The Sanatorium (Detective Elin Warner, #1)

by Sarah Pearse

On nous apprend à vivre quand la vie est passée. They teach us to live when life has passed. —Michel de Montaigne

Effortless. To him, nothing’s insurmountable. There’s no bravado in it, it’s just how his mind works—rapidly breaking an issue down into logical, manageable chunks. A list, some research, a phone call or two—answers found, problem solved.

For her, even easy, everyday things became something to be agonized over until they swelled out of all proportion.

“How long have you been working for the hotel?” Will says, turning back. “Just over a year.” “You like it?” The driver nods. “There’s something about the building, the history, it gets inside your head.”

Foreshadowing?

“I looked it up online,” Elin murmurs. “I couldn’t believe how many patients actually—” “I wouldn’t think too much about that.” The driver cuts her off. “Digging up the past, especially with this place, you’ll send yourself mad. If you go into the details about what went on . . .” He shrugs, trailing off. Elin picks up her water bottle. His words echo in her mind: It gets inside your head. It already has, she thinks,

Adele loves her son wholly, absolutely, but sometimes she struggles to remember who she was before. What her world was like before it had been deconstructed, reassembled into something else entirely. Responsibilities. Worry. Collection letters stacking up on her desk. This job;

from the corner of her eye, she notices something on the balustrade. A sliver of something shiny among the snow. Adele pushes open the door, curious. Freezing air fills the room along with tiny flakes of windblown snow. Walking over to the balustrade, she picks it up. A bracelet. As she turns it between her fingers, she can see it’s made of copper, similar to the ones people wear for arthritis. Tiny numbers loop the interior. An engraving.

Her stomach clenches. Despite Will’s presence, and the hotel in front of her, she can’t help but be struck by their isolation—the absolute remoteness of the location. The drive from town had taken more than an hour and a half. With each minute ticking by, the winding roads drawing them farther up the mountain, Elin couldn’t shake her growing sense of unease.

Standing there in front of the hotel, she can feel the strangest thing—a disturbance in the air, a curious restlessness that has nothing to do with the falling snow. Elin looks around. The driveway and the car park beyond are empty. No one’s there. Everyone from the funicular has gone inside. It’s the building, she thinks, absorbing the vast white structure. The more she looks, the more she senses a tension. An anomaly.

the building itself, how savage it looks.

This is the anomaly, she thinks, the tension she’s picked up on. This juxtaposition . . . it’s chilling. Institution butting up against beauty.

It makes sense now, her brother celebrating his engagement here. This place, like Isaac, is all about façades. Covering up what really lies beneath.

“It was a hygiene thing, but they also thought that whitewashing helped bring an ‘inner cleanliness.’” He makes quote marks with his fingers. “Architects then were experimenting with using design to influence how people felt. A building like this was used as a medical instrument in itself, every detail custom designed to help patients recover.”

What struck her was how easy it was. There was none of the usual awkwardness you got with strangers. Elin knew it was because Will was completely at ease with himself. She didn’t have to second-guess—he was an open book, and so she, in turn, opened up to him in a way she hadn’t for a long time.

Elin soon got the sense that he didn’t see her the way she had always seen herself. The effect was almost dizzying; it made her want to live up to what he saw in her, or what he thought he saw.

But she should have known it couldn’t last, that the real Elin would come out eventually. The loner. The introvert. The one who found it easier to run than give her hand away. It made her angry, in a way, how loosely she’d held it all, those few months where everything worked. If she’d known it was all so finely balanced, so close to crashing down, she’d have held it closer, tighter.

Watching her, she’s seized by a sense of inadequacy: Are we really the same age? Laure seems older; a grown-up, a leader. But then, she thinks, maybe she always was.

Laure was secure in who she was. There was something definite about her, a solidity anchoring her to the world that Elin envied. She was the opposite; she cared too much, fretted about every little thing: Was she too quiet? Too loud? Not enough?

“I don’t think it’s that,” Isaac says slowly. “You used to be like this as a kid, if we went somewhere new, you felt uncomfortable.” “Isaac, stop.” The words are sharper than she intended. “How is that relevant? I’m hardly a child anymore, am I?”

As she turns away, it hits her: Isaac never told Laure how things changed after Sam died. He hasn’t told her any of it.

It’s the disadvantage of not working, her mind simultaneously overactive and underused.

It’s this place. This building. Her body is reacting to something here; something living, breathing, woven into the DNA of the building, as much a part of it as its walls and floors.

Relax.” Will leans back in his chair. “This, the holiday, it’ll only work if you don’t let things get to you.” She scans the room. “I’m trying, but this place . . . there’s something weird about it, isn’t there? Something creepy.”

Better? How would it ever get better? Her grief for Sam is locked inside her, in every cell.

How do you go about unpicking someone from your life when they’re the thread tying every part of you together?

she’d been going through her mother’s things late into the night. Every item—books, clothes, the faded photographs still in their frames—had brought memories flooding back, left her feeling strangely isolated, adrift. It’s been more than six months since she died, but the grief is still raw.

At first glance, it’s magnificent, yet the more she looks, the more she realizes how sinister the mountains appear: raw, jagged spikes. The highest is hooked, like a claw. Elin shudders. She thinks about what Isaac told her about Daniel Lemaitre, the missing architect. No body. No evidence. It’s not hard to imagine, she thinks, looking out; this place somehow consuming someone, swallowing them whole.

Closure by deletion of the past.

When they were children, Isaac lied all the time. He hated his middle status—two years younger than Elin, two years older than Sam—so lying became his default: a way to grab attention, to take advantage, to put them in their place.

Elin doesn’t tell him how when she was under, part of her had almost let go. It had felt so strong. The desire to give in. Stop fighting. But her will to live came out stronger. The will to know the truth about what happened to Sam.

Her job had always defined her. After Sam died, she knew it was all she wanted to do. Find the truth. Get answers. If she can’t do that anymore, what is she? Who is she?

Part of her wants to just tell him, tell him the one thing that might make him understand what she’s really doing here. Explain that while she’s desperate to move on, she can’t until she knows the truth about what happened to Sam that day. But the words are stuck.

The legacy of asthma. It’s strange, she thinks, how for her, claustrophobia doesn’t only exist in spaces outside herself, but within her too. That horrible sense of being trapped inside your own body.

Nothing about the images reveals a softer side, any vulnerabilities. She wants to be seen as serious, creative, in control. This is revealing: the complete lack of flaws, of being able to show herself as anything other than living a perfect life, indicates an insecurity. Laure wasn’t quite confident enough that people would like the real her, so she’s having to posture. All in all, someone trying very hard.

Elin withdraws her hand with a horrible sense of disquiet. She’s rushing in again, isn’t she? Taking this at face value. Everything he’s shown her, everything he’s said—it’s just words, nothing more. Reaching for her water glass, Elin blinks, angry at herself. Despite everything, she’s let down her guard. She should know better. She’s forgotten how easy it is to lose track of someone; the sum of their parts.

the terror remains, a terror unique to a situation like this. What’s happened here, it isn’t logical, rational, something that can be explained. Elin knows it has its roots in something dark, something so dark it feels almost tangible, a presence in itself.

Il faut bonne mémoire après qu’on a menti. “A liar should have a good memory,”

Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop. This time it’s Cecile who translates. “Chase away the natural and it returns at a gallop.”

she feels her heart thudding. It isn’t fear causing the reaction, but something just as primal. Excitement: a sudden bolt of adrenaline. Will’s right, about her coming alive. She’s forgotten this—life not just happening to her, but being part of it. Changing the path of something. Taking action.

“I had all these plans, like Lucas. Children. Family life . . . None of it happened. It takes time to mentally readjust.”

She doesn’t care about the morals of hidden cameras. She simply wants to see the footage.

ever since Sam died, she’s felt like she’s been looking for something. Like she’s running, trying to find the finish line, but the end is always just out of reach.

Grief is like a series of bombs exploding, one after another. Every hour, a new detonation. Shock after shock after shock.

the signature is what holds the meaning; it’s the personal imprint of the killer. It isn’t essential—not something that’s actually required to commit the crime, so its only purpose is to fulfill the emotional or psychological needs of the killer. It comes from deep within their psyche, perhaps reflecting a fantasy they might have had about their victims. The key element of a signature is that it’s always the same, a pattern, because it stems from the fantasies or desires that have evolved for years before they murdered their first victim.

Cecile’s tone is still lacking in emotion, a void where feeling should be. Elin knows that this type of emotion is always dangerous. Unlike a fiery, passionate rage, a cold, bitter anger like this can’t burn itself out. It’s gone past that point and hardened into something solid. Unbreakable.

There’s no hurry, is there? He’s found it’s best to wait until someone’s relaxed, has let down their guard. That’s the sweet spot, isn’t it? That tiny space between happiness and fear.