The Ice House

by John Connor

  She called and, predictably, got a message that the phone wasn’t operational at that moment. Her mother’s phone would be somewhere near her dead mother, in the house. If it was still working, which he doubted, then it was likely it would still have no cover. They had a signal now because they had moved into the range of a different mast. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve sent her the text. She will reply if she can.’

  She didn’t reply. She was in a stranger’s car. She had just seen him shoot three people. She would be terrified, no doubt about that, even if she knew, at some level, that those men had been trying to kill her. He had to change the situation, reassure her.

  He pulled the car over when they were still half a kilometre from the village. ‘I have to make a call too,’ he said. ‘You can try your mother again.’ He got out and walked a little away, then quickly got her number up and composed a text to her. Rebecca. I have had to change phones. I’m OK. I got your message but don’t use that number any more. I will explain everything when I see you. Don’t worry. You can trust Carl. He will protect you until I can get to you. Give me two days. He looked at it, trying to work out if it was too much or too little. He wanted to sign it off ‘mum’ or ‘mamma’, or do an ‘x’, but wasn’t sure how her mother would do that, so left it out. It couldn’t be from anyone else. He thought for a moment about her crying, then added, I love you. Everything will be fine. He sent it.

  Back in the car he asked her if she had reached her mum. She shook her head and started crying uncontrollably. She was sitting pressed up against the window, as far away from him as possible. ‘You can get out if you want,’ he said. ‘I’m not stopping you.’ She pulled at the door handle immediately but it was locked. She started to shout something at him, becoming frantic in an instant, but he quickly pressed the button to release the lock. ‘It’s automatic,’ he said. ‘It locks itself. It’s open now.’ She was out at once, door swinging wide. She ran to the other side of the road and stood there, panting, looking back at him as if she thought he might get out the little gun and shoot her.

  He leaned across the passenger seat and closed the door, started the engine. He counted slowly to ten, then put it in gear. She was still standing there. I will have to leave her, he thought. It’s her choice. But he didn’t want to now. If he left her he was certain she would be dead within twenty-four hours. He didn’t want her to die. She was his responsibility. Because he had done this, brought this situation about. If she died then he had killed three people for nothing.

  But he couldn’t force her to come either. He started the car rolling, saw she was looking down at her phone. He slowed, stopped, lowered the windows. In the wing mirror he saw her running towards the car, heard her shouting for him to wait. She got to the door and looked in through the open window. ‘She had to change phones,’ she said, breathless, voice really high-pitched. ‘That’s why I couldn’t get her.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  She opened the door and got in. ‘She says I’m to stay with you.’

  11

  The shop was so busy Julia was going to have to turn people out to get away on time. It was typical – slack all morning, and now a rush. She’d forgotten about the delivery too. A new freezer unit that had been on order for weeks. There were two guys manhandling it through the rear service doors now, as she stood watching them. She’d had to leave the teenager serving out front.

  The shop/ice cream parlour – selling ‘speciality ice cream’ made mostly by Julia herself from frozen yogurt – was right on the beachfront road, the pedestrianised lane that ran along the embankment wall from the tip of Marbella old town, as far as the marina. It was hers – or at least the long lease on the place was. She had used all of her money, none of Juan’s, kept it separate, got a lawyer involved. Juan had resented that, at the time – they had been about to get married, after all – but she had just weathered that storm, waited for him to forget it. Now he worked about as much as her in the place and she assumed that gave him some rights, given their legal status. She had never checked, but maybe she should.

  She was almost certain he was having an affair with a young waitress she had employed until about a month ago. If true it wouldn’t be the first time in their marriage. The third, in fact, and each time she had confronted him he had reacted the same – he had been crestfallen, seized with panic that she would leave him or tell Rebecca, crippled with guilt and full of apologies and promises. He insisted, of course, that it meant nothing. Maybe she believed that the first time.

  She shouted out some instructions to the delivery guys, to stop them taking half the wall away as they came through, then walked back through to the front to check. There was still a queue but it was getting smaller. The girl was doing OK. Beyond the open doors she could see the sun, bright on the sea. The weather had brightened up mid-afternoon – that was what was doing it – a little heat and it had brought them out.

  She walked back to the storeroom and saw they were almost done. She looked in her pocket for her mobile, to check the time, remembered it had died on her and was by the till out front, charging. She needed to call Rebecca, check she was back safe, check Juan had got there, as they had arranged.

  As one of the men stripped the protective card and styrofoam from the edges of the unit she switched the phone on. A text message came in straight away, but then the other man was in her face wanting her to sign something, saying she had received the fridge in good working order.

  She argued with the men, telling them they needed to plug it in and start it up before she would sign. Whilst they were doing that she walked back through the shop. There were only two customers left. ‘Well done, Ester,’ she said to the girl. ‘Sorry about that.’ She nodded a smile at the front customer. Everyone looked happy enough. She looked at her phone, got the text up. It was Rebecca’s number. She started to read the message. She frowned. Her heart skipped, the blood drained from her face: Mum get home qckly scared dont know what to do. Some kind of explosion at the house. OK, but need u to get here phones down so cant get anyone. A policeman dead. He tried to kill me. POLICEMAN TRIED TO SHOOT ME. This man says u r also in danger. Someone trying to kill us, he says. He thinks thats wot explsn was. knows my name, says here to help me. Carl. Says u have paid him to protect me. On hill. Will try to wait. He says I need to come with in his car. He saved my life. Call me back. Quick.

  She threw the bunch of keys at the girl as she was running out. The shop suddenly didn’t matter – she had to get to the car, get up the valley.

  She tried desperately to call Rebecca as she ran. But her phone was off, or disconnected. She composed a quick, clumsy message telling her she was on her way, then got to the car and tried to concentrate on getting up there as fast as possible.

  The fear was screaming in her skull all the way up through the town, then out onto the twisting, terrible road home. She kept the phone lying on the seat beside her whilst she kept her eyes on the road. She used the voice recognition to shout at the thing to call Rebecca without having to stop. But there was only ever the same dead voice telling her Rebecca was unreachable. She got the same message when she tried Juan. She wanted to send texts to both of them, but driving was the priority. She wanted to call the police too, but the message itself stopped her each time she started – she had to try to work out what the message meant. She couldn’t get her head round it. A policeman had tried to shoot her??? Was that a mistake? She had to get up there, see what Rebecca meant for herself.

  The drive took half an hour, if there were no tractors or ­tourists, forty-five minutes during the rush hours, when the routes out of Marbella were blocked. She cursed again and again that she had ever bought a place out in the hills.

  It had been cheap, spacious, isolated, and back then isolation was what she thought she had needed most of all to be safe. But that was a stupid idea, and she had known it was stupid for many years now. Isolation hadn’t kept her hid
den, it had merely left her exposed without help and witnesses. Michael Rugojev had found her here a year ago, his assistant turning up at the shop out of the blue. She should have done something then, moved house, sold the shop, moved countries, but she had trusted him, trusted the promises he had given. So here she was.

  She told herself it would be OK all the way up. Rebecca was clever, she had been told how to protect herself, taught caution. She would do what she had to.

  But when the phone signal went down she started to really panic inside. Cars passed her coming back the other way and she had to slow to check who was in them. Was it anyone she recognised, with Rebecca bundled into the back, out of sight? She knew no one called Carl. She remembered again the most prominent part of the message. Rebecca had written it in caps, shouting it. A policeman had tried to kill her? Maybe someone dressed as a policeman, or who looked like police. It had to be that. An error. But someone had shot at her. Julia went into a kind of frozen stupor thinking about it, unable to process the information in any useful way.

  As she got past the Ramirez place she saw smoke hanging in the valley, in the distance, and felt the shock kick at her heart. Was that from her house? Now she had to call the police, regard­less of the message – she would have to assume Rebecca had made a mistake. But then she saw a yellow ambulance and a red fire brigade truck crawling up the road ahead, saw a ­police car with lights flashing just behind them. The police were already onto it.

  The road was a one lane dirt track, barely maintained by the local council. It was just under two kilometres from where it turned off at the Ramirez house to their place. She knew the ruts and potholes well and was driving furiously, so that she quickly caught up with the trailing police car, but there was no room to pass. The passenger in the police car kept waving to her out of his window – trying to signal that she should stop or turn back.

  As they came to the last stretch of straight road she saw the house in the valley below and went numb with fear. It looked like the roof was completely destroyed. Both the fire truck and the ambulance had turned down the short lane to the front of the building. She could see there were already at least three cars there, on the flat parking area outside the front door, one another marked police car. She was going to drive straight down there, join them. But the police car she was following stopped abruptly in front of her, by the little olive trees at the bend, blocking her way. She braked to a halt and was already out and looking to run round it, her engine left on, door wide open, when one of them got out of the passenger side and moved to block her with hands in the air.

  ‘I live here,’ she shouted at him in Spanish, trying to push past, desperate. ‘It’s my home. I have to get to my daughter …’ She dodged low to go round him but he dropped an arm across her chest and caught hold of her arm. ‘You can’t go down there,’ he said firmly. ‘It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s dangerous …’

  ‘My daughter is down there. I have to get to her.’

  ‘Calm down and I will call my boss to speak to you. You can’t go down there.’

  She stepped back. She felt like hitting him, but that wasn’t going to work. She thought she might be able to twist away from him, duck under his arm, head down the valley side and run through the trees, but then the other one – the driver – appeared, shutting down the space between them and the car. She began to plead with the one holding her, telling him again and again about Rebecca, then started to shout for Rebecca at the top of her voice. The other was on his radio. She heard something about someone being killed. ‘Who has been killed?’ she yelled, voice becoming hysterical. ‘I live here. You need to tell me. This is my house.’

  She couldn’t get her eyes off it. It didn’t look like the place she lived in. She had an unreal sensation of being somewhere else. Walls were caved in, smoke coming through the roof. There were firemen moving in through the holes. For some reason she didn’t notice the half-buried car until they started to break its windscreen. She put her hand to her mouth. She thought it could be Juan’s car. Was he in it, was he the one who had been killed? She took a huge breath, feeling a premonition of something terrible, something truly terrible, coming right at her.

  12

  More police cars appeared from the road behind her, then a woman officer took hold of her arm and the others walked off. The woman started asking questions in an aggressive voice but she couldn’t answer any of them, could barely understand them, because all she could think about was Rebecca.

  Rebecca was somewhere here and they weren’t letting her get to her. She gave the woman her ID, got her phone out to check for a signal, only to have it promptly snatched from her grip. She started to protest hysterically – the phone was her last link to Rebecca. But no one was listening.

  Because of the position of the police cars she couldn’t see the body on the ground or the group of people around it until the woman moved her forward. It was lying in the road almost exactly in the middle of the turn-off down to the house. There were two police officers in uniform crouched beside it, someone in ordinary clothes standing a little further away. She couldn’t see it properly, only that it was an adult, too large for Rebecca. It looked like a policeman – she could see the uniform. But if it was the man Rebecca had texted about then she assumed it wasn’t a policeman. Because why would a policeman try to shoot her daughter?

  When the guy in charge appeared she started shouting at him, angrily, repeating over and over again that she was the girl’s mother so she had to be allowed to be with her and to use her mobile phone. ‘It’s my ten-year-old daughter Rebecca. She’s down there somewhere. I know she’s here.’

  ‘There is no little girl here,’ he said. He looked tired and irri­tated. ‘Your daughter is not here.’

  She forced herself to stand still in front of him, to look at him, to deal with him. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘Do you have ID?’

  ‘Diego Molina,’ he said, but he didn’t offer any ID as he turned hers over in his hand, scrutinising it as if it might be fake. He had her mobile in his other hand. ‘I’m an inspector.’ His face came into focus. He pocketed the phone and ID, held out his hand for her to shake. She ignored it, but he barely ­noticed. ‘I’m in charge here,’ he said. ‘You are Julia Martin? This is your house?’ He looked too young to be in charge of anything – thirty at most, clean-shaven, pretty features, unusually blond, wearing a pastel-blue open-necked shirt and off-white slacks, as if about to enjoy an evening in town, before this had struck. A beautiful lock of hair dangled over his forehead. He smelled strongly of aftershave.

  ‘This is my house, yes. Are you saying my daughter isn’t in the house, or anywhere here?’

  ‘No. There is no little girl here. Or anywhere near. Why do you think she would be here?’

  ‘She texted me. She told me she was here, only twenty ­minutes ago. She said she was on the hill, waiting.’ She was on the verge of reporting other things Rebecca had texted, but simple ­caution stopped her. What if the dead man, lying there, really was a policeman? She had a sudden thought that she should have erased Rebecca’s last text, then immediately thought the idea foolish, because surely Rebecca had made a mistake. In any case this man would need her access code before he could read the text. He hadn’t asked for that. Not yet.

  ‘OK. Then we will search again,’ he said. He motioned back to a man she saw was standing just behind him, also in ordinary civilian clothes, who nodded and started speaking softly into a handheld radio. ‘But not in this immediate area,’ Molina added. ‘We’ve already searched the house and grounds for survivors. We’re waiting for the helicopter now. It’s on its way from Malaga. It has specialist search capabilities. It will quickly cover these hills – better than we can on foot alone. Is there anywhere nearby that she would run to, if she was startled?’

  ‘She could be hiding in the garden, or down the slopes there. I think she probably meant the slopes below the house when
she said she was on the hill. She knows them, she plays there. You need to let me through, I can look and I can shout for her …’

  ‘You already have shouted. I’m sure she would have heard. I did, very clearly. And we’ve already been through the property. She’s not there. If she’s further out we will find her soon enough. She will not come to harm.’

  He didn’t have a clue. He didn’t know what he was up against, what had happened. But she couldn’t put him right. She had to keep her mouth shut or she would end up in some cell answering questions about the past instead of free to look for Rebecca. He was meant to be in charge though, so he was the one to work on. He looked honest – the way he looked at her, spoke to her, the way he wasn’t bristling with male hormones and the need to stamp his authority all over her – more intelligent than the types she was used to dealing with from the national or local police. When they came to the shop asking to see paperwork she was never sure whether she was meant to bribe them in some way.

  He suggested they get into a car and he would take the details he needed, instead of standing out in the open. ‘We are not sure it’s safe,’ he explained. ‘There has been an explosion. We thought it could have been an accident – a gas leak, perhaps – but then we found the dead man. He has been shot.’ He looked closely at her as he spoke. She struggled to assimilate it, her mind wanting to link it to what Rebecca had texted. She needed to know more, but he was already starting on his questions.