The Sanatorium Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Simultaneously published in hardcover in Great Britain by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2021.

  First American edition published by Viking in 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Pearse Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A Pamela Dorman Book/Viking

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Pearse, Sarah, author.

  Title: The sanatorium: a novel / Sarah Pearse.

  Description: [New York]: Pamela Dorman Books; Viking, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020016188 (print) | LCCN 2020016189 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593296677 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593296684 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6116.E169 S26 2021 (print) | LCC PR6116.E169

  (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016188

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016189

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Ervin Serrano

  Cover images: (building) David Clapp / Getty Images; (snowy mountains) Buena Vista Images / Getty Images; (frost) Shutterstock

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For James, Rosie, and Molly,

  It’s a long way to the top (if you wanna rock ’n’ roll . . . )

  —ac/dc

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  On nous apprend à vivre quand la vie est passée.

  They teach us to live when life has passed.

  —Michel de Montaigne

  I have loved constraints. They give me comfort.

  —Joseph Dirand

  prologue

  January 2015

  Discarded medical equipment litters the floor; surgical tools blistered with rust, broken bottles, jars, the scratched spine of an old invalid chair. A torn mattress sits slumped against the wall, bile-yellow stains pocking the surface.

  Hand clamped tight around his briefcase, Daniel Lemaitre feels a sharp wave of revulsion: it’s as if time has taken over the building’s soul, left something rotten and diseased in its place.

  He moves quickly down the corridor, footsteps echoing on the tiled floor.

  Keep your eyes on the door. Don’t look back.

  But the decaying objects pull at his gaze, each one telling stories. It doesn’t take much to imagine the people who’d stayed here, coughing up their lungs.

  Sometimes he thinks he can even smell it, what this place used to be—the sharp, acrid scent of chemicals still lingering in the air from the old operating wards.

  Daniel is halfway down the corridor when he stops.

  A movement in the room opposite—a dark, distorted blur.

  His stomach drops. Motionless, he stares, his gaze slowly picking over the shadowy contents of the room—a slew of papers scattered across the floor, the contorted tubes of a breathing apparatus, a broken bed frame, frayed restraints hanging loose.

  He’s silent, his skin prickling with tension, but nothing happens.

  The building is quiet, still.

  He exhales heavily, starts walking again.

  Don’t be stupid, he tells himself. You’re tired. Too many late nights, early mornings.

  Reaching the front door, he pulls it open. The wind howls angrily, jerking it back on its hinges. As he steps forward, he’s blinded by an icy gust of snowflakes, but it’s a relief to be outside.

  The sanatorium unnerves him. Though he knows what it will become—has sketched every door, window, and light switch of the new hotel—at the moment, he can’t help but react to its past, what it used to be.

  The exterior isn’t much better, he thinks, glancing up. The stark, rectangular structure is mottled with snow. It’s decaying, neglected—the balconies and balustrades, the long veranda, crumbled and rotting. A few windows are still intact, but most are boarded up, ugly squares of chipboard scarring the façade like diseased, unseeing eyes.

  Daniel thinks about the contrast with his own home in Vevey, overlooking the lake. The contemporary, blockish design is constructed mostly of glass to take in panoramic views of the water. It has a rooftop terrace, a small mooring.

  He designed it all.

  With the image comes Jo, his wife. She’ll have just gotten back from work, her mind still churning over advertising budgets, briefs, already corralling the kids into doing their homework.

  Daniel imagines her in the kitchen, preparing dinner, auburn hair falling across her face as she efficiently chops and slices. It’ll be something easy—pasta, fish, stir-fry. Neither of them are good at the domestics.

  The thought buoys him, but only momentarily. As he crosses the car park, Daniel feels the first flickers of trepidation about the drive home.

  The sanatorium wasn’t easy to get to in the best of weather, its position isolated, high among the mountains. This was a deliberate choice, engineered to keep the tuberculosis patients away from the smog of the towns and cities, and keep the rest of the population away from them.

  But the remote location meant the road leading to it was nightmarish, a series of hairpin bends cutting through a dense forest of firs. On the drive up this morning, the road itself was barely visible—snowflakes hurling themselves at the windscreen like icy, white darts, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.

  Daniel’s nearly at the car when his foot catches on something, the tattered remains of a placard, half covered by snow. The letters are crude, daubed in red.

  NON AUX TRAVAUX!! NO TO CONSTRUCTION!!

  Anger spiking, Daniel tramples it underfoot. The protesters had been here last week. Over fifty of them, shouting abuse, waving their gaudy placards in his face. It had been filmed on mobile phones, shared on social media.

  That was just one of the endless battles they’d
had to fight to bring this project to fruition. People claimed they wanted progress, the tourist francs that followed, but when it came down to actually building they balked.

  Daniel knew why. People don’t like a winner.

  It’s what his father had said to him once and it was true. The locals had been proud at the start. They’d approved of his small successes—the shopping mall in Sion, the apartment block in Sierre overlooking the Rhône—but then he’d become too much, hadn’t he? Too much of a success, a personality.

  Daniel got the feeling that in their eyes he’d had his share of the pie, and was now being greedy by taking more. Only thirty-three, and his architectural practice was thriving—offices in Sion, Lausanne, Geneva. One planned for Zurich.

  It was the same with Lucas, the property developer and one of his oldest friends. Midthirties, and he already owned three landmark hotels.

  People resented them for their success.

  And this project had been the nail in the coffin. They’d had it all: online trolls, e-mails, letters to the office. Planning objections.

  They came for him first. Rumors began circulating on local blogs and social media that the business was struggling. Then they’d started on Lucas. Similar stories, stories he could easily dismiss, but one in particular stuck.

  It bothered Daniel, more than he cared to admit.

  Talk of bribes. Corruption.

  Daniel had tried to speak to Lucas about it, but his friend had shut the conversation down. The thought nags at him, an itch, like so many things on this project, but he forces it away. He has to ignore it. Focus on the result. This hotel will cement his reputation. Lucas’s drive and his compulsion for detail have propelled Daniel to a spectacularly ambitious design, an end point he hadn’t thought possible.

  He reaches the car. The windscreen is thick with fresh snow; too much for the wipers. It will need scraping off.

  But as he reaches into his pocket for his key, he notices something.

  A bracelet, lying beside the front tire.

  Daniel bends down, picks it up. It’s thin, and made of copper. He twists it between his fingers, noticing a row of numbers engraved on the interior . . . a date?

  He frowns. It has to belong to someone who’d been up there today, surely? Otherwise it would already be covered in snow.

  But what were they doing so close to his car?

  Images of the protesters flicker through his mind, their angry, jeering faces.

  Could it be them?

  Daniel makes himself take a long, deep breath, but as he pushes the bracelet into his pocket, he catches a glimpse of something: a movement behind the ridge of snow that’s built up against the wall of the car park.

  A hazy profile.

  His heart races, his palms sweaty around his key fob. Pushing down hard on the fob to open the boot, he freezes as he looks up.

  A figure, standing in front of him, positioned between him and his car.

  Daniel stares, briefly paralyzed, his brain frantically trying to process what he’s seeing—how could someone have moved so quickly toward him without him noticing?

  The figure is dressed in black. Something is covering their face.

  It resembles a gas mask; the same basic form, but it’s missing the filter at the front. Instead, there’s a thick rubber hose running from mouth to nose. A connector. The hose is black, ribbed; it quivers as the figure shifts from foot to foot.

  The effect is horrifying. Monstrous. Something scraped from the darkest depths of the unconscious mind.

  Think, he tells himself, think. His mind starts churning through possibilities, ways to make this something innocuous, benign. It’s a prank, that’s all: one of the protesters, trying to scare him.

  Then the figure steps toward him. A precise, controlled movement.

  All Daniel can see is the lurid, magnified close-up of the black rubber stretched across the face. The thick ribbed lines of the hose. Then he hears the breathing; a strange, wet sucking sound coming from the mask. Liquid exhalations.

  His heart is pounding against his rib cage.

  “What is this?” Daniel says, hearing the fear in his voice. A tremble he tries to stamp out. “Who are you? What are you trying to do?” A drip slowly trickles down his face. Snow melting against the heat of his skin, or sweat? He can’t tell.

  Come on, he tells himself. Get control of yourself. It’s some stupid prick, messing around.

  Just walk past and get into your car.

  It’s then, from this angle, that he notices another car. A car that wasn’t there when he arrived. A black pickup. A Nissan.

  Come on, Daniel. Move.

  But his body is frozen, refusing to obey. All he can do is listen to the strange breathing sound coming from the mask. It’s louder now, faster, more labored.

  A soft sucking noise and then a high-pitched whistle.

  Over and over.

  The figure lurches closer, with something in hand. A knife? Daniel can’t make it out—the thick glove is concealing it.

  Move, move.

  He manages to propel himself forward, one step, then two, but fear makes his muscles seize. He stumbles in the snow, right foot sliding out from under him.

  By the time he straightens it’s too late: the gloved hand clamps over his mouth. Daniel can smell the stale mustiness of the glove but also the mask—the curious burnt-plasticky odor of rubber, laced with something else.

  Something familiar.

  But before his brain can make the connection, something pierces his thigh. A single, sharp pain. His thoughts scatter; then his mind goes quiet.

  A quiet that, within seconds, tips over into nothingness.

  Press Release—Under Embargo until Midnight March 5, 2018

  Le Sommet

  Hauts de Plumachit

  Crans-Montana 3963

  Valais

  Switzerland

  5-STAR HOTEL SET TO OPEN IN THE SWISS RESORT OF CRANS-MONTANA

  Located on a sunny mountain plateau above Crans-Montana, high in the Swiss Alps, Le Sommet is the brainchild of Swiss property developer Lucas Caron.

  After eight years of extensive planning and construction, one of the town’s oldest sanatoriums is set to reopen as a luxury hotel.

  The main building was designed in the late nineteenth century by Caron’s great-grandfather Pierre. It became renowned worldwide as a center for treating tuberculosis before the advent of antibiotics forced its diversification.

  More recently, it gained international recognition for its innovative architecture, earning the elder Caron a posthumous Swiss Art Award in 1942. Combining clean lines with large panoramic windows, flat roofs, and unadorned geometrical shapes, one judge described the building as “groundbreaking”—custom designed to fulfill its function as a hospital, while also creating a seamless transition between the interior and exterior landscapes.

  Lucas Caron said: “It was time we breathed new life into this building. We were confident that with the right vision, we could create a sensitively restored hotel that would pay homage to its rich past.”

  Under the guidance of Swiss architectural firm Lemaitre SA, a team has been assembled to renovate the building and also add a state-of-the-art spa and event center.

  Subtly refurbished, Le Sommet will make innovative use of natural, local materials such as wood, slate, and stone. The hotel’s elegant, modern interiors will not only echo the powerful topography outside, but will draw on the building’s past to create a new narrative.

  Philippe Volkem, CEO of Valais Tourisme, said, “This will doubtless be the jewel in the crown of what is already one of the finest winter resorts in the world.”

  For press inquiries, please contact Leman PR, Lausanne.

  For general inquiries / bookings, please visit www.lesommetcransmontana.ch.

  1

  January 2020

  Day One

  The funicular from the valley town of Sierre to Crans-Montana scores a near-perfect vertical line up the mountainside.

  Slicing through snow-covered vineyards and the small towns of Venthone, Chermignon, Mollens, Randogne, and Bluche, the route, almost three miles long, takes passengers up the mountain in just twelve minutes.

  In off-peak season, the funicular is usually half empty. Most people drive up the mountain or take the bus. But today, with the roads almost stationary thanks to heavy traffic, it’s full.