The Ice House

by John Connor

  ‘The phone was actually in La Linea somewhere, in the zone near the border. We’ve already taken steps to seal off the area. We think they might be headed for Gibraltar. It’s an easy way to avoid our systems. We need to go there right now and you must come with us. We have only photos of Rebecca – from her national ID fiche. But you will recognise her immediately.’

  16

  They were walking in the dark, somewhere in the backstreets of La Linea, looking for a suitable car. They had come about a kilometre and a half from the hotel, heading away from the border area, sticking to side roads, many of which were unlit, skirting the edges of the town. Beyond the centre, the town seemed to be slowly crumbling, everything dusty and dry and faded, cracks in the buildings, paint flaking off, an atmosphere of abandonment hanging in the air. All the people they saw were standing around – outside houses or shuttered shops or bars, at the entrance to overgrown playgrounds with screaming kids in pushchairs. No one looked like they had anywhere to go or anything to do. Everyone was either smoking or drinking from cans of beer.

  There was a large group of maybe a hundred and fifty young men gathered outside some public building with placards and banners, arguing vociferously, using gestures like it might spill into violence. He gave them a wide berth. He saw a few bars and restaurants open – and virtually empty – but many more boarded up. Boarded up shops too. Houses with ragged washing hanging from balconies. Piles of uncollected refuse in a few streets. It was very far from the Costa del Sol image.

  Rebecca said very little as they moved, kept very close to him, told him she didn’t like the place, that she was frightened. She was getting more upset as the hours wore on. He could see her struggling with what was happening, trying to fit it into some normal pattern which didn’t exist any longer. She kept asking if she could call her mother and he kept asking her not to. Once it got as far as her demanding her phone, him giving it to her. She had switched it on, he thought, but only for a few seconds, before fear got the better of her. The images from back at her house were still there, the primeval sense of overriding danger.

  In a dirty, badly lit, all-night store he bought her a Coke, some nuts and crisps. For a while then she walked along beside him eating and drinking, and then began to look less forlorn, even began to talk a bit about her friends. She wanted to call them too. And some cousin, in London. He told her there would be time soon for all that. Her mood picked up enough for him to think there must have been a blood sugar thing going on. ‘You need to tell me when you’re hungry,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t a clue about these things.’

  A few young men stared at them like they might be an opportunity for gain. But no one tried it on. And no one shouted at them, or pointed, or got on their phones as they passed. If the Spanish police were looking for a man and a young girl then that news hadn’t penetrated to here. He saw glimpses of TV sets in the bars, but no images of Rebecca on the screens. Where they had bought the Coke, the guy behind the counter had been occupied with a magazine and had barely looked at them. Carl thought most people would guess they were father and daughter.

  He was no expert at breaking into cars and starting them without keys. He’d learned how to do it as a teenager, in the years between his brother leaving and him joining the army. He’d been trouble for his mother then, a teenager in a rural town with nothing much to push against. There had been some bad incidents in those years, including many stolen cars. He was lucky none of it had ended in a criminal conviction.

  The army had saved him. The military had discovered he could shoot, put him in a special unit. After that he’d shot as part of the national team for two years, while still in the army, getting as far as the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan – but there had been no future in it. So he’d turned to Viktor, started doing security work for the wealthy Russian relatives he was working for. Then met Liz, maybe the only bit of his life that had been worth it. But he’d fucked that up, somehow, then drifted into using the only skill he had left – because the cartel had made him an offer. He hadn’t stolen a car in nearly twenty years.

  He assumed the technique was much the same now as it had been then, except more models were impossible to take, due to electronics, computers, et cetera. There were plenty of clapped-out fifteen-year-old rust heaps in La Linea though, too old to have immobilisers and alarms. Finding one he could actually get into wasn’t the issue. He had to find one that wouldn’t be missed for a while. With people lounging at every street corner that wasn’t so easy.

  They didn’t have an abundance of time either. He thought they would need to start towards the border just after ten. It was ten past nine now. He had thought about crossing over immediately they had arrived here, before there was any chance of the Spanish police getting organised enough to stop them, but then they would have been stuck in Gibraltar until half eleven – the time Viktor had given him for the charter flight he was arranging – and he didn’t like the sound of that. Gibraltar was tiny. If there was any kind of cross-border cooperation then the place would be like a net, with limited exit possibilities. If things were going to heat up then he preferred to be able to find a car and drive across the border into France or Portugal. From the position they were in now they had all of Europe to get lost in. Once they were in Gibraltar they were stuck.

  At nearly 9.30 he left Rebecca at a corner, within sight, and walked down a back alley full of rubbish skips – the service alley for a dilapidated row of shops – to a Ford Escort he thought might be a mid-nineties model. The doors were all open – with rusted locks that looked like they wouldn’t work – so he paused, listening in the dark for anyone approaching, then got in and tried to get it going. It looked like someone had already had the same idea. The steering column casing was missing, the wiring exposed. He looked at it and tried to remember what he should do, then started experimenting. Nothing happened. It was possible the battery was flat.

  He kept at it, trying different combinations. Then he realised he was guessing, making it up. He’d forgotten what you were meant to do, which wires you were supposed to touch together. But there were a limited number of them hanging out and it was only a matter of logic to try them all, in sequence. All the key did – if you had it – was make the connection between two wires. He just had to find those two wires.

  He had more or less done that – gone through every combina­tion – when someone spoke from right beside him. ‘Will it not work?’ she asked. He jerked his head up in surprise, banging it on the steering wheel. It was Rebecca, standing at the open passenger door. He rubbed his head. He was getting very careless. ‘I’ve forgotten what to do,’ he said. He got out. ‘Maybe we’ll just use the other car.’ He looked at his mobile and started to worry. They had a brisk walk to get back.

  ‘I thought you said the other car was dangerous?’

  He opened his mouth to argue with her, but then heard sirens, close.

  ‘Are they coming for us?’ she asked, but the sound was already drawing into the distance. He thought they were headed towards the centre of town. More followed close behind, one or two at first, intermittent, but building up. Within a few seconds he could make out maybe nine different sources. Something was going on. ‘Time to get back,’ he said.

  They walked quickly, taking a different route to the one he’d used previously. As they got back towards the centre the sirens were still there, coming from behind him, moving past along parallel streets. He slowed, started to check junctions before they got to them. He thought they could only be about a kilometre from the hotel and car.

  A police car turned into the street behind them. Lights and sirens off, it sped past them before he could even push Rebecca off to the side. Another followed. They were headed in the same direction he had intended to use. People started to come out of the houses, onto the streets, started shouting to each other. There was enough noise up ahead to suggest something big. Not just the sirens. He could hear shouting too, he
thought.

  ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘We’ll head towards the beach.’

  They took a route through the streets which he estimated moved around the square where the hotel was, but kept moving a little closer to it, so he could try to see what was happening. The town was built on the land falling away from a spine of hills marching out of the interior and down the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The heights stopped fifteen kilometres from Gibraltar, falling quickly into a thin isthmus of flat land that stretched out to the sudden mass of the rock. From the bay on one side of the isthmus to the Mediterranean on the other, it was only about a kilometre across; right at the point they had the border posts. That was where they were, at the tip of the town, the tip of Spain.

  The hotel was less than a kilometre from the border. As they came within sight of the sea he could also see back towards the hotel, looking in the other direction along one of the streets leading towards the town centre – a straight road running about half a kilometre inland to where he could see the top floors of the hotel. But he couldn’t see the actual square. About halfway along there were police cars blocking his view, stopping the traffic. There were officers out with riot shields and automatic weapons. They wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the car using that route.

  They kept going towards the shore instead, passing other streets into the town centre, but it was the same at every turn. Police cars, riot gear, all eyes focused away from them. They must be setting up a ring round the central zone. If they hadn’t left to find another car they would be trapped inside it, right now.

  They had everything with them – they didn’t need to go back to the hotel – but the car was there, inside the security perimeter. That was a problem.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked him again, as they came out onto the wide promenade that ran along the beach. The sea was over there, the night bright with artificial light, everything visible. He could hear waves rolling along the shore, smell the fresher air. Groups of people were moving away from the thin strip of sand, heading towards the police cordon. Locals, not tourists. There were no tourists here, as far as he could see.

  Off to the right, in the town, there was a continual noise of sirens now. He could hear chanting behind them, shouts, anger. It sounded like there was a sizeable crowd somewhere, back near the hotel. He stood still and watched the people moving quickly across the road, trying to assess the information. There were hardly any cars. ‘We can’t get back to the car,’ he decided.

  There was a sudden surge of noise, a huge massed shout, then a sound like gunshots. She said something to him about people shooting, but he told her it was only firecrackers. He felt her take hold of his arm and hold it, near the wrist. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You’re OK.’ Then they saw some rockets bursting in the air above the bay. Was it a party?

  Ahead of them there were wide areas of vacant land, the beach widened out and there was a ruin – a broken fortress sticking up from the sand. The road ran past it, to the side of a local football stadium, with four floodlight towers, but it looked deserted, dark. Past it was the border area – behind the stadium, so they couldn’t see it yet – and, beyond that, always there, dominating every view, the Rock, a towering white floodlit cliff, beckoning.

  He shouted out to a woman walking past them, her eyes on the back streets they had just left. He asked her in English what was going on. She shouted back at him in Spanish, but he didn’t understand Spanish.

  ‘She says it’s a huelga,’ Rebecca said. She let go of his arm. ‘That means a strike,’ she explained. ‘There’s a strike, a demonstration.’

  ‘A strike?’ He felt a little twinge of hope. Maybe it was nothing to do with them at all. He asked Rebecca to go over to a woman who was closing up a tobacco kiosk, on the promenade, overlooking the dirty strip of beach. ‘Ask her what’s going on,’ he said.

  He waited on his side of the road whilst she did it, then came back and told him. There was a strike going on – public service workers. Because they weren’t getting paid by the local government. Because of ‘the crisis’. Because of the border checks. It was the same every week. They set fire to things, smashed some cars, the police came and arrested them all.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’re OK.’ He guessed, from the noise, that the confrontation was going on in the square near the hotel. Maybe it was the group of men they had seen earlier.

  He still didn’t want to risk walking through the police lines, however. ‘Maybe we can just walk over the border,’ he said to her, thinking aloud. ‘We’ll walk to the end of this promenade and look. If we get past that football stadium we should be able to see the border post.’

  Maybe there was nothing to worry about after all. Get in the short queue he had seen from the hotel, walk through the customs post whilst the authorities were concentrating on the strike.

  17

  ‘This is organised crime,’ Molina told her during the car ­journey, on the toll motorway south to Gibraltar, siren wailing, blue lights flashing, all traffic moving over to let them pass. ‘There is no need for the guardia civil to be involved, no need for anti-terror units. The national police will handle it. You should have confidence in that. You should trust me.’

  It was the same speech Arroyo had given her. She nodded dumbly, watching the hills streaming past in the darkness, thought how only hours ago these hills had meant something to her, something beautiful, something she might point out to her daughter. But right now they were just lumps of rock, part of the distance to be covered to get to where Rebecca might be.

  Organised crime. He was right about that, she supposed, though he wouldn’t get near working it out.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to deal with Colonel Arroyo,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again. I have resolved the jurisdictional issues. This is my case now. And I want you to be clear – for me you are a victim here. You are assisting me. I am assisting you. You are not detained.’

  He had even added a smile. But she hadn’t believed a word. The other one – Arroyo – had been fixated on terrorists, but he had taken seriously Rebecca’s statements – he had been weighing whether it could be true that a policeman had shot at her. Molina wasn’t even considering that. He wouldn’t return her phone either. It was in a lab somewhere.

  She didn’t trust any of them. She needed to get away from them all. He had told her she was free to do that, but now she couldn’t because he was the best chance of getting nearer to Rebecca, because he was telling her they knew where she was. For now she had to stick with him, follow this through.

  That conversation had been half an hour ago. Now they were in a part of the customs post, on the Spanish side of the border with Gibraltar – a long, low building, with tinted, one-way windows facing onto the line of cars slowly moving through the passport check lanes, not ten metres in front of the building. There were lights all over, so they could see the front of the queue quite easily, see inside the cars, see the faces. It was like daylight.

  Just to the other side of the cars there was a shorter queue of pedestrians walking along the pavement to get in. The queue of cars was nothing compared to the last time she had travelled to visit Gibraltar, with Rebecca, about a year ago. Back then she had waited in the mid-afternoon heat for nearly three hours to filter through the customs checks, due to some dispute with the UK. But the cars and trucks stretched only to the first round­about now, about two hundred metres away. It was nearly ten in the evening.

  The route out of the colony was at the other side of the building they were in and she couldn’t see it at all. Molina had left other officers watching that. He had asked her to check every face she could see. He was standing next to her, looking over the shoulder of a woman who had a bank of CCTV monitors ranged on a set of desks in front of her, scrutinising the images on the screens. There were twelve cameras covering various parts of the border, Molina said, but mostly the entry side, for those
coming into Spain. That was the direction contraband goods passed – alcohol and cigarettes, mainly – out of the colony and into Spain, to be resold at higher prices.

  ‘There was a riot here last week,’ Molina said. ‘You must have heard about it.’

  She had. La Linea was threatened with bankruptcy, the local government unable to pay the wages of its workforce – so they had set fire to the mayor’s car, or the town hall, or something like that. The week before there had been something else, an attack on the border crossing in protest against the checks Spain had put in to prevent contraband.

  ‘That’s what the noise is?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the noise,’ Molina said. ‘The strike, the demonstration. It’s been going on every week for nearly a year.’

  She could hear the continual wail of sirens, shouting and chanting, coming from the other side of the dividing road that ran across the neck of the isthmus, from the bay in the west to the sea in the east. Whatever was happening was somewhere over there, in the town of La Linea itself. She could see the lights of police cars speeding along the roads into the town centre.

  ‘So all these police cars,’ she said. ‘They’re not looking for my daughter?’

  ‘Of course not. These are Arroyo’s men. The guardia civil has responsibility for disorder. We sent in plain cars, no lights, no noise. The man will bring her nowhere near the border if we barricade it off. We don’t want him to know we’re here.’

  Fat chance of that, she thought. Was this Carl likely to think that as all those police weren’t there for him he could just walk through them? She doubted it. ‘But are you sure something isn’t happening over there?’ she asked. ‘You sure it’s not connected?’

  ‘Something is happening, yes. As I said: it’s a riot.’ He was angry about it. ‘The same as last week. Just concentrate on the faces out there.’