The Ice House

by John Connor

  She felt a vibration in the floor, coming up through her feet, and thought it must be the lift again. She spun and hurried out.

  There was no plan now except to get out and call Drake. He had been right – she shouldn’t have done this. She came round the corner and heard a soft ringing sound as the lift reached her floor. She slowed, tried to compose her features as she moved, tried to look normal. She was about a metre from the stairwell doors, her face down, when the lift doors opened and someone stepped out.

  She looked up expecting a builder, saw the feet – clean black shoes, not dirty boots – saw the hand hanging there, the gun, a blunt black extension of his fist. For an instant her mind didn’t register what it was. She looked up at him, the white face, the ordinary hair and appearance, the clean-shaven chin, the eyes on her. The guy from La Linea.

  She was right by the door, her hand starting to reach out to push it open. He took a step towards her and brought the gun up. She saw his finger on the trigger, saw his other hand moving towards the gun, a long black metal tube held in his fingers.

  She thought there would be a shot, she would scream, she would try to run. She thought if she moved quickly enough the bullet might miss altogether. She had to go for it. If she didn’t she was dead.

  But nothing happened. No movement. Her legs were like lead, her chest so heavy she had to heave the air in. Her mind was lucid, she knew what had to be done, but her body wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do anything.

  ‘Move back,’ he said quietly. ‘Go back to the end of the corri­dor.’

  It was fear holding her in place, fixing her in front of him. If he fired it would hit her stomach. She wanted to say ‘I saw you in Spain, I know you,’ but instead heard her voice coming out of her mouth in a weak rasp: ‘Who are you? What have you done with my daughter?’

  ‘Go back,’ he said again. ‘Move back now.’

  Her brain took her eyes to the metal tube in his left hand. His eyes were on hers, trying to hold her gaze, but he moved his body slightly, awkwardly, trying to shield the gun from anyone who might be behind him. Something slotted into place and she recognised, from somewhere, that the metal tube was a silencer. She imagined him getting it out in the lift, wanting to screw it onto the pistol before he got anywhere near her. If he fired at her now the builders at the end would hear. At least the builders – the noise would be loud. Everyone in the block might hear. So he wanted her round the corner, out of sight. He wasn’t just going to let her walk through the doors and get away, but he needed time to fit the thing onto the gun. So she had time too, maybe only moments before he decided on the risk.

  ‘Where’s my daughter?’ she asked again. ‘Where have you taken her?’

  ‘I’ll only ask you once more,’ he said, but the gun was lowered now, at his side. ‘Turn around and go back.’

  ‘So you can kill me like that woman through there?’

  His eyes changed expression, but he said nothing. He knew about the dead woman. He had been in there already. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I don’t care what you do to me. I just want to know my daughter will be safe.’

  ‘So go back. Go back and we can talk about it.’ He had the temerity to smile slightly, as if she were utterly stupid and feckless, as if he could fake something like that and she would go for it. ‘All I want to do is talk to you,’ he repeated.

  ‘I know you work for Zaikov,’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘Zaikov?’

  ‘You’re Carl Bowman. I know who you are.’

  ‘I’m Philip Jones. I’m police,’ he said. He had a standard kind of London accent. He sounded convincing. But she was certain he wasn’t police. ‘I don’t know who Zaikov is,’ he said. ‘But I do know Bowman. I can help you there.’

  ‘Who is the dead woman?’ she asked. ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He said it almost flippantly, the little smile still there. ‘I’m police. I don’t kill people. She’s Bowman’s girlfriend. Bowman killed her, we think. He’s dangerous, and he has your daughter. Go back to the flat and I’ll tell you what I know. We can pool what we know. You help us and we help you.’

  He raised the gun again and she could see the thoughts moving across his face – the decision, the risk. Shoot her now and run, or delay, try to get her back there where it was safer.

  ‘I’ll move if you tell me where she is,’ she said. Her last ­gamble. If he refused she had to yell, run.

  ‘She’s safe,’ he said. ‘But she’s not here. She’s in Helsinki, with Bowman. If you help me she will be—’

  Helsinki.

  But there was no time to think about that, no time to work out whether it was a lie or truth. He stopped speaking because behind him a door slammed shut and a man appeared at the other end of the corridor, walking towards them. She switched her gaze over his shoulder, saw a yellow hard hat, a man with some kind of power tool held in both hands, looking straight at her.

  Jones had a warning glare with his eyes. He was trying to appear relaxed, moving the gun down to the line of his leg, shifting stance so he could turn quickly. She got immediately what would happen if she shouted – he would turn and shoot the man. She waited until Jones was sideways on, his head moving to look back, then put her shoulder against the stairwell door and dived through.

  34

  He was coming after her. All the way down the stairs she thought she could hear him coming after her. She couldn’t look, couldn’t get her eyes up, because she was taking the steps three and four at a time, leaping down, gathering speed, getting more and more out of control. Hand on the rail to pull herself round the bend on each floor, banging into the walls, tripping, catching herself, ducking, breath and heart hammering in her ears, the pain bad in her injured knee.

  She tried to count the floors but couldn’t concentrate on anything but her footing, on keeping her eyes on what was ­coming. She glimpsed a sign painted on the wall next to a door she almost went straight through – ‘3’. The third floor. By now her legs were shaking and she was in real danger of falling head first. The swollen knee wasn’t going to hold up. She made herself slow enough to keep her balance.

  Then, as she plunged down the next flight, she glanced up momentarily. Saw nothing. She realised she couldn’t hear anything either – just the din she was generating, echoing through the spaces – no footfall in pursuit.

  She grabbed the rail to stop herself, slammed into the wall and held her breath. Silence. He wasn’t following.

  She heard the lift mechanism and let herself gulp in the air. He was using the lift. She set off again, slightly more carefully, her ears on the sound, trying to place it. The builder had been going for the lift too. Would Jones get in the same lift as him? Not with a gun. So maybe he was waiting for the other lift.

  She heard it start up, an additional vibration, just as she came in sight of the ground level. She paused long enough to not be gasping for air, then walked the last few paces and pushed open the door very slowly, staring through the little pane of glass first. An empty foyer, the street outside.

  She ran for it. Turned sharp left under the scaffolding, dodged some people – a woman and a child – put her head down, went full speed in a jerky limp, ignoring the pain. She had to get to the car.

  She saw people staring at her then reached the turn towards Brook Green. She went straight over the road, not looking behind to see if any car was turning after her, relying on her ears. Someone braked with a screech, but she didn’t look. She dodged a bicycle, made the opposite pavement, got her head down again.

  She counted the turn-offs, didn’t pause to look back once. The car was on a street three back from the main road. The turns passed her quickly. Nice little streets with trees and expensive little Victorian semis. She found the one she thought she had put the car in but couldn’t see it. She stopped and concentrated. There were rows of parked cars down both sides, al
l the way down the street. A drop of rain picked at her face. Wrong street, she decided. She had passed only two, turned too soon. She felt panic leaping in her gut. She would have to turn back.

  She walked back to the junction, looked down towards Hammersmith Road and immediately saw him, about two ­hundred metres back on the opposite side. He had just come round the corner. Maybe he hadn’t even known where she had gone. But he knew now. She saw him pause then start to walk quicker, coming up the road towards her. She bit her lip, wanted to cry at her own stupidity, turned on her heels and limped off again. Would he try to shoot her in broad daylight, in the middle of London?

  As soon as she got to the next turn she saw the car. She kept running, digging in her jeans pocket for the keycard, got it out when she was still twenty metres away, clicked it to open the doors, saw the lights flash. How long did she have?

  She opened the driver’s door, threw herself in, fumbled to start the engine, looked to the end of the road. He hadn’t appeared yet. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would change his mind.

  The engine wouldn’t start. She was pressing the wrong button. She made herself think it through. She was being exceptionally stupid. She had been staring at the end of the road, frantically pressing the button that operated the air conditioning. She put her thumb on the right button and the car started at once.

  She slipped the stick into reverse, tried to edge back, eyes always on the end of the road. She felt it bump the car behind, gently, put the wheel on full lock, jerked into the road, almost stalling. A car pipped, but she couldn’t even see it. She kept going, straightening up. But she was on the wrong side of the road again. She veered to the left, pressed the accelerator a little. Maybe only fifteen metres to the junction. What then? Turn right, away from him, pick up speed.

  Then he was there, sprinting towards her, his eyes right on her. She couldn’t believe it. The gun was in his hand, in full view. He was coming across the pavement at the end of the junction, running like he would come right out in front of her. She heard herself scream with fright, swerved slightly away from him, saw his arm come up and realised he was actually going to shoot. He was in the road now, almost blocking her. She would have to go round him, but then he would shoot as she passed, straight into the windscreen, point-blank.

  She flicked the wheel towards him instinctively, a tiny movement, her foot flat on the accelerator, the car still in ­second gear, engine roaring. She saw the shock flash across his face, saw him try to stop in his tracks. The gun was pointed at the front of the car. She thought it fired, but the noise was drowned out. There was a bang as she struck his hips and legs. Then he was a blur of movement in the air, a black shape filling her view, his head arching up and over, then down with a crack, straight into the top part of the windscreen. The glass shattered, blood spattering over the cracks. He was catapulted up and over, across the roof and back. She hauled the wheel over, foot on the brake, saw a car swerving through a tiny patch of clear glass. She braked to an emergency stop, screeching to the other side of the junction, pointed back down towards Hammersmith Road. A moment later she was knocked viciously forward by a rear impact, her head smashing off the steering wheel.

  She sat dazed, foot pressed against the brake, engine revving really hard. Then pressed the button and stopped it, tried to see behind in her mirrors. There was no one in the road. No one running at her. She couldn’t see anything clearly though. She started the engine again, heard someone shout something, tried to move forward and heard a violent scraping noise. She put it into neutral, opened the door and got out.

  He was about six metres back, in the middle of the junction, half underneath another car, the one that had been behind her. His head and chest were out of sight, beneath it. It had clearly gone over him. He wasn’t moving. There were people running towards him, converging on the scene, cars stopped across the road she had come onto. Two people were already there beside him, crouching down, shouting. Someone else, off to the side, was pointing at something near a storm drain – the gun. The driver from the car that had rear-ended her – a man, middle-aged – was sitting at the wheel staring ahead, not looking at her, not looking at anything, running a hand over his face.

  No one was looking at her. No one.

  But that would change soon.

  She started to walk away from it. She moved around her own car, over to the kerb. She expected shouts, people trying to stop her. Her head was throbbing badly. She put a hand up and felt a bump above her left eye, angry and sore. No blood, but her nose was trickling again. She pulled some tissue from the jacket pocket, wiped it, quickened her pace, then thought better of it. She slowed, tried to move normally. Still no one shouted. She kept going, didn’t look back. People were walking past her, looking behind, going towards it all, paying no attention to her. She went round them, got down to Hammersmith Road, waited for a space, crossed it, then started running towards the Broadway and the tube station.

  35

  He was in a pitch-black suffocating enclosure, in the bilge, ­beneath the lowest deck of the boat, in a curved space intersected with the thick iron ribs that braced the outer, reinforced hull structure. It was some kind of watertight compartment, turning the hull into a double-skinned structure, between sealed bulkheads, a safety feature.

  At its lowest level, if he let himself slide down there, towards where the keelson would be, he sank up to his knees in bilge water. The distance across, from outer skin to inner hull, was a little further than the length of his arm at head height, narrow­ing to about fifteen centimetres where it curved under the hull towards the keel. The hatch they had pushed him through was about a metre above his head, just within reach. He would be able to get up to it by bracing his legs against the inner and outer walls – if his legs would stop shaking.

  There was no light at all, not even a crack of it coming through the seal on the hatch, so he could see absolutely nothing. He had figured out where he was by feeling his way around, very slowly. He had worked a big boat like this once, as engine room crew, in his teens. A summer job. Sometimes they’d sent him down to clean the bilge pump, so he knew the rough structure.

  The air stank of engine oil and stale sea water. He had to breathe deeply to get enough of it into his lungs but he wasn’t sure if that was an effect of the repeated tasering, or because there wasn’t much air down here. He had read about people sent to clean huge metal storage tanks dying because there was no oxygen in the bottom level. He tried to wedge himself against the outer hull and stay as high up as possible.

  ‘Make a noise and we’ll give you more,’ they had told him as they pushed him in. Meaning more tasering. By that point everything had been a blurred daze, his brain not working properly at all, his heart labouring, his breath so constricted he had felt as if he were asphyxiating. He had dropped the two and a half metres from the hatch without really knowing what was happening, smashing his head and knee off the bulkhead on the way down. He could feel blood trickling from a cut behind his ear. But at least – as far as he could recall – the son hadn’t used the baseball bat on him. Not yet.

  They hadn’t wanted a mess up there, hadn’t wanted a mess on their clothes – they were headed for the shareholders’ meeting, had no time to deal with him, and didn’t want to do it there, in Helsinki harbour. But they were going to do it, sometime later, out to sea. They were going to ‘question’ him, then kill him. He knew all this because he had heard them talking about it all as he lay there being repeatedly shocked, his body like a quiver­ing rigid board, but his mind – at least at first – startlingly un­affected.

  He had been tasered before, as part of the military training programme, but not like this. He had no idea how long it had gone on, or what the charge was. It seemed more powerful than what he had been through before. And they hadn’t stopped until he had repeatedly blacked out. How long had that taken, and how long had he been out? He didn’t know that either. But they must have
dragged him to the hatch leading here whilst he was unconscious, then waited for him to come round to put him in. The son and Zaikov had disappeared by then, presumably into the sleek Mercs back on shore, and it was the big man who had used the taser who had manhandled him into here.

  He didn’t know how long he had before they came back from their meetings, because he didn’t know what time it was now, didn’t know how long had elapsed since he had been put in this place. They were due to finish at seven, he knew, because that also had been discussed in front of his prone form. And it had been mid-afternoon when all this had started. But time had slipped and slid away from him as he waited for his heart and brain to recover. There had been a persistent mental confusion which was only now dissipating. When he had full control of his muscles he would need to work out what he was going to do. Or they were going to set sail, pull him out and kill him. He had no doubt about that.

  He eased himself back against the freezing outer hull, throbbing with engine vibrations, and tried to get his breathing regular. He tried to relax, but still the buzzing was there, in his legs and arms, across his chest, the feeling you got when you banged the nerve in your elbow, but magnified many times over and through many sets of muscles.

  What had gone wrong? Zaikov had looked down at him, writhing on the deck – looked down at him with eyes filled only with hatred – and said something like, ‘He is too small, too stupid. How could he have killed Uri?’ Uri. The dead son. They were blaming him for that, for the events of ten years ago. But why?

  He forced his mind back there, into the past. It had been a crystal-clear memory for so long but now he couldn’t get it to focus properly, not with his brain struggling to rewire itself. That was an effect of the tasering that he’d read about – the mental sluggishness, the loss of memory. It would pass, sooner or later. Maybe. Or he’d have a reaction – the name of which he’d forgotten – and pass out, stop breathing, die.