by John Connor
The last time he had been to the place was ten years ago, but he doubted much had changed. The roads were poor once you got to the eastern part of Finland, worse over the border. ‘We can get to the border in four hours,’ he said. ‘After that it depends …’
‘I told her I would be there in five hours.’
‘It will be more like seven.’ He strode back through the house, through the kitchen and down the passageway that led to the garage. He pulled the door open and switched on the lights. She was still with him. ‘Don’t worry. We will get there. We will get her.’ He could hear the confidence in his voice. He wasn’t faking it. He was absolutely certain he would get to Rebecca and she would be alive. There was no other way he could think about it. She was his daughter. He felt his heart leaping with a kind of absurd exultation, despite everything. But Liz started to cry again and he stopped in front of her, not knowing what to say to help.
‘I’m so frightened,’ she said. ‘I’m scared he will kill her before we get there …’
‘He couldn’t. He couldn’t do that.’ He said it without thinking and saw the look she gave him. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He could hire someone to do it, but he couldn’t do it himself. Not to a little girl. I saw him with her. He couldn’t do it.’
Her face twisted into a grimace. ‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ she said. ‘He could easily do it. He’s fucking insane. He’s a psychopath. The only reason he hasn’t already done it is because he can use her to get me too.’
He turned away from her. She was right, but he didn’t want her to see that he knew that. He didn’t have a clue what Viktor was capable of, not any more. There were a massive questions in his head, each one a malignancy threatening to rewrite the entire history of his last ten years. He would need to get to them, work them out, try to get some sense back. But right now, he just needed to get them out of there, get started.
He found car keys hanging on a rack. There were three cars in the garage but the BMW X5 was Viktor’s winter car, so he took the keys for that. There were covers on it. He started pulling them off, while she stood a little away from him, her face in her hands.
48
Rebecca stood alone in the room, staring at the door. She felt dizzy, like she might fall over. She leaned against the wall and tried to think. Viktor had brought her up here himself, left her here, walked off. She had heard his footsteps in the passageway beyond. She could come or go as she wished, he had said. He had promised the door would never be locked.
When she had come off the phone she had been very confused, not sure why her mum had said the things she had, or why she had sounded so frightened. But she had already been too tired to speak properly by then. She hoped she hadn’t upset her. Freezing, she had got back in the car when Viktor had taken the phone, so hadn’t heard anything he said after that.
When he had returned she had looked him in the face and told him her mum had sounded worried. It had felt scary, keeping what her mum had said from him. He hadn’t done anything bad to her since she had met him. Not really. He had talked a little weirdly in the car, kept her awake, but that was it. Yet she was definitely frightened he might guess what her mum had said.
She thought he might start asking about it. But he didn’t. He wasn’t even watching her closely. She had concentrated carefully on his eyes when she spoke to him, because her mum had taught her you could tell if a person was lying by watching their eyes. But he had only looked down at her with a slight smile and said, ‘Your mum’s probably missing you. That’s all. She’ll be here tomorrow. Not long to wait.’
There was nothing in his eyes that would scare her. He was acting the same as before, the same as he always had. As they walked back to the house he even held her hand, to guide her across the ice on the driveway. So what was the problem? Why had her mum said those things?
Her problem right now was that she could barely keep her eyes open. Every now and then she felt them close and then woke suddenly – immediately, it seemed – with a start, frightened again, wondering where she was. She tried hard to think clearly, to remember her mum’s instructions. What had she told her to do? Hide from Viktor? But where? And why?
Viktor had said one of them would bring her up a hot chocolate in a few minutes, but she didn’t know whether she could wait for that. She went over to the huge bed and sat on it.
The room – like the whole house – resembled something out of a film, something for a princess. She had said that to Viktor, on the way in, and he had laughed. ‘You are a princess,’ he had said. The ceiling was very high, with patterns painted across it that she couldn’t quite decipher. There was a huge double bed, with a massive quilt, as if the room might get cold. But the house was very warm – radiators along the walls, three of them, and though she couldn’t now be bothered to get up and feel them, she was sure they would be hot. There was a window, but there were heavy curtains in front of it, with some kind of dark, floral pattern embroidered into the fabric. On the walls many pictures, hunting scenes, one that looked like a prince or king – someone on a horse with a crown – visiting this place, or a place that looked very similar. Crowds of people bowing in front of him.
In the ceiling there was a small chandelier, but with candles that would need to be lit, real candles. She had never seen that before. They weren’t lit now – the light instead came from two tall standard lamps with very ornate stands. Black metal with bronze vines growing up to cup the hidden light bulbs. The carpet on the floor was like a tapestry – another hunting scene, she thought. There was a big flat-screen mounted on the wall in front of the bed – modern and out of place – but she couldn’t see a remote.
Not that she wanted to switch it on. All she wanted to do was sleep. She sank back into the soft quilt, then tried to shift herself up the bed a little, to reach the massive, plump pillows. She should take her clothes off, she thought, or she would be too warm. But she didn’t have the strength. When had she started to feel like this?
She tried to keep her eyes open by focusing on one of the pictures on the wall, but couldn’t even see it clearly now. Moments before it had been OK. She didn’t feel uncomfortable, far from it. Or rather, only if she tried to fight it, to keep her eyes open, then things would start to spin a bit and she felt slightly sick.
It had started after Viktor had given her the drink of water, just as they got in here. Or had it? Hadn’t she been like this since they had been in the helicopter? She needed sleep, that was all.
But her mum hadn’t wanted her to sleep. What was it her mum had wanted her to do? It was important she remember.
It had got worse after the water, she decided. Definitely. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t beat it, couldn’t think any more. Her head was heavy, her eyes rolling up. She tried to turn onto her side, but couldn’t even do that.
49
It was nearly six in the morning and pitch black when Julia woke up. The car was still, silent, freezing. Beside her, in the driving seat, Alex had his head against the window, eyes closed. She had a moment of confusion before she could place herself, then another to work out that the reason it was so dark was that the windscreen was covered in snow. She started to shiver.
‘Alex,’ she said. He woke at once, turned his head towards her, squinted. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘I had to rest,’ he said. ‘I was driving with my eyes closed.’ He reached forward and switched the engine on, looked at the time on the dash. ‘So I slept. For twenty minutes. Not long enough.’
‘Where are we?’
He put the heating on full, then turned the windscreen wipers on. They swept away a light covering of snow, revealing a long, unlit road through trees, curving towards glittering lights in the distance. The air was thick with falling snow. ‘That’s the Niirala crossing up ahead,’ he said. ‘The border with Russia.’
‘You said you would wake me.’
‘We both n
eeded to sleep. If we drive with our eyes closed, we’ll end up in a ditch.’
She felt annoyed with him. She pushed herself up in the seat. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. She wanted to add, don’t do it again, but stopped herself. She had a headache, and nausea in the top of her gut. He was right that she needed sleep, and she didn’t want to snap at him.
She found the water bottle as he eased the car back onto the road. The road – presumably it was gritted and ploughed – was still clear of snow. She took a drink, then offered it to him. He shook his head. ‘What do we do at the border?’ she asked.
‘Drive through.’
‘What about the guns?’ Before they had left Gumbacka he had taken a gun from the motorbike outside the house. It was in a long holdall now, stuffed under her seat, along with the shotgun he had been holding when he had appeared behind her. She hadn’t said anything about them, but she would get to it. When they got there, she didn’t want guns near her daughter.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ he said. ‘They won’t search.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I’ll pay them. That’s the way it works.’
As they went forward she looked behind and saw they had been stopped in a lay-by with a small petrol station and store. There were other cars there, and trucks, a movement of headlights through the swirls of snow.
He took the car back onto the main road, a surfaced two-lane highway that led downhill towards the lights. She might have felt nervous about it but the acid gnawing in her stomach had been a constant thing for days now. Her default state was something she wouldn’t have recognised a few days ago – the intense fears for Rebecca constantly dominating everything. If she had suffered anything like this before, it was ten years ago, at the place they were driving to now, where Viktor had said all this had started. He was right about that – though not in the way he must have meant – because as far as she could calculate it, it had to have been there that Rebecca was conceived. She hadn’t said that to Alex. She had said hardly anything significant about the past.
Since leaving Helsinki she had done what he had told her to do, which was either sleep or drive, but mostly sleep. She had driven for about an hour in total. He had done the rest. She had not wanted to sleep but her body had overridden her. And meanwhile, he had kept them going, bringing them closer and closer to where Rebecca was. She reminded herself that, however else she was with him, she didn’t need to be sharp with him, or take it out on him. He was doing exactly what he’d said he would do, he was helping her.
She hoped her intuitions about him were sound. When she had first seen him she had gasped with shock but, in the gap before reason could get in, there had been relief also. And something else, a tiny residue of the past, affecting her judgement, because he was Alex, the man she had felt all those things for. She couldn’t look at him without all that being there, compacted between them. He was her daughter’s father. So when she had first realised she was looking at him again there had been a little bit of isolated hope, in the middle of all the crushing anxiety; the hope that he was someone who wouldn’t hurt her, someone she could trust.
But it hadn’t taken long for history and reason to switch that into a fear of him, and then an anger. Because he was in Viktor’s house, so she assumed that he must have had something to do with taking Rebecca (which he had, if she was to believe even his own account of it all). Later, he had convinced her that he was safe, had brought her nearer to her original intuition. Not with the words – though she had asked him many, many questions, over and over again – but with the look in his eyes. The eyes she remembered all too well. The same eyes. She could not look into his eyes and believe that he would hurt her.
He looked different, much older, no longer a little boy. But when she met his gaze the thing that had lit up inside her whenever he had been near flickered again – weaker, but with that same tenuous reaching out to him. She had to acknowledge that, though that was as far as she could go with it. They had not spoken about it. They had spoken functionally, filling in the gaps – her life in Spain, his in London. But nothing about these feelings, nothing about why she had left him. The constant need to concentrate on the pressing immediate issue – recovering their daughter – blotted out any possibility of innocent catch-up. She could only bring herself to glance flinchingly sideways at the stark reality of this dreadful situation, and when she did the view was utterly dominated by the imminent possibility of incomprehensible horror, by the likelihood that this man’s psychotic brother would kill their daughter before they got anywhere near her. That mental backdrop didn’t leave much room for light chat. So the whole of it was just sitting there between them, an aching gap and an unanswered question.
And maybe that was the best way. She had left him for good reasons, and the gun he had taken from the bike, and his whole story of being hired to kill his own daughter … almost everything he had told her, in fact, about the intervening ten years and the world he lived in confirmed that her decision all that time ago had been correct. His brother, his family, he himself – they were all criminals and killers. That was the truth. The man she had picked instead – Juan Martin – her poor dead husband who had died because of her connections to these thugs – he had been a good man, a harmless man, despite his distractions with other women. This emergency aside, regardless of any emotions he might provoke in her, did she want Alex anywhere near their daughter?
The car came to a wider, brightly illuminated area, with signs in Russian, Swedish and Finnish. There was a truck in front of them now but it filtered off into another lane and he kept going. Up ahead she could see the squat sheds and buildings of the border post. There were bulky, six-wheeled army vehicles to one side, Finnish flags everywhere. And barriers. Cars stopped at booths, small queues, even at this time of the morning.
‘There are two checks,’ he said quietly to her. ‘The Finnish one will be quick, the Russians might ask more questions, but not too many more, just enough to keep face. You need to be calm and let me talk to them.’ She saw he had placed his passport in the tray by the gearstick. There was a tightly coiled roll of crisp banknotes beside it. To try to thank him, or encourage him, or communicate something – she wasn’t sure what – she reached a hand across and briefly touched his arm.
50
Rebecca woke suddenly, opening her eyes, but lying still. She was in the bed, in the exact position she could last recall, halfway to the pillows. There was a table by the bed with a glass of water. Her throat was dry. She needed a drink and she needed a pee. She sat up quickly, looked around the room. She was alone. The room was very warm.
She slid over the bed, put her feet on the floor and reached for the water, then remembered what she had thought before she fell asleep – that they had put something in her drink, a sleeping pill or something. If that was possible. She had seen it in movies, so maybe it was.
She took her hand away, stood up and walked to the big window. Her legs were a little shaky. Is that what they would feel like if someone drugged you? She could see light coming in through a crack in the heavy drapes. She parted them carefully, peeked through, squinted. It was daytime, she could see hills, trees, snow, everything covered with snow, but the sky was clear and blue, the sun in her eyes. She moved back. How long had she been asleep?
There was no clock in the room. There were two doors though. One, she thought, was the door they had brought her in through. She stepped over to it and placed her head against it, listening. There was a corridor outside – she could remember that, remember walking up it, hanging onto Viktor’s arm because she was so dopy. She couldn’t hear anything through the door now though. Everything was very silent.
She went over to the other door and opened it onto an en suite bathroom. The light came on automatically. It looked luxurious – white marble, gleaming chrome, a huge oval bathtub. She stepped in, left the door open, used the toilet, then went to the sink
s and splashed cold water onto her face, drank some of the water direct from the tap. She felt better, her head clearer, a hunger pain gnawing at her gut. She started to remember everything that had happened.
Her eyes found a clock on the wall – 10.45: in the morning, she assumed, but again wasn’t certain of that. She had lost track of time over the last few days. Her mother had said five hours until she could get there, but when had that been? In the middle of the night – longer than five hours ago. And she wasn’t here. She took a breath, feeling the confusion again.
Her mother had told her not to trust Viktor, to hide, but all she’d done was sleep. So she would do it now – look around, find a place to hide, do what her mother had told her to do. Her mum would get here. She always did what she said she would, always kept her promises.
She went back over to the main door and listened again. She put her hand on the handle and carefully eased it down, then pulled gently. The door didn’t move – it rattled, but wouldn’t open. She yanked on it as hard as she could but someone had locked it. They’d locked her in, trapped her.
51
Carl could feel the tension building – inside his head and inside the car. Nearly ten o’clock. They were almost there, he thought. He slowed the car, watching carefully for roads he recognised. They had been off the satnav for a long time now, in a vast blank space on the map. He was navigating from memory.
He had guessed it would take seven hours to get to Viktor, but it had taken nearer nine. The going from the border had been steady at first but then the snow had started falling again. Up until two hours ago they had been crawling along a road that was barely visible, deep in drifts, expecting to get stuck at any minute. Then the weather had suddenly cleared, the blizzard vanishing and the sky appearing from the night, clean and blue. At the same time the temperature started dropping, freezing the compacted surface of the snow into ice, making driving on the chains a bit easier. He had put the chains on just after the border crossing, with Liz pacing around shivering beside him, worrying about how long it took.
