The Sanatorium

Elin goes to Isaac’s room to tell him that she thinks that they should go back to find what Margot dropped. After Isaac expresses worry over Elin and Will’s condition and the danger Margot presents, he thinks of his dead fiancée and agrees to go to the maintenance room. 

The lights are on in the maintenance room as Elin and Isaac walk towards the back. She finds an envelope, stuffed thick with papers and photos, under one of the machines. Inside are records from Gotterdorf Klinik for a patient named Bette Massen. Massen, she realizes, is Margot’s surname. The record also had the same number as one of the redacted records on the memory stick: 87534. The photos in the envelope show horrifying images of five women, bodies mutilated and stomachs splayed open. Behind them are three men in surgical clothes wearing the same black masks as the killer. She realizes that the doctors aren’t doing this for research, and they are torturing the women in the picture. Elin shows the picture to Isaac and flips through the rest.

“Sanatorium du Plumachit, 1927” is written on the back of the picture, and these things happened in the old sanatorium. (329) Elin finds one photo of an unmarked grave somewhere on the grounds. She also realizes that the five women in the pictures and five sets of numbers suggest that there may end up being five victims. They can’t figure out the connection between the 1927 victims and the recent ones, but Elin sees flakes of Margot’s grey nail varnish on the envelope, and she gets an idea of where she might be. 

Elin asks Lucas and Cecile for access to the archive room. Lucas wants to wait for the police, but Elin points out that Margot is losing control and that the situation could escalate if they don’t act. Elin shows them the images she found in the envelope and explains that these things happened in the sanatorium. She shows them the unmarked graves and the records that suggest Margot’s relative was one of the five women who were tortured.

Lucas sends Cecile to supervise the breakfast service, and he gets ready to go with Elin, but Elin gets a call from Isaac. Will’s condition has worsened, and his blood pressure has dropped. Elin goes to check on him before going to the archive room.

At the archive room, Elin tells Lucas that Will’s blood pressure has stabilized, but that he’ll need a hospital as soon as possible. Elin finds one of Margot’s hair grips on the floor, remembering her spilling them at the reception desk. She also sees several flakes of Margot’s grey nail polish. She notices a fine line in the floor and pulls it back to reveal a wooden door. Elin can see more grey nail polish flakes on the door and knows that Margot’s been there.

Lucas doesn’t know what the door is or what it leads to, so Elin opens it to find a pitch-black darkness. The pair go down together.

With a flashlight, they walk down the steps under the wooden door and into the dank, musty tunnel that runs under the hotel. Lucas claims that the tunnel isn’t on the hotel plans, but that it’s likely that this tunnel was used to carry the dead away from the sanatorium without alarming the other patients. Elin speculates that the doctors in the photographs might have used the tunnel for their illegal experiments, which might be why there weren’t official records of the women ever being at the sanatorium. They come to a wider part of the tunnel and find blood-stained medical instruments and towels. Elin realizes “This is where it happened. This is where Laure was mutilated before her death. Adele too” (345). Then, Elin and Lucas notice the smell of something decaying; an almost metallic smell, like fresh blood. Elin shines her flashlight around and stops when she sees a horrifying sight.

In the widest part of the tunnel, Elin sees Margot, dead, hanging on a pulley system that is fixed to a wooden rack. The rubber mask is hanging off of her face just enough for Elin to see that there is no life in her eyes. For a moment, Elin wonders if she committed suicide, however, the manner of her death quickly rules out that possibility. Her body has been stretched by ropes attached to her ankles and wrists, her torso pulled taut. Her head is in a metal clamp, and her neck has been stretched so far that it has torn. It would have been impossible to have done it to herself. Elin realizes that Margot had been working with someone else.

When Elin turns to tell Lucas that Margot has been working with someone, he isn’t there. Elin panics, realizing that Lucas leaving her means he might be who Margot was working with. She tries to make sense of Lucas being the killer, imagining that the people he killed must have known about the hotel’s dark history and that he wanted to silence them: “She remembers Cecile talking about his passion for the place: building a monument to himself” (347). Elin goes back through the tunnel to try to follow him, but when she gets back to the wooden door, it won’t budge, and she realizes that he has locked her inside. She remembers that she has her phone, and she takes it out to see if she can send out a text to Isaac. She tells him she’s trapped, and gives him instructions on how to find the wooden door.

Minutes later, Isaac comes to save her, and she tells him that Margot is dead, and she suspects that Margot was working with Lucas. 

Elin finds Cecile in the lounge and tells her what happened. She tells Cecile that she suspects Lucas may be the killer, and Cecile agrees to let Elin search his office. There, Elin finds more of the threatening letters like the ones Laure had sent to him. She wonders why he hadn’t shown them to her before. Then, she notices the cupboards, each with a small lock on them. Elin uses a paperweight to smash the lock. Once she gets it open, she finds one of the black masks inside, and she’s convinced of Lucas’s guilt. Cecile defends Lucas, suggesting that he probably has all kinds of artifacts from the sanatorium because he was building an archive and is interested in its history. Soon, however, she relents and says that there’s something that Elin should know. 

Cecile recounts the story of how Daniel Lemaitre was found dead and dismembered on the hotel property by the building manager. Lucas told the building manager not to tell anyone because he thought it was a prank, but when he got there, he saw that the body was really there. He conspired with the building manager to get rid of the body because he felt that if this got out, the hotel would be dead before it could even open. They cleaned up the area where he’d been murdered, and when the police came, they simply assumed that Daniel had left on his own accord and didn’t do a thorough investigation. She tells Elin that Lucas didn’t want to tell her because if the police found out that they’d covered up Daniel’s murder, they’d be arrested for conspiracy: “Lucas said that he hoped that we’d find whoever was doing this, that no one would connect Adele’s case to Daniel. I never thought he’d be the one…” (357).

Elin sends Cecile back to the lounge to check on everyone while she plans to search every room for Lucas. When Cecile leaves, Elin remembers hearing the something Cecile said before. She looks something up on her phone, then she makes a connection. Retrieving the mask, she brings it close to her face and breathes in, getting the scent of something that helps put the pieces together in her brain. She’s figured it out. She rushes out of the office and runs, hoping to stop the killer before it’s too late. 

Elin comes to the pool area outside and sees Lucas on a lounge chair, just as she suspected. She sees that Lucas has been bashed in the head and is barely conscious, blood trickling down his face. He is sedated. She pauses when she sees Cecile standing over him. Cecile tries to act as if she’s just trying to care for Lucas, but Elin reveals that she knows that Cecile is the real killer:

What you said back then, in Lucas’ office. ‘From now on, I’m going to do what I want. To hell with anyone who stands in my way.’ That expression… I realized I’d read it somewhere before. A blog, protesting about the hotel being built. Someone described Lucas using those very words. The same comment on Twitter, too (360).

Cecile was anonymously making posts against her brother all along. Elin also smelled chlorine on the mask and recalled that Cecile was an avid swimmer who felt most at home in the water. That’s why she expected to find Cecile at the pools. Elin believes that the murders are personal revenge against Lucas. Cecile admits that she’s the killer, and that she did it because Daniel Lemaitre raped her. Lucas, despite knowing what happened, didn’t do anything about it.

Cecile tells the story of the night Daniel raped her. Daniel and Cecile had been kissing at a party, but when Daniel took it too far, Cecile didn’t know how to stop him. Lucas claims that he didn’t realize what happened, and he didn’t know how to handle it, but for Cecile, his lack of action felt like betrayal.

When Cecile became pregnant, her parents assumed she’d simply had a fling with Daniel, and wanting to keep it quiet, made her get an abortion. After the whole ordeal, her mental health declined. Later, when she was married, she and her husband Michel found out that she couldn’t get pregnant due to the scarring on her uterus from an infection following that abortion. Her infertility put a strain on her marriage, and Michel left her.

When Lucas offered her a chance to come work on the hotel with him and Daniel, she took the opportunity to confront Daniel about what happened: “I knew he’d never be held accountable, not even by himself. He’d swept it aside, maybe even convinced himself that I’d wanted it, or maybe he didn’t even remember” (365). The sanatorium and its secrets were the final straw in her reasoning for doing what she did. 

Lucas admits that Margot came to them asking questions about her relative who had been transferred from a clinic in Germany, and that looking into it, he found all of these documents, photographs, and even diaries from women who had come to the sanatorium but weren’t tuberculosis patients. He knew about the experiments, and how they became something much worse as time went on; “‘It was abuse.’ Cecile’s voice is barely audible. ‘The age-old abuse of power; it was an exploitation of vulnerable women’” (367). Cecile knew that nothing would stop Lucas from opening the hotel, and that he would eschew an investigation for fear that it would kill the hotel. She reveals that Lucas and Daniel knew about the unmarked grave, and they simply bribed the surveyors and chose to ignore it.

She reveals that she killed Adele and Laure because she felt that they were complicit, in different ways, of contributing to covering up Daniel and Lucas’s crimes.

Margot had a fixation on her great-grandmother, the relative who was tortured at the sanatorium. She didn’t have the stomach to commit the murders, so Margot only had her restrain the victims, and Cecile killed them herself. She blames Lucas for Margot’s involvement, claiming that she wouldn’t have been involved if he had been honest about the sanatorium and what happened to her great-grandmother.

Cecile pulls Lucas up from the chair and presses a knife against his throat. She asks Elin to leave and let her kill Lucas, but Elin refuses. The sedative wearing off, Lucas is now hyperaware of the situation he’s in, and he’s terrified. Elin lunges towards Cecile to stop her from hurting her brother any further.

Elin knocks Cecile off balance, but she falls into the pool and pulls Lucas in with her. Elin watches as Cecile surfaces, and she realizes that Cecile, a strong swimmer, will easily be able to best both of them in the water. Cecile chokes Lucas, and Elin knows she should be saving him, but she’s frozen. The water reminds her of the Hayler case, and she’s terrified.

Lucas frees himself from Cecile’s grasp and tries to swim away, but Cecile swims after him and elbows him in the throat. Elin remembers Sam and realizes she can’t stand by and watch Lucas die without doing anything. Grasping the necklace that her mother gave her, Elin jumps into the water. While Cecile is focused on attacking Lucas, Elin swims over, taking the hook in her hand and gouging it into Cecile’s cheek. The pain is enough to make Cecile pull back and drop her knife, and Elin, grabbing Lucas to pull him away, grabs for the knife before it floats to the bottom. Cecile grabs for it at the same time, but Elin beats her to it. Lucas tries to climb out of the pool, but Cecile goes after him, pulling him back in. Elin begs her to let him go, but Cecile refuses, screaming that he has to pay for his lies.

Elin rationalizes that he will. Cecile will get her justice because the truth has come out now that she’s told Elin. Cecile finally releases him, and Elin helps Lucas out of the pool. It’s cold, and it has begun to snow again, and Lucas and Elin are freezing. Elin glances at Cecile, who is floating on her back in the pool, watching the snow fall from the sky.