The Ice House

by John Connor

  The space was only just big enough to fit her. The sides seemed to be of wood, the cover lined with some metal, maybe to dampen sound. The seal – whatever it was – was very tight. She could see absolutely nothing, not even a crack of light. She thought there was an odour of fish. Already she wondered how long she had been in there. She started to count off the seconds in her head, then heard voices more clearly, more movement, a sound like a bang, then a scuffle. She held her breath again and felt the panic rising in her throat. She had an urge to scream. She put her knuckles in her mouth, started to suck in air like she was having an asthma attack.

  She was just getting the better of it when she heard the gunshots. Very loud, near her. She jumped so much her head banged off the metallic surface above her. Then she could hear a man shouting, and for the first time her thoughts came back to Alex. Was it him? She couldn’t tell. But where was he? The thought made her forget her own predicament. If the man in the room above hadn’t already been to the stables then he might go there now. Or Alex might hear the shots and run down. She should get out, try to warn him. She couldn’t just skulk here and let the man surprise him. He would kill Alex as he had killed the guard. She felt a sudden leaping fear thinking about it, quite different to the emotion that had gripped her when she was thinking only of running. Because now she had to do something, she had to get out there, face it.

  She pushed gently on the cover, trying to get it to move, but it felt solid. She pushed harder, putting her knees against it, but that was useless too. She started to shout, involuntarily, but shut herself up quickly and made herself think about it. She felt her way around the parts of the lid she could reach. There had to be a switch or release mechanism. She couldn’t be trapped here. But what if she had got in the wrong end? What if the switch was nearer her feet? There was no room to sit up and reach down there. The man might kill everyone and she would be left here, in the middle of nowhere. Would anyone come before her air ran out?

  She found it. A small metal catch. She pushed it one way, then another, heard another shot from up above. The catch clicked when she pulled it towards her and the lid moved slightly – light poked in, dazzling her. She lay still, listening intently, found the leather strap she had used to pull the lid down on her and held it from opening any further.

  Now she could hear properly. Noises from the rooms above. Loud blows, grunts, furniture moving, someone fighting. She eased on the strap and the false boards swung up enough for her to raise her head and look across the kitchen floor. She couldn’t see any feet. She let go of the strap and as the cover sprang back pushed herself out of the hole. She could hear a muffled cry for help, from the next room, the dining room.

  What happened next became very scrambled in her memory. She thought it sounded like someone was struggling through there, shouting for help, and could remember thinking definitely that the voice sounded like Alex’s. She could not remember picking up a knife as she passed the work surface, but as she pushed open the doors into the dining room she was certainly holding a long, thin filleting knife from the rack.

  What she saw was not what she had been expecting. Above the long, mahogany dining room table a man was hanging by his neck, kicking wildly with his feet, a strangled, terrible scream coming from beneath a black hood that covered his head. His hands were tied behind his back and he was spinning and turning through the air as he scrabbled desperately to get one foot then the other down onto the table. The rope holding him was looped through a fixture in the high ceiling above the dining room table and another man was hauling on the end of it, trying to get the hooded man off the table, trying to hang him.

  As she came in the man hauling at the rope was struggling back towards her, his body straining at a sixty-degree angle, both hands tangled in the rope and heaving at it. She couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see anything of him. It might have been the man she had seen earlier with the gun. He was grunting and cursing at the struggling man. He didn’t turn round as she came in, didn’t even notice her. All his attention and strength was on getting the man off the table.

  She knew the hanging man was Alex, knew with absolute certainty, without checking the clothing or trying to interpret the cries. But she could not remember crossing the floor towards the one trying to kill him. The distance was no more than five metres. She didn’t know whether she walked it or ran, had no memory of any thoughts going through her head between ­coming through the doors and then being there behind the man. Except that it was Alex on the end of the rope. And she had to do something.

  She stabbed the man three times in quick succession, using one hand to jab the knife into his exposed back, the other to push at his shoulder, forcing him sideways and away from the rope. When he fell to the ground, releasing the rope with an exclamation of surprise, she slashed towards him again, missing this time as he stumbled across the floor, blood coming out of him, his eyes wide with surprise. Alex came down onto the table with a heavy bang, the table splitting and collapsing beneath him. She turned her attention only briefly towards it, but as she did the one she had stabbed continued to crawl away from her.

  She was torn between the need to get to Alex, to get the noose off his neck and check him, and the need to make sure the stabbed man wouldn’t come back at her. She glanced round for a weapon he might have ready but could see nothing. When he was about five metres across the room he pushed himself to his feet, screaming now at the top of his voice, then crashed in a half fall, half run, through the doors at the opposite side.

  She dropped the knife, stepped over to the broken table. Alex was on the floor beneath a part of it, struggling and yelling, still hooded. She got her hands around the rope and pulled frantic­ally, trying to loosen it. It gave and she got it off, then pulled the hood over his head and opened her mouth to say something.

  But it wasn’t Alex. It was Michael.

  43

  Carl had been out for hours. He had a red swelling across his left cheek, where he’d hit his face on the floor when he went down. The knee was still stiff, from the boat, but he could walk. He could not have been unconscious that long, he thought, or his memory would be scrambled worse than it had been before. Instead he could remember everything with clarity. He must have passed out for only a few seconds. But unlike the first time he hadn’t returned to wakefulness when it was over. Instead, it seemed, he had remained there, flat out on the floor, for nearly five hours.

  Doing what? Sleeping? Semi-conscious? It must have been something like that, his body giving him no choice over it. He had come round five hours later and started panicking about the time lost. How far away could Rebecca be now? The thought made his heart race, and he didn’t need that. He forced himself to be methodical, to pick up with what he had been doing when he had blacked out – searching for a method of locating Viktor. There was no other way of finding her.

  He was looking at a phone he had found in a room off the kitchen when he glanced out of the window and saw the figure. Whoever it was, they were about thirty metres away, on the drive leading down from the security gates: a figure about his own height standing off to the side of the track, just outside the halo of light cast by the tungsten lamps lining the driveway at ten metre intervals. Just standing there.

  The only reason he noticed was because the light in that room was dim, a single weak bulb in the ceiling behind him, so there was less glare across the glass than in other rooms. He reached back and switched the light off, cancelling the remaining reflections across the window pane. But that far off from the house it was impossible to make out details. A man, he decided, watching the front of the house, not obviously armed, but standing so that he wasn’t illuminated very clearly. He would be able to see Carl clear as day. If there were others then Carl might be in their sights already. He stepped back, went through the kitchen door, dropped to the floor. His head spun a little with the movement, but not too badly. His heart was steady.

  The fi
gure would be merely covering the gate, he thought. There would be more than one. So he would have to deal with it, get away from here altogether. It would be people sent by Zaikov – that was his best guess – either for him or Viktor or both of them. He had been careless, leaving the gates open, all the security systems off, as he had found them on his return.

  He crawled across the floor quickly, trying to listen at the same time. The gun he had was in the top box of the bike, which he had left outside the house, so that was out of the question. But in the past Viktor had kept guns in the cellar – shotguns he used for hunting trips. He went to the cellar door on his knees, the damaged one very sore, opened it, stood and went quickly down.

  Concentrating on noises from the level above, he switched the lights on and found the bolted metal gun case. It hadn’t moved since he had last looked at it. It was secured with a chain, no sign of a key, so he took a discarded section of piping and used it like a crowbar. The chain held but not the hoop it was fed through. It came away with a bang, the pipe clattering across the floor. He paused for any sign of a reaction upstairs, then opened the doors to a selection of shotguns and ammunition. He picked an expensive Purdey double-barrelled model and stuffed a box of cartridges into his pocket, feeding two into the barrels and snapping them shut.

  There was a door and steps that led directly to the rear gardens from the cellar. He opened the door quietly, crept up, then slid quietly into the chill night and crouched low, letting his eyes adjust, scanning for movement. There was plenty of light coming from the house to assist. He would move carefully to the front, he thought, clear the area there so he could get on the bike, then get out.

  The ground from the corner of the house to the front drive was clear of foliage, so before he got anywhere near it he cut into a section of garden where there were trees and bushes, a little further off from the house. Then he went low and picked a route through the cover, sometimes on his belly, pine needles pricking into his hands. He could smell the pine resin, feel the cold air on the back of his head.

  Up until now he had been thinking he would get a visual on the one at the front and shoot, from as far away as would guarantee accuracy, then get to the bike. But now he thought it might be better to get a closer look at the man, take him down without firing the gun if possible. He could then try to identify who he worked for, find out for sure if it was Zaikov.

  So he went a bit deeper into the ornamental trees and came back towards the drive from a position a little behind where he guessed the man would be standing. But when he parted the grasses obscuring his view he saw nothing. He dragged himself forwards and saw the guy had moved closer to the house.

  He stood carefully, brought the Purdey up to his shoulder, holding it ready, pointed at the man’s back. Then he stepped onto the drive, paying attention to any movement in his ­peripheral vision, and slowly moved forwards.

  The man was facing towards the house, right in the light from one of the lamp-posts now. Then he went down onto his haunches and something about the movement made Carl think, immediately, that it wasn’t a man at all. He kept going forwards, then decided. It was a woman. That made him pause.

  He was behind her. She had short hair and was squatting on the ground, one knee down, the shoulders shaking. Like she was laughing. Or crying. Or maybe just shivering badly with the cold. He could see no weapon at all. He waited until he was only five metres behind her, the gun still aimed directly at her head, then spoke quietly: ‘Get up. Turn slowly.’

  She sprang up so quickly he had to move the gun to keep it aimed. He kept his eyes on her hands, looking for weapons, but there were none. As she spun to face him the light from the nearest floodlight, off to the left, came directly across her face.

  His jaw dropped. He moved the gun off to the side and heard himself cry out. ‘Liz,’ he said. ‘Christ. Liz.’

  She was looking at him with something like horror. ‘Alex,’ she said, almost shouting it. ‘Where’s your fucking brother? What have you done with my daughter?’

  44

  In the back of the Range Rover Rebecca stared through smarting, bloodshot eyes at the narrow band of road visible in the powerful headlights. She was so tired her eyes kept rolling up into her head. Then she would be gone for a few minutes before another jolt in the motion woke her, head lolling, neck sore, and she was back in the car, the same, featureless, narrow road lit by the beams, the same wall of jagged shadow towering either side.

  They were passing between dense ranks of briefly illuminated pine trees, so high it sometimes felt they were driving through an endless tunnel. The road surface was buried beneath compacted snow and ice which made a weird rumbling noise as the chained wheels went over it. If she looked out of the window by her seat she could see nothing but vague, looming shadows ­sliding by; only very occasionally was there a gap allowing a glimpse of brilliant white stars in a clear sky.

  They had stopped twice for her to go to the toilet and she had tramped through knee-deep snow and squatted shivering in the intense cold, frightened she would freeze to death before she could get back to the safety of the vehicle.

  There were two men she didn’t know in the front – men who worked for Viktor, one of them his driver. They spoke only Russian, and not very often. Viktor mostly acted as if they weren’t there, and to help him there was a glass screen between the front and back of the car which he could close, like in a taxi in London. When it was shut, even if they were speaking to each other, you couldn’t hear them in the back.

  Viktor sat in the back with her. They had travelled in a small, four-seater helicopter first, then another helicopter that had been larger, with two people who looked like soldiers flying it – at least, they had on some kind of uniform and helmets. After that, in darkness, in some freezing place Viktor had told her the name of, they had got into this car. How long ago was that? She had no idea. The entire journey had been the same whenever she opened her eyes. She hadn’t been able to sleep for the first part of it – up to the second toilet stop – but after that it had been hard to stay awake.

  Viktor had said hardly anything to her throughout the helicopter trips – just a few words every now and then to convince her everything was OK. Then for the first hour in the car he had been working on a laptop on a shelf that came out of the partition in front, typing on the keyboard, speaking into an earpiece with a mic in some language she didn’t understand.

  She had asked him if he had spoken to her mother, or Carl, many times, and always he had replied politely, gently, with a smile. But he hadn’t spoken to them. They were moving from Finland, he had said, because they were going to where her mum was. The people that had got her mother out of Spain had brought her to Russia, because they were connected to Viktor, and because that had been easiest. It was just a ‘slight change of plan’.

  After the last toilet stop he had looked tired. He had put the laptop away and started talking to her, just at the point she most needed to sleep. ‘Did you ever love anyone?’ he had asked her. She told him she loved her mother, frowning, but too tired to wonder why he was asking that. Then he started to tell her about someone he had loved and whom he would have given his life for but she had betrayed him in the worst possible way, and now he couldn’t do anything properly, he said, it was like she had broken something in him, something that had made him able to appreciate the world and other people. ‘Now I hate everything,’ he said. ‘The truth is I hate everyone. All these ­people around me …’ He waved his hands as if there were hundreds of people standing around him. ‘I couldn’t care less whether they live or die.’ Then he laughed, as if she wasn’t there. ‘I need to rewind the clock. Go back. Undo what she did to me. You understand?’

  She didn’t. ‘You don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘About hating everyone. You can’t mean that. What about your brother?’

  He had looked quickly at her then, the laughter all vanished from his face, his mouth so mis
erable and hard that she had started to get frightened. She must have reacted in some way that gave that away because he took a breath and smiled again. ‘Nah. You’re right,’ he said. He reached a hand across and patted the back of her hand on the seat between them. ‘How could you hate your own family, your own flesh and blood?’ Then he stared at her for a very long time, so hard she had to look away.

  ‘We should all sleep,’ he said. But she couldn’t close her eyes then, and kept her head facing the other way, so she was looking out of the window, away from him.

  ‘I envy you,’ she heard him mutter. ‘You have been with your mother all your life.’

  She didn’t ask him what he meant because she didn’t like the way he was talking, and just wanted him to stop, but she guessed that he meant that his own mother had died.

  ‘Some people are one of a kind,’ he went on, a bit louder.

  Was he talking to himself? She closed her eyes, trying to pretend she was asleep, hoping he would stop.

  ‘They light you up,’ he continued. ‘So that you really live, really see things. Nothing else means anything. The money is all worthless. But then if the light goes out, what do you do?’

  She kept her eyes closed but he said her name, three times, to get her to look at him, and when she did, finally, he just shrugged. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This is down to them. Their fault.’

  She had no idea what he was talking about. ‘When will we be there?’ she asked.

  He smirked. ‘In fifteen minutes. Then no more travelling for you. I promise.’

  ‘And my mum will be there already?’

  ‘I doubt it. But you can call her. Tell her where you are. I think she will want to know. And once she knows, I’m sure she’ll get there as quick as she can.’