Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

CHAPTER 22

The sky had darkened once more. Beneath the clouds, the Grand Pic de Belledonne rose up in a huge black wave, its rocky sides frozen rigid. Its slopes, dotted with minuscule trees, seemed to fade away as they ascended into a hazy white mist. The lines of the cable cars stretched downwards, like tiny wires across the snow.

"I reckon that the killer went up there with Remy Caillois, while his victim was still alive." Niémans smiled. "I think they took a cable car. An experienced climber could easily switch the system on, at any time of the day or night."

"Why are you so sure that they went up there?"

Fanny Ferreira, the young geology lecturer, was looking splendid. Beneath her hood, her face was vibrantly fresh and youthful. Her hair fluttered round her temples and her eyes shone out from the darkness of her skin. Niémans felt a terrible urge to bite into that pure living flesh. He answered:

"We have proof that the body passed through a glacier in one of the mountains. My instinct tells me that the mountain in question was the Grand Pic, and the glacier the amphitheater of Vallernes. Because this is the peak which overlooks the university and the town. And that is the glacier which turns into the river which runs down to the campus. I think that the killer then descended into the valley on the stream, in a dinghy or something of that sort, with his victim on board. He then wedged him in the rocks, so that his reflection appeared in the river…"

Fanny looked uneasily around. Gendarmes were bustling about the cable cars. There were weapons, uniforms, tension. She declared, obtusely:

"All of which still doesn't explain what the hell I'm doing here."

The superintendent grinned. The clouds were drifting across the sky, like a funeral procession on its way to bury the sun. He, too, was wearing a Gore-Tex jacket and waterproof kevlar-tec leggings, which were strapped up round his ankles, above his climbing boots.

"That's simple. I want to go up there, to look for evidence. And I need a guide."

"What?"

"I'm going to explore the amphitheater of Vallernes, until I find something. So I need an experienced guide, and so I quite naturally thought of you." Niémans grinned again. "Didn't you tell me that you knew this mountain like the back of your hand?"

"No way."

"Come on, now. I could demand your presence as a material witness. Or I could quite simply requisition you as a guide. I've heard that you have got your official climbing certificate. So, no arguing. We're just going to fly over the summit and the amphitheatre in a helicopter. It will only take a couple of hours."

Niémans gestured over to the gendarmes who were waiting beside a van. Alongside it, they were laying out large waterproof canvas bags on the slope.

"I've had some equipment brought up. For our expedition. If you'd just like to check…"

"Why me?" she persisted, as stubborn as a mule. "One of these gendarmes could easily do it…" She pointed at the men who were busying themselves behind her. "They're the mountain rescue guys, aren't they?"

The policeman leant toward her.

"Put it this way, I'm trying to pick you up."

Fanny glared at him.

"Superintendent, less than twenty-four hours ago, I discovered a corpse wedged into a cliff. I've undergone repeated questioning and spent ages in the police station. If I were you, I'd keep the macho chat-up lines to yourself!"

Niémans looked at her. Despite the murder, despite this gloomy atmosphere, he was totally under the charm of this wild, muscular woman. Crossing her arms, Fanny repeated:

"So, I'll ask you again: why me?"

The officer picked up a dead branch, which was lined with lichen, and bent it to and fro nervously.

"Because you're a geologist?”

Fanny frowned. Her expression had changed. Niémans explained:

"Analysis has shown that the traces of water we found on the victim's body date back to a period before the 1960s. They contain residues of a form of pollution that no longer exists. Rain that fell in this region over thirty-five years ago. You realise what that means, don't you?"

The young woman looked intrigued, but said nothing. Niémans knelt down and, with his stick, drew some parallel lines on the ground.

"I've done a bit of finding out. Each year's rainfall becomes compressed into an eight inch thick stratum on the ice-caps of the highest glaciers, those which never thaw?” He pointed at the various layers in his drawing. "These strata are preserved up there eternally, like a crystal archive. Therefore, the body spent some time in one of these glaciers, where it picked up this water from the past."

He looked at Fanny.

"I want to dive into the ice, Fanny. I want to go down into those ancient waters. Because the killer murdered his victim there. Or else transported him there. I don't know. And I need a scientist capable of finding the crevasses which lead to this buried ice.”

One knee on the ground, Fanny was now staring at the drawing in the grass. The light was gray, stony, riddled with reflections. The young woman's eyes were sparkling like snowdrops. It was impossible to read her thoughts. She murmured:

"What if it's a trap? What if the killer only picked up those crystals in order to attract you onto the summit? The strata you're talking about are at an altitude of over ten thousand feet. This is going to be no picnic. Up there, you'll be vulnerable and…"

"That did occur to me," Niémans admitted. "Which would mean that this is a message. That the murderer wants us to go up there. And go up there we will. Do you know of any crevasses in the amphitheater of Vallernes through which we could reach the older ice?"

Fanny nodded curtly.

"How many of them are there?" Niémans asked.

"On this glacier, I'm thinking of one extremely deep crevasse in particular?”

"Perfect. What are our chances of being able to go down inside it?"

The whirring of a helicopter suddenly filled the sky. As its blades approached, the grass turned into billowing waves and, a few yards from them, the surface of the stream rippled.

"Do we have a chance, Fanny?"

She glanced across at the deafening machine and ran a hand through her curls. As she bent down, her profile sent shivers through Niémans's spine.

She smiled:

"You'll have to hang on tight, officer?”

CHAPTER 23

Seen from above, the earth, rocks and trees shared out the territory in a succession of peaks and depressions, of light and shade. As the helicopter flew over this landscape, a marveling Niémans observed these changes for the first time. He admired the lakes of dark conifers, the shipwrecked moraines, the stony heights. Crossing these lonely horizons, he felt as if he had grasped a hidden truth about our planet. A violent, incorruptible truth that had abruptly been exposed, which would always resist the will of mankind.

The helicopter made its precise way through the labyrinth of reliefs, following the course of the river, as all of its effluents now converged into one single sparkling flow. Beside the pilot, Fanny stared down at these waters, which, now and then, sent back fleeting glints. She was the person who was now in charge.

The green of the forests fell away. The trees retreated, fading into their own shadows, as though abandoning the chase. Then came the black earth – a sterile surface, which must have been frozen for much of the year. Dark mosses, gloomy lichens, stagnant marshes, which gave off an intense feeling of desolation. Soon, large gray ridges appeared. Rocky crests which had surged up as though propelled by the earth's sighing. Then more shadowlands, like the black moat of some forbidden fortress. The mountain was there. It extended, stretched and exposed its abyssal spurs.

Finally, their eyes were dazzled. Immaculate whiteness. Snow-covered domes. Icy fissures, the lips of which had begun to close up with early fall. Niémans saw streams which became petrified as they flowed. Despite the grayness of the sky, the surface of this snake of light was brilliant, as though white-hot. He pulled down his polycarbonate goggles, buttoned down their protective shells and looked at the scarred river. On its immaculate bed could be seen flashes of blue, like imprisoned memories of the sky. The din of the blades was now being swallowed up by the snow.

In front, Fanny did not take her eyes off her GPS, a receptor with a quartz dial, which allowed her to position herself in relation to a satellite's signals. She grabbed the microphone that was connected to her helmet and spoke to the pilot:

"Over there, to the north-east. That's the amphitheater?”

The pilot nodded and the chopper swerved off, with all the lightness of a toy, toward a large nine-hundred-feet-long crater, shaped like a boomerang, which seemed to be wallowing on the top slope of the peak. Inside this basin lay a massive tongue of ice, casting brilliant reflections into the heights and darker glimmers down the slopes, where the ice was building up, becoming compressed before splintering into frozen shards. Fanny shouted at the pilot:

"Here. Just down there. The big crevasse."

The helicopter flew toward the confines of the glacier, where the translucent ledges piled up into a staircase, before opening out into a long fault – a monster from hell whose snowy face seemed to be grinning. The chopper touched down in a whirlwind of powdery flakes, its blades plowing out large furrows in the drifts.

"Two hours!" the pilot bellowed. "I'll be back in two hours. Just before nightfall?”

Adjusting her GPS, Fanny handed it to the man and indicated the point where she wanted him to pick them up. The man nodded. Niémans and Fanny leapt down onto the ground, each holding a large waterproof bag.

The helicopter took off again at once, as though drawn up by the heavens, leaving those two figures alone amid the eternal snows.

They took stock for a moment. Niémans raised his eyes and examined the precipice of ice just by where they were standing, like two human particles in a white desert. The policeman was dazzled, his every sense alert. In contrast with the hugeness of the landscape, he seemed to be able to hear the slightest murmuring of the snow as its flakes crunched together into snugly hidden crystals.

He glanced at the young woman. Her body tense, shoulders stretched, she was breathing in deeply, as though gorging herself on that cold purity. The mountain seemed to have put her back into a good mood. He supposed that she was happy only among those glinting reflections, that headier atmosphere. She made him think of an oread. A creature of the mountains. He pointed at the crevasse and asked:

"Why this one, rather than another?"

"Because it's the only one deep enough to reach the strata that you're interested in. It goes down to a depth of three hundred feet." Niémans went over to her.

"Three hundred feet? But we only have to descend a few feet to reach the layers dating to the 1960s. According to my calculations, at an average of eight inches per year, we…"

Fanny smiled.

"That's fine in theory. But this glacier doesn't obey the averages. The ice in its basin becomes crushed and oblique. In other words, it widens out and lengthens. In fact, one year in this gulf produces a layer of about three feet. So count again, officer. To go back thirty-five years, we're going to have to descend…"

"…at least a hundred feet."

The young woman nodded. Somewhere, in a blue-tinted niche, a stream could be heard flowing. The slight laughter of trickling water. Fanny pointed at the gulf behind them.

"There's also another reason why I chose this fault. The last stop of the cable car is just eight hundred yards away. If you're right, and the killer really did lure his victim up to a crevasse, then the chances are it was to this one. It's the easiest one to get to on foot."

Fanny bent down and opened her bag. She produced two pairs of laminated steel crampons and tossed one to Niémans.

"Fix these on your boots."

Niémans did so. He covered both soles with the metallic points, adjusting them to meet the edges of his boots. He then buckled up the neoprene straps as though they were spurs. It reminded him of putting on roller-skates when he was a kid.

Fanny had already removed from her bag some hollow threaded rods, which ended in oblong loops.

"Ice spits," she commented laconically.

Her breath froze into a shining mist. She then took out a piton hammer with a broad handle, its nickel-plated parts apparently removable, then she handed a helmet to Niémans, who was looking at all these objects with mounting curiosity. These tools looked highly sophisticated and, at the same time, perfectly simple. They seemed to be made of unknown, revolutionary materials, and were as brightly colored as sugar drops.

"Come here."

Fanny put a cushioned harness around his waist and thighs, which looked like a maze of straps and buckles. But she had it done up in a matter of seconds. She stood back, as though she were a dress designer sizing up a model.

"You'll do," she smiled.

Next, she picked up a strange lamp, with thin metal strips, an electronic system plus a stubby wick in front of a reflector. Niémans caught a glance of himself in this mirror: in a balaclava, helmet, harness and steel points, he looked like a futuristic Yeti. Fanny screwed the lamp into his helmet, then dangled a pipe behind his shoulder. She tied the reservoir at its end onto Niémans's belt and murmured:

"It's an acetylene lamp, fueled by vapor. I'll show you how it works, when the moment comes."

Then she lifted her eyes and addressed Niémans in a serious tone of voice:

"Ice is a world apart, superintendent," she began. "Forget your reflexes, your habits, and ways of thinking. Trust nothing: not its reflections, not its hardness, nor the appearance of its walls." She pointed to the gulf while doing up her own harness. "Down there, in that gulch, everything will become extraordinary, stupefying. But there are traps everywhere. You've never encountered ice like this before. It's ultra-compressed, harder than concrete, but half an inch of it can also conceal a pit. You will have to follow my instructions to the letter?”

Fanny stopped, allowing her words to sink in. The condensation formed a magical halo around her face. She pulled her hair back into a bun and put on her balaclava.

"We're going to enter the pothole this way," she went on. "The level drops here, so it will be easier. I'll go in first and position the spits. The imprisoned gases which I shall release when breaking into the ice will form a huge crack covering several yards. This fault could run vertically, or horizontally. So you must stand away from the wall. It'll make one hell of a din, which is nothing in itself, but it could loosen some blocks of ice or stalactites. Keep your eyes peeled, superintendent. Stay constantly on your guard and don't touch anything."

Niémans drank in the young woman's instructions. It was certainly the first time that he had ever been under the orders of a curly-haired girl. Fanny seemed to notice this quiver of pride. She continued in a tone of voice that mixed amusement and authority:

"We're going to lose all notion of time and space. Our only point of reference is the rope. I have several bags each containing one hundred yards of rope, and I alone will be able to measure the distance we've covered. You will follow in my steps and obey my orders. No personal initiative. No spontaneous actions. Clear?"

"OK;" Niémans sighed. "Is that all?"

"No."

Fanny examined the cloud-laden sky.

"I only agreed to this expedition because of the storm. If the sun comes out again, then we'll have to come back up at once.

“Why?”

"Because the ice will melt. The streams will reawaken and pour down on top of us, along the walls. The temperature of the water will be less than two degrees. Now, the physical effort will have made our bodies baking hot. That will be the first shock, which may well give us both heart attacks. If we survive that, then our limbs will start to go limp, we'll slow down and gradually lose consciousness…Get the picture? Within a few minutes, we'll be frozen solid, like statues, on the end of our rope. So, whatever happens, and whatever we discover, at the first sign of sunshine, we come back up.”

Niémans thought this new phenomenon over.

"Doesn't that mean that the killer also needed a storm to be able to go down inside the fault?"

"A storm. Or nightfall."

The superintendent remembered that, when he had been following the cloud hypothesis, he had found out that the sun had shone all Saturday in that area. If the killer had really gone down into the ice with his victim, then he must have waited for it to be night. Why had he made things so difficult for himself? And why then bring the corpse back down into the valley?

Unused to the crampons, Niémans staggered clumsily over to the edge of the fault. He risked a glance down. The canyon did not seem vertiginous. After fifteen feet, the walls swelled out until they were almost touching each other. The gulf was then but a narrow slit, like the opening of an infinitely deep shell.

Fanny joined him and, while attaching a large number of snap-hooks and spits onto her belt, observed:

"The stream slides into the crevasse then widens a few feet lower down. Which explains why the gulf is far wider after this initial fault. Beneath it, the water splashes against the walls and erodes them. We'll have to slip between its jaws to get inside.”

Niémans looked' at the two icy edges, which seemed to open up reluctantly over the pit.

"If we went down even deeper into the glacier, would we find water from past centuries?"

"Absolutely. In the Arctic, it's possible to descend as far as extremely distant eras. At a depth of over ten thousand feet lie, still intact, the rainwaters which pushed Noah into constructing his Ark. And the air he breathed, too."

"The air?"

"Bubbles of oxygen, imprisoned in the ice."

Niémans was astonished. Fanny put on her rucksack and knelt down by the edge of the crevasse. She screwed in her first spit, attached a snaphook, then played the rope through it. She looked up at the storm clouds, then playfully declared:

"Welcome to the time machine, superintendent."

CHAPTER 24

They roped down.

The policeman was suspended on the rope, which slid through a self-locking grip. To go down, all he had to do was press the handle, which then slowly played it out. As soon as he released the pressure, it became blocked. Sitting in his harness, he was now dangling in the void.

Keeping his mind on this simple gesture, Niémans listened to Fanny's instructions. Several feet beneath him, she told him when to lower himself down. When he reached the next spit, the policeman changed ropes, taking care to attach himself first by the short cord tied to his harness. With all these straps, Niémans looked like an octopus decked with sparkling Christmas decorations.

As the descent continued, the superintendent remained above the young woman and, although he could not see her, instinctively trusted himself to her experience. As he progressed along the wall, he heard her working a few feet below him. His mind emptied. Outside his own concentration, all he felt was a mixture of strange vivid sensations. The chill breath of the wall. The support of his harness as his body hung in the air. The beauty of the ice, with its dark blue sheen, like a lump of night torn from the heavens.

Soon, the daylight faded. They passed between the swollen edges of the fault and into the very heart of the gulf. Niémans felt as though he were diving into the crystallised belly of a huge animal. Under that bell-jar of ice, made up of one hundred per cent water, his sensations became even sharper and more intense. He quietly admired the dark, translucent walls which cast off jagged glints of light, like echoes of the day. In the darkness, each of their movements resonated deeply in the vault.

Finally, Fanny touched down on a sort of almost horizontal gallery, which ran along the wall. Niémans followed her onto that natural landing. The two sides of the crevasse had narrowed again until they were just a few yards apart.

"Come here," she ordered.

He did so. Fanny pressed a button on the top of his helmet – just as if she had flicked on a lighter – a sudden bright ray gleamed out. The policeman caught another glimpse of himself in the reflector on the young woman's helmet. What he saw most clearly was the acetylene flame, a sort of inverted cone, which was shedding this strong light by refraction. Fanny cautiously turned on her lamp, too, then said:

"If your killer came into this gulf, then this is the route he took."

Baffled, Niémans stared at her. The yellowy gleam of her lamp shone down on her face, deforming it into a pattern of disturbing, brutal shadows.

"We've reached the right depth," she continued, indicating the smooth surface of the wall. "Ninety feet below the dome. The crystallised snow from the 1960s. And then, below it…"

Fanny opened another bag of rope then fixed a spit into the wall. After having hammered it home, she screwed it into place by sliding a snaphook into its end, and twisting its threaded point. Just as she would have done with a corkscrew. Niémans was astonished by her strength. He looked at the displaced ice, which emerged from the spit through a side opening, and thought how few men he knew would be capable of such a feat.

They roped off again, but this time horizontally, along that glittering tunnel. Tied one to the other, they were walking above the precipice. Their reflections mingled in the wall opposite them. Every twenty yards, Fanny fractioned off the rope, digging another spit into the wall and separating off the next section. She repeated this action several times, and they progressed a hundred yards.

"Shall we go on?" she asked.

The policeman looked at her. Her face, hardened by the brutal light from the lamp, now seemed distinctly sinister. He nodded, pointing at the corridor of ice which led away into an infinite succession of reflections. She opened another bag and carried out her maneuver once more. Spit, rope, twenty yards, then spit, rope, twenty yards…

They thus covered four hundred yards. Not a sign, not a trace of the killer having gone that way before them. Soon, the walls seemed to be wandering in front of Niémans's eyes. Slight clicking noises and distant sardonic laughter came to his ears. The world had become luminous, resonant, shaky. Did ice vertigo exist? He peered at Fanny, who was opening a fresh bag of rope. She did not seem to have noticed anything.

A vague panic gripped him. Perhaps he was starting to lose his wits. His body, his brain, were perhaps so tired that they were showing signs of cracking up. Niémans began to tremble. The cold bit into his bones in waves. His hands seized the next spit. His feet shuffled on clumsily. With tears in his eyes, he tried to catch up with Fanny. He suddenly felt that he was about to fall, that his legs could no longer support him. His wits wandered even further. The bluish walls seemed to be undulating rapidly in the light of his lamp, and the distant laughter to echo around him. He was going to fall. Into the pit. Into his own madness. He managed to give a suffocated shout:

"Fanny!"

She turned round and Niémans realised that he was not going crazy. Her face was no longer disfigured by the shadows from the lamp. A brilliant light, so intense that its source was unfathomable, was raining down on her features. Fanny's beaming, majestic beauty had returned. Niémans peered around. The wall was now afire with light. And a torrent was pouring down the walls, in a ghostly flood.

No, he was not going crazy. On the contrary, he had noticed something which Fanny had been too busy with her ropes to see. The sun. Up on the surface, the storm clouds must have scattered and the sun had come out. Hence the diffuse light which had crept in through the cracks in the glacier. Hence the gleams and the laughter from the niches. The temperature was rising. The glacier was beginning to melt.

"Shit," muttered Fanny, who had just caught on.

She immediately examined the nearest spit. The thread of the screw was standing out from the wall, which was disappearing in long drips. The two of them were going to become unhooked. Fall straight down into the bottom of the pit. Fanny barked:

"Step back!"

Niémans tried to move backward, then to his left. His foot slipped, he stood upright, his back over the void and pulled violently on the rope to recover his balance. He heard it all at the same instant: the sound of the spit coming out, his crampons scratching along the wall, the shock of Fanny's hand grabbing him by the nape of the neck at the last moment. She pinned him against the wall.

Icy water gnawed into his face. Fanny whispered into his ear: "Don't move."

Hunched up, panting, Niémans froze. Fanny straddled him. He felt her breath, the softness of her curls, smelt her sweat. She roped him up again and stuck two more spits into the wall at lightning speed. By the time she had done so, the whispering from the gulf had turned into groans, the rivulets a waterfall. All around them, the flow beat thunderously against the walls. Entire sections of the ice fell away, breaking into pieces on the gallery. Niémans closed his eyes. He felt himself drift away, slip, faint into that hall of mirrors in which angles, distance and perspective had vanished.

It was Fanny's scream which brought him back to reality.

He turned his head and saw her bent on the rope, trying to distance herself from the wall. Niémans made a superhuman effort, got to his feet and, through the sheets of water which were pouring down with the force of a cataract, approached her. His fingers clasped round the rope, he let himself swing out like a hanged man and passed through the vertical stream. Why was she trying to get away from the wall, even when the crevasse was swallowing them up? Fanny pointed at the wall of ice.

"There," she panted. "It's there."

Niémans maneuvered himself into the young climber's line of vision.

Then he drank in the impossible.

In the transparent wall, a veritable mirror of white water, the shape of a body imprisoned in the ice suddenly surged out. In the fetal position. Its mouth was voicing a silent scream. The incessant shallow torrent that passed over the image distorted that vision of a bruised and battered corpse.

Despite his astonishment, despite the cold that was freezing them both to the bone, the superintendent immediately grasped that what they were looking at was a mere mirror image of reality. He checked his balance on the gallery, then swung round, describing a perfect arc to get a look at the other ice face, just opposite.

"No," he murmured. "There."

He could now no longer take his eyes off the real body, stuck in the facing wall of ice, its bloody contours mingling with its own reflection.

CHAPTER 25

Niémans put the file back down on the desk and asked Captain Barnes:

"Why are you so sure that this man's our new victim?" The gendarme shrugged and opened his arms.

"His mother's just been in to see us. She says that he disappeared last night…"

The superintendent was once again in a gendarmerie office, on the first floor. Dressed in a tight woolen pullover, with a roll-neck collar, he was only just starting to warm up. One hour before, Fanny had managed to get the two of them out of that gulf, just about in one piece. Luck had been on their side: the helicopter had reappeared above their position at that very instant.

Since then, mountain rescue teams had been working on extracting the body from its icy mausoleum, while the superintendent and Fanny Ferreira had returned to the town and undergone a routine medical check-up.

Barnes had then immediately mentioned another missing person, whose identity could well match that of the body they had discovered: Philippe Sertys, aged twenty-six, single, a nursing auxiliary at Guernon Hospital. While sipping at his scalding coffee, Niémans repeated his question:

"How can you be so certain that this is our man, before we've even established the victim's identity?"

Barnes fumbled through his papers, then stammered: "It's…it's because of the resemblance?”

"What resemblance?"

The captain handed Niémans a photograph of a young man, with narrow features and a crew cut. He was smiling keenly, the darkness of his eyes was tainted with gentleness. His face made him look youthful, almost boyish, but also tense. The superintendent saw where Barnes was coming from: he looked just like Rémy Caillois, the first victim. Same age. Same pointed features. Same hair cut. Two slim, handsome young men whose expressions seemed to conceal some hidden anxieties.

"This is a series, superintendent?”

Niémans drank some coffee. It felt as if his still-frozen throat was going to crack from the contact of such violent heat. He raised his eyes.

"Sorry?"

Barnes was swaying from one foot to the other. His shoes could be heard creaking, like the bridge of a ship.

"I lack your experience, of course, but…Look, if the second victim does turn out to be Philippe Sertys, then this is obviously a series. The work of a serial killer, I mean. Who chooses his victims according to their appearance. This sort of face must remind him of some traumatic experience, or…"

The captain stopped dead under Niémans's furious stare. The superintendent smiled broadly in an attempt to wipe out his irritation.

"Captain, we are not going to turn this resemblance into some big theory. Least of all when we have not yet identified the second victim?”

"I…You're right, superintendent?”

The gendarme fidgeted nervously with his file, which seemed to contain the existence of the entire town. He looked embarrassed and, at the same time, jumpy. Niémans could read his mind. In it, "Serial Killer in Guernon" was written up in flashing letters. This gendarme was going to remain traumatised until his retirement, and even beyond it. The policeman asked:

"How are the rescue teams doing?"

"They're on the point of bringing the victim to the surface. The…the ice had frozen over the body. My colleagues think that the man was placed up there last night. The temperature must have been very low for the ice to harden so much."

"When are we likely to be able to see it?"

"We'll have to wait about another hour, superintendent. Sorry?” Niémans got up and opened the window. Cold air billowed into the room. Six o'clock.

Night was already falling over the town. Thick darkness that was slowly absorbing the slate roofs and the wooden façades. The river slid between the shadows, like a snake between two rocks.

The superintendent shivered in his sweater. Provincial life was definitely not for him. And particularly not this variety: stuck at the foot of the mountains, beaten by the cold and the storms, divided between the black sludge of the snow and the incessant dripping of stalactites. A secret, hostile, sullen world, locked up in its silence like the kernel of an iced fruit.

Turning toward Barnes, he asked:

"Where do we stand now, twelve hours into our enquiries?"

"Nowhere. All our checking has produced nothing. No prowlers. No recently released prisoners whose profile might match that of the killer. Nothing from the hotels, bus or railway stations. And our road-blocks have also failed to produce."

"What about the library?"

"The library?"

Now that there was a second corpse, the book angle was starting to look secondary. But Niémans wanted to see each part of the investigation through to its conclusion. He explained:

"The regional boys are checking through the books consulted by the students."

The captain shrugged.

"Oh, that…That's not our business. You'll have to ask Joisneau…"

"Where is he?"

"I've no idea."

Niémans then tried to call the young lieutenant on his cell phone. No answer. Switched off. Annoyed, he asked again:

"And Vermont?"

"Still up on the heights with his brigade. They're searching the refuges and the sides of the mountain. Now even more so…"

Niémans sighed.

"Ask Grenoble for some more men. I want another fifty. At least. I want the search to be concentrated around the amphitheater of Vallernes and the cable car that runs up there. I want the entire mountain to be fine-toothcombed up to its tip."

"I'll get onto it."

"How many road-blocks are there?"

"Eight. The toll booth on the autoroute. Two on the A-roads and five on the B-roads. Guernon is under close watch. But, as I just told you, it…"

The policeman stared straight into Barnes's eyes.

"Captain, we are sure of only one thing: the killer is an experienced mountain climber. Question everybody in Guernon, and in the environs, who's capable of crossing a glacier?”

"There'll be quite a crowd. Climbing is the local sport and…"

"I'm talking about an expert, Barnes. A man who is able to descend a hundred feet under the ice and transport a dead body there. I've already asked Joisneau to check that out. Find him and ask him what he's found"

Barnes nodded.

"Very well. But I must repeat that we are mountain folk. You'll find experienced climbers in every village, inside every house, on the sides of every summit. It's a tradition with us. Some of our locals are still crystal makers, or shepherds…But all of us still have a passion for the heights. It's only really in Guernon, in the university town, that these traditions are dying out."

"What are you getting at?"

"All I mean is that we'll have to extend the radius of our search. To the upper villages. And that it will take us days."

"Ask for extra reinforcements. Set up a post in each hamlet. Check people's movements, their equipment, their expeditions. And, for Christ's sake, find me some suspects?”

The superintendent opened the door and concluded:

"Get the mother in for me"

"The mother?"

"Philippe Sertys's mother. I want to speak to her."

CHAPTER 26

Niémans went down to the ground floor. The gendarmerie offices looked like any other police station in France or, probably, in the world. Through the windows in the partitions, Niémans could see metal filing cabinets, an assortment of formica-topped desks, and filthy lino stained with cigarette burns. He liked such monochrome, neon-filled places. Because they were a reminder of the police's real vocation – the streets, the outside world. These grim buildings were merely the antechamber of the policeman's life, his dark warren, from which he emerged, sirens blaring.

That was when he noticed her, sitting in the corridor, wrapped up in a heavy blanket and dressed in a gendarme's royal blue sweater. He shivered and found himself back under the ice, beside her, and he felt her warm breath against the nape of his neck. Half anxious, half flirtatiously, he readjusted his glasses.

"Haven't you gone home yet?"

Fanny Ferreira's clear eyes looked up at him.

"I have to sign my statement. I'm getting used to it now. But don't count on me to discover the third one.”

"The third one?"

"The third corpse?”

"So you think there will be more murders?"

"Don't you?"

The young woman must have noticed a pained expression flicker across Niémans's face. She murmured:

"Sorry. I was being sarcastic. It helps me to handle the situation."

As she spoke, she patted the place next to her on the bench, as though inviting a child to sit with her. Niémans did so. His head down, hands together, feet twitching slightly.

"I didn't thank you," he mumbled between his teeth. "If it hadn't been for you, in the ice…"

"I just did my job as a guide."

"True. Not only did you save my life, but you also took me exactly where I wanted to go."

Fanny's expression became serious. Gendarmes marched up and down the corridor. Boots thumping and oil-skins creaking. She asked:

"Where are you? I mean, in your investigations? Why this terrible violence? Why such…weird killings?"

Niémans tried to smile, but failed.

"We're getting nowhere. All I know is what my nose tells me."

"Meaning?"

"My nose tells me that this is a series. But not in the usual sense of the term. This isn't a killer who strikes at the whim of his obsessions. This series has a motive. A precise, established, rational motive?”

"What sort of motive?"

The policeman gazed at Fanny. The shadows of the passing guards flickered across her face, like the wings of a bird.

"I don't know. Yet."

Silence descended. Fanny lit a cigarette, then abruptly asked: "How long have you been in the force?"

"About twenty years."

"What made you join? The idea of putting the bad guys in prison?"

Niémans smiled, spontaneously this time. From the corner of his eye, he saw another squad arriving, with rain pearling from their capes. A glance at them was enough to tell him that they had found nothing. He looked back toward Fanny, who was inhaling a long drag.

"That sort of idea gets quickly lost along the way, you know. Anyway, justice and all that bullshit never interested me very much."

"So why? Power? Job security?"

Niémans was astonished.

"You really do have funny ideas. No, I think I joined for the sensations."

"Sensations? Like the one we've just had?"

"For example?”

"I see," she nodded ironically, exhaling the pale smoke. "Action Man. Who only feels alive when he risks his life every day…"

"And what's wrong with that?"

Fanny aped Niémans's posture – shoulders hunched and hands linked, as though in prayer. She had stopped laughing. She seemed to guess that Niémans, behind these generalisations, was revealing a part of himself. Cigarette in her mouth, she murmured:

"Nothing. Nothing whatsoever…"

The policeman lowered his eyes and, through the curved lenses of his glasses, observed the young woman's hands. No ring. Only dressings, marks and cracked skin. As though she was married to the mountain, the elements, violent emotions.

"Nobody understands cops," he went on, gloomily. "And so nobody can judge them. Our world is closed, brutal, incoherent. A dangerous universe with well-established frontiers. If you are on the outside, you are incapable of understanding. And on the inside, you lose your objectivity. That's the life of a cop. A sealed existence. A crater of barbed wire. Incomprehensible. It's the very nature of the thing. But one point at least is clear: we have nothing to learn from a load of bureaucrats who wouldn't even risk getting their fingers caught in their car doors."

Fanny stretched, ran her hands through her curls and pushed them back. The gesture made Niémans think of roots, mixed with the earth. Roots of a heady sensual nature. The policeman trembled. Icy pinpricks were battling against the warmth of his blood.

The young woman quietly asked:

"What are you going to do? What's your next step?"

"Keep looking. And waiting."

"For what?" she picked him up aggressively. "Another victim?" Ignoring this provocation, Niémans got to his feet.

"I'm waiting for the body to be brought down from the mountain. The killer made an appointment with us up there. He placed a pointer in the first corpse which led me to that glacier. I think he will have put a fresh clue in the second body, which will lead us to the third…and so on. It's a sort of game, which we are supposed to lose?”

Fanny stood up as well and grabbed her parka, which was drying on the end of the bench.

"You must agree to give me an interview?”

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm the chief editor of Tempo, the university magazine?” Niémans felt his nerves tightening under his skin.

"Don't tell me that you…"

"Don't panic. I couldn't care less about the magazine. Anyway, like it or not, at the rate your investigations are going, the whole of the national press is going to be here soon. You'll then have a load of journalists on your trail who are far more tenacious than I am.” The superintendent waved away this possibility.

"Where do you live?" he suddenly asked.

"At the university."

"Where, exactly?"

"On the top floor of the main building. I have a flat, near the boarders' rooms."

"Where the Caillois live?"

"Precisely."

"What's your opinion of Sophie Caillois?"

Fanny smiled in admiration.

"She's a strange girl. Silent. But extremely pretty. The two of them were as thick as thieves. Almost as if…as if they had a secret?” Niémans nodded.

"That's what I think, too. And the motive for the murders perhaps lies in that secret. I'll call round to see you later this evening, if that's all right?”

"Are you still trying to pick me up?"

The superintendent grinned.

"More than ever. And I'll give you exclusive rights to everything I know, for your rag."

"I told you. I couldn't care less about that magazine. I'm incorruptible."

"See you this evening," he said over his shoulder, as he turned on his heel.

CHAPTER 27

One hour later, the body of the second victim had still not been extracted from the ice.

Niémans was furious. He had just listened to Philippe Sertys's old mother's laconic testimony, told in a thick local accent. The previous evening, her son had left home as usual at about nine o'clock in his car, a recently purchased second-hand Lada. Philippe worked nights at the Guernon University Hospital, and began his shift at ten o'clock. She had started to become worried only the next morning, when she found his car in the garage, but no Philippe in his bedroom. This meant that he had come home, then gone out again. But another surprise was in store for her. She contacted the hospital and was told that Sertys had taken the night off. So, he had gone somewhere else, had returned home, then left again on foot. What the hell did it all mean? The woman was frantic, and clutched at Niémans's arm. Where was her boy? According to her, this was extremely worrying. Her son did not have a girlfriend, never went out, and slept every day "at home".

The superintendent unenthusiastically made a mental note of this information. All the same, if Sertys did turn out to be the prisoner in the ice, her testimony would help them to fix the possible time of the murder. The killer must have kidnapped the young man in the early hours of the morning, murdered him, probably mutilated him, then transported him to the amphitheater of Vallernes. It was the chill air of dawn that had sealed the ice wall over the victim. But this was all pure speculation.

The superintendent took the old woman to speak to a gendarme, so that he could take down a detailed statement. As for him, he decided to return with his files to his little den in the university.

Once there, he changed back into a suit then, alone in his office, laid out on his desk the various documents he had brought with him. His first step was to conduct a detailed comparative study of Rémy Caillois and Philippe Sertys, in an attempt to establish a link between the first victim and the probable second one.

The two men did' not seem to have that much in common. They were both aged about twenty-five. They were both tall, slim, with regular and yet rather tormented features topped off by a crew cut. They had both lost their fathers: Philippe Sertys's had died two years before of liver cancer. But Rémy Caillois had also lost his mother, who had died when he was eight years old. Their final point in common was that they had both followed in their fathers' footsteps – as a librarian for Caillois, and as a nursing auxiliary for Sertys.

Their differences, on the other hand, abounded. Caillois and Sertys had not gone to the same school. They had grown up in different parts of town and did not belong to the same social class. Rémy Caillois was middle-class and had grown up among the intellectuals of the university. Philippe Sertys had been born into the lower classes and had started work at the age of fifteen, in the hospital with his father. He was practically illiterate and still lived in the small family home on the outskirts of Guernon.

Rémy Caillois was a bookworm and Philippe Sertys a night-owl at the hospital. The latter did not seem to have any hobbies, apart from hanging around in the aseptic corridors where he worked, and playing video games at the end of the afternoon in the bar across the road from the hospital. Caillois had been dismissed as unfit from the army. Sertys had served in the infantry. One was married; the other single. One was an enthusiastic mountain walker; the other apparently never went out. One was schizophrenic and undoubtedly violent; the other was, according to everybody, "as gentle as a lamb".

Therefore, the only thing the two of them had in common was their looks. The sharp features they both had, the crew cut, and the slender build. As Barnes had said, the killer must be choosing his prey according to their physical appearance.

The idea of a sex crime crossed Niémans's mind: the killer could be a closet homosexual who was attracted by this sort of young man. But the superintendent remained skeptical, and the forensic pathologist had been categoric: "It is clearly not his department?” In the wounds and mutilations of the first victim's body, the doctor had seen a cold cruelty, a dogged application that had nothing to do with a pervert's frenzied desires. What was more, no trace of sexual assault had been found on the corpse.

So, what then?

The killer's madness presumably ran along other lines. In any case, the resemblance between the two presumed victims and the beginnings of a series – two murders in two days – now made it likely that they were the work of a psychopath, in the throes of some demonic obsession, who would kill again. There were other factors to support this hypothesis: the presence of a clue in the first body which had led to the second one, the fetal position, the mutilation of the eyes and the positioning of the bodies in wild, dramatic locations: the cliff overlooking the river, the transparent prison of ice…

And yet, Niémans still did not accept this thesis.

In the first place, because of his daily experience as a police officer.

While serial killers had been imported from America and now peopled the world's books and films, that terrible trend had never really taken off in France. During his twenty years of service, Niémans had arrested paedophiles, whose lusts had occasionally driven them to commit murder, rapists who had killed in a frenzy of violence, sadomasochists whose cruel games had gone too far, but never, in the strict sense of the term, a serial killer who had committed a long list of motiveless murders. It was not a French specialty. Whichever way you looked at it, the facts were there: the last French killers who had murdered repeatedly had been lower-middle-class men, like Landru or Dr Petiot, chasing after a small inheritance or stealing from their victims. But nothing in common with that American nightmare, those bloodthirsty monsters who haunted the United States.

The superintendent looked again at the photographs of Philippe Sertys, then those of Rémy Caillois, spread out over the students' work-top. In the cardboard folder, there also lay the images of the first corpse. A red-hot iron burned his conscience: he could not just sit there, doing nothing. At that very moment, while he was examining these Polaroids, a third person might be undergoing unspeakable tortures. His eye-sockets were perhaps being cleaned out with a carpet cutter, his eyeballs torn out by rubber-gloved hands.

It was seven o'clock. Night was falling. Niémans stood up and turned out the neon light. He decided to explore Philippe Sertys's life thoroughly. Perhaps he might find out something. A clue. A sign.

Or, quite simply, another common factor linking the two victims.

CHAPTER 28

Philippe Sertys lived with his mother in a small detached house on the outskirts of town, near a housing estate of shabby buildings, down a deserted street. A brown polygonal roof, a dirty white facade, curtains of yellowed lace, which framed the interior darkness like a smiling set of rotten teeth. Niémans knew that the old woman was still going through her statement at the station and there was no light from inside. But he still rang the bell, as a precaution.

No answer.

Niémans walked around the house. A violent, icy wind was blowing, carrying a first hint of winter. A little garage stood next to it, to the left. He peered inside and found an ancient muddy Lada. He walked on. A few square feet of cropped grass lay behind the dwelling: the garden.

The policeman glanced round again, on the look-out for nosy neighbors. Nobody. He went up the three steps and examined the lock. A standard, downmarket job. The policeman forced it open without any difficulty, wiped his feet on the mat and entered the presumed victim's home.

After the hall, he reached a cramped living-room and switched on his torch. Its white beam revealed a green carpet, covered with small dark rugs, a sofa-bed stuck under some hunter's shotguns on the wall, some ill-assorted furniture and a collection of hideous rustic knick-knacks. It smelt to him of airless comfort, a jealously guarded daily existence.

He put on his latex gloves and went carefully through the drawers. He found nothing of interest. Silver-plated cutlery, embroidered handkerchiefs, personal papers – tax returns, prescriptions…He glanced over them, then made a rapid search for further information. Nothing. It was a dull, run-of-the-mill family sitting-room.

Niémans went upstairs.

He easily located Philippe Sertys's bedroom. Animal posters, color magazines heaped up in a chest, TV guides: it all gave off an impression of intellectual poverty which verged on the inane. Niémans searched more thoroughly. He found nothing, apart from a few details which revealed Sertys's totally nocturnal existence. A large collection of lamps, of varying voltages, took up an entire shelf – as though the man wanted to create a different light to go with each season. He also noticed the solid reinforced shutters, as a protection against daylight, or else to conceal his own night-time movements. Then Niémans came across some eye-masks, like those used in aeroplanes, to block out the slightest glimmer of light. Either Sertys found it hard to sleep. Or he had the nature of a vampire.

Niémans turned over the blankets, sheets and mattress. He slid his fingers under the rugs and ran his hands over the wallpaper. He found nothing. And, above all, not the slightest trace of a girlfriend.

The policeman looked hastily round the mother's bedroom. The atmosphere in that house was starting to get to him. He went back downstairs for a quick inspection of the kitchen, bathroom and cellar. Nothing doing.

Outside, the wind was still raging, making the windows rattle slightly.

He turned off his torch and experienced an unexpected agreeable sensation, the feeling of a secret intrusion, a hidden refuge.

Niémans stopped to think. He could not have got it wrong. Not to that point. There had to be some sign lurking there, somewhere. He told himself that he had been mistaken after all, then immediately changed his mind. He had to dig out the truth, find the link between Caillois and Sertys.

Another idea then occurred to him.

The changing-room in the hospital was a vague bluish-gray color. Succeeding ranks of rusty metallic cupboards stood precariously to attention. The place was deserted. Niémans silently walked on. He read the names in the little iron frames until he found Philippe Sertys.

He put his gloves back on and felt the padlock. Memories streamed through his mind: the time of nocturnal missions, dressed in black, with the boys of the Antigang Brigade. He did not feel particularly nostalgic about that period. What Niémans loved more than anything else was penetrating the mood of the night, mastering its vital hours, but only as a real intruder: on his own, in silence, and undercover.

The lock clicked, and the door opened. White coats. Confectionery. Old magazines. And more lamps and eye-masks. Careful not to make the metal clang, Niémans felt round the interior partitions and searched into the corners. Nothing. He checked to see if the cupboard had a false bottom, or top.

Swearing to himself, Niémans knelt down. He was clearly not on the right track. There was nothing to be learnt from this young man's existence. What was more, he did not even know if that deep-frozen body, up in the mountains, was really Philippe Sertys. Perhaps the auxiliary would reappear in a few days' time, coming back home after his first elopement, on the arm of a beautiful nurse.

Niémans could not help smiling at his own stubbornness. He decided to get out of there before anybody noticed him. It was when he was standing up that he noticed a square of linoleum that had moved slightly out of place under the cupboard. He felt the roughness of the concrete below it, then an object. He heard a metallic sound, pushed his fingers further and closed his fist. When he opened it again, his hand was holding a key on a ring, which had been carefully concealed beneath the cabinet.

Along its shaft, Niémans recognised the characteristic indentations for opening a reinforced metal door.

If Sertys had a secret, then this was the key to it.

At the town hall, he just managed to catch the land register clerk, who was about to go home. When he mentioned the name "Sertys", the man did not blink. Word of the murder had obviously not got out yet, nor the presumed identity of the second victim. The town clerk, who already had his coat on, grudgingly looked for the information the policeman required.

While waiting, Niémans ran back over the hypothesis which had led him there, as though this would increase its chances of turning out right. Philippe Sertys had concealed the key to a reinforced lock under his cupboard in the changing-room. Now, the front door of the house had no armor-plating. This key could have been cut for any number of doors, cupboards or stockrooms, maybe in the hospital. But why hide it? A hunch had led Niémans to pay a call on the land register to see if Philippe Sertys might own another house, a shack, a barn, anything that might have a reinforced door concealing a second existence.

The grumbling clerk placed a battered cardboard box onto the counter. On its top, in a thin brass frame, was a label which read: "Sertys". Holding back his excitement, Niémans opened it and leafed through the official documents, the solicitors' contracts, the title deeds. He read them carefully, looked at the numbers of the plots and located them on a map of the region which was included in the file. He stared at the address again and again.

So, it was as simple as that.

Philippe Sertys and his mother rented the house they lived in, but the young man also owned another property, which he had inherited from his father.

CHAPTER 29

It was not a dwelling, but an isolated warehouse near the foot of the Grand Doménon, encircled by arid conifers. On the walls of the building, pale paint was flaking off, like the scales of an iguana, presumably untouched for an untold number of years.

Niémans approached it cautiously. The windows had metal bars and were blocked by sacks of concrete. There was a cumbersome gate and, to its right, a reinforced door. It was a place to store barrels, metal drums, or sacks of building material. Something to do with industry. But this warehouse belonged to a taciturn auxiliary nurse, who had presumably just been murdered in a high-altitude glacier.

The policeman began by pacing round the building, then he went back to the reinforced door. He slid the key into the lock. He heard the mechanism give a slight click, then the sound of the bolt gliding out of its metal surround.

The door swung open. Before going in, Niémans took a deep breath. Inside, the bluish gleam of the night filtered in softly through the few gaps left between the sacks of concrete stacked up against the metal bars. It was several hundred square yards in area, somber, run-down, lined by transversal shadows cast by the metallic structure of the roof. Tall pillars rose up toward the tip.

Niémans advanced with his torch on. The place was completely empty. Or, rather, had recently been emptied. There were dust marks everywhere, furrows had been dug out in the concrete floor, presumably by some heavy furniture which had been pulled toward the door. It was filled with a strange atmosphere, an echo of panic, of a mad rush.

The superintendent went on, peering, sniffing, feeling. It was, indeed, an industrial site, but it was extraordinarily clean. An antiseptic odor still hung there. But there was also the vague scent of a wild animal.

Niémans continued. He was now walking on white dust, like crushed chalk. He knelt down and found some tiny wire meshes.

Perhaps they came from some fencing, or were bits of an air filter: He slipped some of them into his plastic envelopes, then took samples of the dust and crushed matter, but without being able to identify their neutral drill odor. Yeast. Or plaster. Not drugs, in any case.

His next discovery showed that the place had been well heated for many years. Electric sockets were situated in each corner of the room, undoubtedly used for heaters, the positions of which could still be made out from the black patches they had left on the walls.

Niémans's mind raced with several contradictory hypotheses. The high temperature could mean that animals had been raised there. He also imagined that it could have been used as a laboratory for experiments, in sterile conditions. Hence the strong hospital smell. He did not know why, but the place gave him the creeps. A stronger, more violent fear than that which he had experienced in the glacier.

He was now sure of two things. The first was that shy little Philippe Sertys had used this place for some occult practices. The second was that the young man had been forced to move everything out in a great hurry, just before he had been killed.

The officer stood up and, playing his torch across the walls, examined them closely. There might be a hiding place there, a niche in which. Sertys may have left something. He brushed his palms over them, tapped them, listened to their resonance, watched for changes in their make-up. The walls were covered with thick paper, over a layer of compressed glass wool. Insulation, presumably.

Niémans had now covered two entire sides. Then, at a height of nearly six feet, he felt a hollow which was out of line with the rest of that bulging surface. He ran his index finger along the edge of it and noticed that someone had plastered it over. He tore off the wallpaper and discovered some hinges. He squeezed his fingers into the central gap and managed to force this priest hole open. Shelves. Dust. Mould.

The superintendent felt along the planks and, on one of them, encountered something flat, covered with a layer of dust. He grabbed the object. It was a small exercise book with ring-binding.

His flesh blazing, he flicked through it at once. The pages were covered with tiny, incomprehensible figures. But one of them bore a large inscription at the top. The letters looked as though they had been written in blood, and with such violence that the pen had occasionally ripped through the paper. Niémans thought of a frenetic rage, a boiling geyser. As if the author of these scarlet lines had not been able to contain his madness. Niémans read:

WE ARE THE MASTERS, WE ARE THE SLAVES.

WE ARE EVERYWHERE, WE ARE NOWHERE.

WE ARE THE SURVEYORS.

WE CONTROL THE BLOOD-RED RIVERS.

The policeman leant against the wall, on the scraps of brown paper and shreds of glass wool. He turned off his torch, and a flash glowed in his mind. He had not found a link between Rémy Caillois and Philippe Sertys. He had found something better: a shadow, a secret at the heart of that young hospital worker's existence. What did those figures and strange sentences in that exercise book mean? What had Sertys been doing in his mysterious warehouse?

Niémans briefly took stock of his investigations, as though bringing together the first smouldering twigs of a fire in a blizzard. Rémy Caillois was an acute schizophrenic, a violent man who had – perhaps – once committed some terrible crime. As for Philippe Sertys, he had indulged in some sort of undercover activity in this sinister workshop, then tried to remove all trace of it shortly before his death.

The superintendent had no solid proof, no evidence, but it was certain that neither Caillois nor Sertys had been as straightforward as their public lives suggested.

Neither the librarian nor the nursing auxiliary had been an innocent victim.