. It was chilling. The intimate diary of a teenage girl, consisting of drawings, poems, cryptic phrases. During the night, as dawn approached like a fearful animal, he had been tempted to throw it into the waste paper basket. And yet there was not much in the way of concrete information in the notebooks – it consisted, rather, of allusions and insinuations. A few facts, however, did appear clearly. In the summer of 1992, Alice Ferrand had gone to stay at Les Isards. The very same one Servaz had seen on his way to the Wargnier Institute, the one that Saint-Cyr had mentioned, the one visible in a photograph pinned in her room. At the time, Les Isards took in children from Saint-Martin and the surrounding valleys for the summer, from families too poor to send their children on holiday. It was a local tradition. Several of Alice's best friends would be there that summer, and she had asked her parents for permission to go with them. At first, they had hesitated, then finally agreed. Alice pointed out that their decision had not been made solely to please her but also because, in the end, it was in keeping with their ideals of social equality. She added that on that day they had taken ‘the most tragic decision of their lives'. Alice did not blame her parents. Or herself. She blamed the
swines,
the
bastards,
the
Nazis
(written in capital letters with red ink) who had destroyed her life. She would have liked to
castrate them, emasculate them, slice off their cocks with a rusty knife and force them to eat them – and then kill them.

It occurred to Servaz that Alice had several things in common with the boy named Clément: both of them were intelligent and precocious for their age. Both of them had also shown they were capable of incredible verbal violence. And physical, too, thought Servaz. Except that the boy had turned against a homeless man, and the girl against herself.

Fortunately for Servaz, Alice's diary did not describe what she had suffered in detail. It was not a diary in the strictest sense of the word: she did not record her life on a day-by-day basis. It was, rather, an indictment. A cry of pain. Still, because Alice was an intelligent child with a penetrating mind, her words were terribly distressing. The drawings were even worse. Some of them would have been extraordinary if their subject had not been so gruesome. Servaz immediately noticed the one of four men in capes and boots. Alice was talented. She had drawn in detail the folds of their black capes and the men's faces, obscured by the sinister shadow of their hoods. Other drawings showed the four men on their backs, naked, their eyes and mouths wide open, dead.
A fantasy,
thought Servaz.

On looking closer, he was disappointed to see that while the capes were faithfully reproduced and the naked bodies realistic, the faces, on the other hand, did not resemble any of the men he knew. Not Grimm, nor Perrault, nor Chaperon. They were swollen, monstrous faces, caricatures of vice and cruelty that evoked the grimacing gargoyles from cathedrals. Had Alice intentionally disfigured them? Or did he have to accept that she and her friends had never seen their torturers' faces, that the men had never removed their hoods? He could, however, infer several things. First of all, there were always four men in the drawings: it was clear that the rapists belonged to the same foursome. And then the diary did answer another question that had arisen from Grimm's death: the boots. Until now, their presence on the chemist's feet had been an enigma, but now Servaz had found an explanation:

They always come on a stormy night, the scum, when it's raining. No doubt to be sure that no one will come to the camp while they're here. Because who would ever think of coming to this valley after midnight when it's pouring down?

They splash about on the path in their loathsome boots and leave their muddy tracks along the corridors and soil everything they touch, the foul pigs.

They have loud voices and coarse laughs: I've recognised at least one of those voices.

Servaz shuddered on reading this last sentence. He had gone through the notebooks in every direction, feverishly turning the pages, but nowhere had he found any other reference to the torturers' identity. At one point he also read, ‘
They each took their turn.
' Words that left him paralysed, incapable of reading any further. He had slept for a few hours, then resumed. After going over certain passages, he concluded that Alice had been raped only once – or rather, on one single night – but that she was not the only one affected, and that the men had come to the camp half a dozen times or so over that summer. Why hadn't she said anything? Why had none of the children sounded the alarm? There was a vague reference to a child who had died, who had fallen down a ravine. Was he an example, a warning to the others? Is that why they remained silent? Because they had been threatened with death? Or was it because they were ashamed and thought no one would believe them? In those days, denunciations were very rare. Alice's diary did not provide any answers to these questions.

There were also poems that displayed the same precocious talent as her drawings, even if her aim was not so much to imbue her text with literary qualities as to express the horror of what she had been through:

Was I that little BODY full of TEARS?

This Filthy Thing, this spot on the ground, this bruise: that was Me? – and I

Looked at the ground so close to my face, the shadow

Of the torturer lying there;

It doesn't matter what they did, what they said

They cannot reach the hard seed, the kernel of me.

‘Papa, what does it mean, WHORE?'

Those words when I was six. This is their answer:

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS.

One detail – the most sinister of all – had caught Servaz's attention: in her description of the events, Alice spoke several times of
the sound of the capes,
the rustling of the black waterproof fabric when her aggressors moved. ‘
That noise,
' she wrote, ‘
I'll never forget it. For ever, it will always mean the same thing: evil exists, and it has a sound.
'

These words left Servaz lost deep in thought. As he went on reading, he understood why he had not found any diaries in Alice's room, or any sort of writing at all: