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She came out of a bend and the road suddenly gave onto a landscape of rivers, forests and white plains. There was a Gothic cathedral perched on the summit of a hill, with a little town surrounding it. Through the swishing of the windscreen wipers the landscape began to resemble an old etching.
Spitzner had warned her: 'The Pyrenees are nothing like Switzerland.' Along the side of the road the snowdrifts rose ever higher.
Diane saw the flashing lights through the snowflakes before she came upon the roadblock. The snow was falling heavily now. Policemen stood in the thick of it, waving their luminous batons. Diane noticed that they were armed. One van and two motorcycles were parked in the dirty slush on the verge, beneath two tall pine trees. She rolled down her window and in no time her seat was wet from the thick, fluffy snowflakes.
'Your papers, please, mademoiselle.'
She leaned over to the glove compartment. She could hear a string of messages crackling on their radios, blending with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the sharp accusations of her exhaust pipe. She felt the chill damp upon her face.
'Are you a reporter?'
'Psychologist. I'm on my way to the Wargnier Institute.' The gendarme studied her, leaning on her open window. A tall, blond fellow, who must have been well over six foot. Beneath the fabric of sounds woven by the radios she could make out the river rushing through the forest.
'What are you doing in this part of the world? Switzerland isn't exactly next door.'
'The Institute is a psychiatric hospital; I'm a psychologist. Do you see the connection?'
He handed back her papers.
'Here you are, you can go.'
As she turned the ignition, she wondered whether the French police always checked on motorists in this way, or if something had happened. The road wound its way round several bends, following the meandering river (known as a 'gave', according to her guidebook) as it flowed through the trees. Then the forest vanished, giving way to a plain that must have been at least five kilometres wide. A long, straight avenue took her past petrol stations and deserted campsites, banners flapping sadly in the wind, fine houses with the air of Alpine chalets, and a string of advertising hoardings vaunting the merits of the nearby ski resorts.
'IN THE HEART OF THE VALLEY, SAINT-MARTIN-DECOMMINGES, POPULATION 20,863' – according to the brightly coloured sign. Above the town, grey clouds obscured the peaks, torn here and there by a glow that sculpted the ridge of a summit or the profile of a pass like the sweep of a beam of light. At the first roundabout, Diane drove past the sign for the town centre and took a little street on the right, behind a building where a large display window proclaimed in neon letters, 'Sport & Nature.' 'It's not a very entertaining place for a young woman.' She recalled Spitzner's words as she drove down the streets to the familiar, reassuring monologue of her windscreen wipers.
The road headed uphill. She caught a brief glimpse of huddled roofs at the bottom of the slope. On the ground the snow was turning into a black slush that splattered the underneath of the car. 'Are you sure you want to go there, Diane? It won't have much in common with Champ-Dollon.' Champ-Dollon was the name of the Swiss prison where, after she had graduated, she had conducted a number of forensic assessments and taken on casework dealing with sex offenders. She'd had to assess serial rapists, paedophiles, cases of interfamilial sexual abuse – an administrative euphemism for incestuous rape. She had also been called on as a joint evaluator to conduct credibility tests on minors who claimed to be the victims of sexual abuse, and she had discovered, to her horror, how easily such an undertaking could be skewed by the evaluator's own ideological and moral prejudices, often to the detriment of all objectivity.
Excerpted from The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier. Copyright © 2014 by Bernard Minier. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Minotaur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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