The Sanatorium(110)
“Women?” Elin moves forward a step, hoping Cecile doesn’t notice.
“Yes. Adele. She was with Lucas’s building manager when they found Daniel’s body. His girlfriend. She was bought off, like he was. Lucas gave her a job here on a highly inflated salary, good enough to keep her mouth shut.”
That explains the link between the pair. The Instagram photo. “We found a photograph of Adele and Lucas together, here in the hotel. A party. It looked like an argument.”
“Yes. She was asking for more money.” Lucas’s voice is muffled.
Elin turns back to Cecile. “But you killed Daniel, Cecile. Murdered him. Why would you have wanted Adele to talk?”
Cecile looks at her, her eyes bright, glittering. For the first time, Elin can see real emotion. “Because I never wanted to be anonymous. When I killed Daniel, I expected to get caught. I wanted my story to be told, those women’s stories to be told. I wanted people to ask why I’d killed him like I had, but no. Everyone wanted to cover it up.”
“But you could have gone to someone, the police, the press. Told your story that way.”
Cecile looks at her in disbelief. “If I went to the press myself, I knew it would have been my word against his. No one believed me back then, so why would they this time? The only way to get justice was to do it myself. Make them pay.”
Elin stares at her, everything pulling into sharp focus; a macabre, raw logic. Revenge in its most brutal form, tipping the power balance back the other way.
“So why the gap between killing Daniel and Adele?”
“I was waiting for the right time. When I found out Adele was asking Lucas for more money, something snapped. I knew she had to go.”
“And by that time, you had Margot on board, too, didn’t you? She was vulnerable, so you groomed her.”
“I wouldn’t call it grooming. She was simply open to suggestion. Her mother had recently died. She’d developed a fixation about her relative.”
“A fixation?” Elin repeats. “She was ill, Cecile. She had a serious form of depression. Psychotic depression. I found printouts in Laure’s desk. I assumed they were hers, but she was researching it because she was worried about Margot, wasn’t she? Laure had depression herself, she knew the signs.”
Cecile swipes her hand through the air impatiently, dismissing Elin’s words. “It doesn’t matter what you call it. The reason behind it is what’s important.”
“Cecile—”
“No. It’s true. Before Margot’s mother died, she asked her to find out what happened to Margot’s great-grandmother. Her disappearance . . . it had scarred every generation of their family. Consumed her grandmother, now her mother too. All they wanted was answers. But when Margot found out what the truth really was, it didn’t give her any peace. It unleashed something dark. The envelope you found with the photographs inside . . . she carried it with her everywhere. She was obsessed by it.”
“And you seized on that obsession, didn’t you? Her vulnerability made her a willing puppet. You used her. She helped you, didn’t she? With the murders?”
“That’s how I knew,” Lucas says quietly. “That’s how I worked it out, in the tunnel. When I realized Margot was working with someone else, something clicked. I knew it had to be Cecile. Only she could know about the tunnel’s existence, and only she knew the truth about what happened to Margot’s great-grandmother. I knew she could have exploited that, got Margot to work with her.”
“But why lock me in?” Elin says.
“I wanted to talk to her. Brother to sister. Give her a chance to explain. But I didn’t get that chance. She was waiting for me. She didn’t want to talk.”
“So what did you ask Margot to do?”
“Restrain them. She didn’t have the stomach for anything else.” Cecile gives a slight smile. “Anyway, her involvement is Lucas’s fault. All she wanted was recognition, an acknowledgment of what happened at the sanatorium, her great-grandmother’s story to be told. Some kind of memorial, a mark in the sand, for those women’s voices to be heard, but Lucas did nothing.”
“I was planning the archive room . . .”
“But you never went through with it. You had no real intention of completing it. It was just to get Margot off your back. Even worse, you offered her a job to assuage your guilt. As if that would be enough.” Cecile looks at him in disgust, her cheeks shining now, a mixture of tears and snow. “And you put those glass boxes around the hotel. Fetishizing the sanatorium’s past, using it as entertainment for the guests. After everything you knew.”
“So you decided to flip it on its head . . .”
“Yes. I put the victims on display, just like the doctors did with those women in the photographs.”
“But what about Laure?” Elin’s voice catches on her name. “Why kill her? She was Margot’s friend, your colleague.”
“She was the same as all the rest in the end. Cowardly.” Cecile wipes a hand over her face. “It started with her fling with Lucas. He’d treated her badly. She was upset and bitter, started asking questions about the build, the bribery and corruption claims. She was planning to publish it on a blog to expose him, but never went through with it. When she got back with your brother, she decided to forget it all.”