The Ice House

by John Connor

  She had started talking after the border crossing, but only desultory sentences about Rebecca, half-expressed thoughts that were meant to try to create an image of her as somehow safe, despite everything. She talked about how sensible Rebecca was, how careful, how she had warned her about many things. She said again and again that she had told her to get away from Viktor, to hide, but that she wasn’t sure now if it was the right thing to have said. He could hurt her, she kept saying, he could hurt her. She sat there for a long while repeating the words, the tears running down her face.

  He couldn’t help much with any of it. Her call to Viktor had cut off any last illusions about his brother’s sanity. Viktor hadn’t even asked about him. And clearly Viktor had known Liz would call, and anyway, it was his phone. Liz had told him she had taken it from a policeman in Spain who had tried to kill her.

  Viktor was behind this, behind all of it. Presumably because Carl had betrayed him ten years before, slept with the woman he loved, conceived a child with her. Somehow he had found that out, plotted this revenge – thought this an appropriate response – not merely to kill his brother, but to get his brother to kill his own daughter first. If he was capable of that then Carl had no idea where his limits were. And if he still couldn’t imagine him killing Rebecca personally, he knew Viktor wouldn’t find it hard to locate people who would. And every extra hour it took to get to him thrust them deeper into a terrifying void of ignorance – what was happening to Rebecca right then, as they were driving, trying to get to her? What was she going through?

  There was no use to these thoughts, so he tried to turn his mind from them. He could drive better and quicker if all his concentration was on the road. But Liz was doing less driving and a lot of the time when he looked over to her, or reached his hand over to hold hers, to console her, all he could see in her eyes was a kind of stunned horror, as if she couldn’t handle any of it. He wanted to talk to her, bring up what had happened to them ten years ago, ask why she had run away and left him. But there was no chance of that. And anyway, it was obvious why she had left him. He was a man who could kill other men for money. His family were the same. That his brother was truly psychotic might not even seem something distinguishing to her. She might justifiably think they were all like that, himself included. She would have been insane to have stayed with him.

  ‘When did he find out?’ he had asked her, at one point. ‘When do you think he first found out about us?’ But she didn’t have an answer to that. He had an answer, but didn’t want to believe it. Because if Viktor had arranged the funds for the hit on Rebecca, then it was possible that he had arranged all the other five hits over the last ten years too, it was possible that he was the cartel, not Zaikov, not anyone else. Carl might have spent the last ten years unknowingly eliminating his brother’s business rivals while his brother quietly searched the world for Liz, biding his time, plotting what he would do when he found her. And that in turn would only make sense if Viktor had known almost from the very start about Liz and him. It was possible. The idea brought a very bitter taste to his mouth. The bitterness of guilt. Because he, Carl, had caused all this – he had started the betrayal, broken the rules.

  He stopped the car. ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘I think we should walk it from here, so he doesn’t see the car.’

  ‘Where is it?’ she asked. She looked terrified. She stared out through the windscreen. ‘Where is the house?’

  ‘It’s about five hundred metres further on, past where the road bends and goes over the crest of the ridge. We’re on the hill to the west of the house, on the other side of it. Maybe you remember?’ He pointed. ‘We’ll be able to see it from there, up ahead, where the road starts to go down.’ He twisted in the seat and looked at her. ‘You don’t have to come, Liz. You can stay here. It will be safer.’

  ‘I want to see the place,’ she said, starting already to open her door.

  They got out, pulling on the thick winter coats they had taken from Viktor’s, the hats and gloves. Carl went to the rear of the car, popped the boot and bent inside. The MP5 was lying on a pile of blankets, already assembled.

  Liz watched him with a numb fear. She had been intending to tell him to leave the gun, but she couldn’t now. For the last hour all she had been able to think about was the thing she had seen Viktor do. She had known from then what he was capable of. On that day, ten years ago, she had got the hood and noose off Michael Rugojev and for a moment had been too shocked to do anything but stare at him, as he spluttered and gasped for breath. She had not been able to believe it wasn’t Alex.

  But then it had sunk in, and at the same time she realised the man she had stabbed – Uri Zaikov – was far from dead, and that she still had no idea where Alex was. So she had stood without thinking, leaving Michael there, and run to the doors through which the stabbed man had staggered.

  Uri Zaikov had got only halfway across the next room, it seemed, stumbling through his own blood. He was there now, in the centre of the room, flat on the floor, making a kind of high-pitched keening noise. As she came through the doors she saw that Alex was with him, crouching over him, alive, unharmed. He was doing something with his jacket, talking quietly to the man. She knew now he had been trying to save him.

  She was about to run over to him, to tell him what had happened, but then Viktor had come through doors at the far end, marching straight across the floor, his heels rapping on the hard, wooden surface. His eyes had crossed hers without a flicker of acknowledgement or recognition.

  She hadn’t seen the gun in his hand until he was over the stabbed man, pushing Alex away from him. Without a moment’s hesitation he had then pointed the gun at the man’s face and fired. It had been so sudden she hadn’t even had time to anticipate it, to look away. So she had seen it all.

  She had collapsed to the floor then. She felt like collapsing into the snow now. Alex had told her repeatedly during the last few hours that his brother wouldn’t hurt Rebecca, but she had seen for herself what Viktor could do.

  She followed Alex along the road anxiously, keeping close behind, sinking up to her knees in the snow. The clothing they had brought was meant to be winter clothing, but already she was freezing. The boots she was wearing were inadequate and already soaked through. She hoped that Rebecca was inside, not out, that she was warm, not shivering to death. She hoped that she hadn’t heeded her advice to such an extent that she had run off into this weather without protection.

  Alex turned to her and asked if she was OK. She nodded, peering past him into the trees, looking for the house but seeing nothing. There were pine trees everywhere, very tall with thick black bark, the branches laden and drooping with snow. They lined the road and stretched off into the distance, following a slight slope. Every now and then some snow would slide off a branch and fall with a thumping noise. She stamped her feet and watched her breath billowing out in clouds of condensation. It didn’t seem like the place she remembered. Everything was horribly silent now, the snow dampening the sound. She looked at Alex. Was he the same man? She didn’t recognise the gloominess in his eyes.

  After a few paces he went into a crouch and turned back. ‘We will come over this rise and see it, I think,’ he said quietly. ‘Go slowly. Stay low.’

  He brought the gun up from his side, held it with two hands. She could see the land rising ahead. He left the road and started moving at an angle beneath the pines. She kept about three metres behind him, also crouching.

  As they got closer to the rise he stopped and went down onto one knee in the snow, told her to wait. He crept forward, then crawled on his belly alongside a fallen trunk and pulled himself up to the edge. She waited for him to signal her, then followed and looked.

  It was about half a kilometre away, the view crystal clear through the frozen air. It was at the bottom of a long slope of land, so that it was well below them – towers and minarets, windows everywhere. Hundreds of windows. The sunli
ght was falling on the panes so that parts of the structure looked like a complicated shard of ice, reflecting and glinting so brightly that she had to shield her eyes.

  She could see the old stable block immediately below them – the building looked derelict, the roof fallen in, the inside filled with a snowdrift. Her eyes followed the path leading away from it down through the woods and found the garden wall outside the kitchen area, where ten years before she had seen the guard shot dead. The main building looked the same. She could see no one moving around, no signs of life, many chimneys but no smoke. There might be lights on behind the windows but the sunlight was too strong to see that.

  He moved away from the edge, pulling her with him. They walked back to the road and he held her arm. ‘I need to know who is down there,’ he said. ‘You go back to the car and wait. Give me an hour. I’ll come down at the back, where the forest is close, try to find out how many people he has with him …’

  ‘You don’t think he’s alone?’

  ‘Possibly. He was alone in Helsinki and I realise why now. I’m not sure he has anyone he could trust enough with what he’s doing. But I need to know for sure. I’ll be an hour, no more. Don’t do anything. Just wait. OK?’

  She nodded. ‘What if you’re longer than an hour?’

  He considered that. ‘I won’t be,’ he said.

  52

  Rebecca had to stop herself from banging on the door in a panic. She could scream and shout for them to let her out, but then they would know she was awake. Viktor had promised it wouldn’t be locked, but it was.

  Now she remembered very clearly her mother’s voice on the phone. She had been crying, frightened. And she had told her to hide from him. The only reason she hadn’t done that was because she had been unable to move. That wasn’t normal. She had been very tired before, after sleepovers, but she had never collapsed.

  She was scared now – just thinking about it made her ­tremble. What was going on? She thought that even the water she had been drinking in the car, before she got here, had tasted off. So had they drugged her? If she had a computer she could look it up on the Internet, find out if it was possible to put something in people’s drinks without them knowing. She went to the glass of water by the bed and sniffed it. She couldn’t smell anything, but the water didn’t look clear. There was a slight sediment at the bottom of the glass.

  She started searching the room for somewhere to hide. There were empty wardrobes and cupboards, and the space under the bed, but that was all too obvious. In the bathroom she examined the side of the bathtub. She had seen her dad fix a pipe under their bath once by taking a panel off the side. Then one of their cats had wanted to hide there. There would be a big enough space under this bath for her to squeeze in, but she couldn’t see any way to get the sides off – there were no screws or loose edges. And even if she did – how would she get the panel back on?

  She wondered where her dad was, and if he had been with her mum when she had spoken to her. Her mum had said nothing about him and she hadn’t heard anything in the background.

  She was getting nervous now about Viktor coming to check on her. She didn’t want to see him again. The more she thought about him, the more sick she felt. He had been speaking very weirdly to her. And he had promised not to lock the door.

  All the time she was in the bathroom she kept listening for noises from the door, through in the main room. Once she thought she could hear someone talking and ran through to the bed, jumping onto it to try to pretend she was asleep. But no one came.

  Still, she had to do something quick. She parted the curtains and looked out of the big window, to see if anyone was out there. It was the same scene of snow and sunshine. The room was on the first floor, if you came in from the front, as she had, but the ground looked closer at this side, as if the land was higher here. The window had a big sill, more like a ledge – wide enough to sit on. She kneeled on it and took a more careful look.

  The drop was straight down to the ground, a bit less than four metres. Not that high. Her mum once told her that when people did a parachute jump the last part of it was the same as jumping off a house. You just had to land properly, roll. She didn’t know how to do that, but her mum had told her it was possible, if there was ever a fire or anything. Better than burning to death. That’s what she had said. The ground below was deep in snow which might make the landing softer, or the drop further than it looked, but she couldn’t tell how deep it was. What if it was really deep and there was something spiky underneath, like a railing? But that didn’t seem likely.

  After that where would she run to? There were trees and bushes down there, all bare of leaves, and maybe the outline of some paths. It was probably a garden in the summer. The land sloped away from it gradually, falling towards a line of trees where a really tall pine forest started. She couldn’t see any fence there. She could run straight into the trees. That wouldn’t take her long – it was sprint distance and she was one of the fastest in the entire Malaga area over that distance. Maybe there was a fence further back, though, deep inside, maybe even an electrified fence. What would she do then? She was less adept at climbing. In the gaps between the trees all she could see was darkness. Would it be colder or warmer there? It looked scary. But her mother had told her to hide.

  She thought about that again, about what her mum had sounded like. She had never heard her like that before, so distraught – so it was serious. She didn’t have an option to just wait here. She had a sudden image of the house in Spain, the fire there, the dead policeman, the blood running out of his head. That was the kind of thing that could happen to her. She could remember running from him, hearing him shouting at her, then the cracks as he fired at her. She had almost wet herself. She had been really terrified for a moment, more than she was now. Carl had told her they were trying to kill her. She had trusted Carl, but he had vanished.

  She had to do something.

  She reached up and pulled the window handle. It was an old window, not double-glazed, a big single frame with four panes of glass. At the other side of it was another window in a thick wooden frame, acting like a kind of double-glazing system. The handle was very stiff, so she had to lean on it with both hands. Then it moved. She was sure the thing was going to be locked, but as the handle came down it sprang back. She moved off the sill and swung it open, then unhooked the catches for the second window. This one was in two parts that creaked outwards. She thought she would just be able to squeeze through one of them. As it opened the air was like ice in her face. She started to shiver at once, then went back to the bed where she had taken off the oversize leather jacket and fleece they had given her. She put them on, then leaned through the opening and looked down.

  She thought she would be able to crawl through backwards then dangle, so that her feet were only two metres from the snow. Two metres was a safe drop. There was a stone ledge about ten centimetres wide running round the outside of the house. She could get her feet onto that. She looked to the left – craning her head out into the freezing air – and saw that it went along the wall under another widow, not in her room, then joined a lower part of the building with a flat roof. Could she walk along it, hanging onto the window ledges, then get to the flat part?

  She heard a noise from behind the door. She wasn’t sure what it was. Someone walking out there? Maybe they were coming for her. Maybe when they saw she was awake they would really put her to sleep, force an injection into her, like they did in the hospital. She decided immediately. She was going to try it, she was going to go.

  It took Carl fifteen minutes to skirt around the back of the ­stable block, keeping on the blind side of the hill. He went quickly, holding the MP5 with both hands, cocked, safety on, his thumb resting against the selector switch. He tried to keep his eyes moving, but thought he was going too fast to spot anyone crouching or stationary. The snow deeper into the woods was thinner, so he ended up making a lot of nois
e stepping through the sticks and mould. His breathing was loud too. But he had told Liz he would be an hour, so the clock was against him. He should have said two hours, then he could have moved more cautiously. But she wouldn’t have accepted that.

  He had thought about how to handle this all the way since the border, whenever they weren’t talking. At first he had been inclined to rely on his instinct that Viktor wouldn’t be able to hurt him, if it came to a direct confrontation. Viktor had already had plenty of opportunities to do something himself, had he been capable. Instead, he had hired people. He had felt the same intuition about Rebecca, until a few hours ago – that Viktor wouldn’t be able to harm her. It was a particular kind of person who could look a little girl in the face and shoot her. That wasn’t Viktor, he’d thought. But Viktor had broken all the rules, so Carl was far from sure about these assumptions now. Maybe Viktor was sick, seriously mentally ill. Could he be otherwise, to have dreamed up a scheme whereby his own brother was contracted to kill his daughter? To have paid so much to pull it off?

  And then there was the question of who Viktor might have with him. That seemed the most important thing right now. Whatever he might think about dealing with Viktor, if he had with him a team of trained security guards then Carl was going to have to go back up to Liz and suggest alternatives. The police were out of the question, but she had some leverage with their uncle – Mikhael Ivanovich, or ‘Michael’, as she called him – due to the fact that she had undoubtedly saved his life ten years ago. Michael had got her out of Spain, so it might be better to try to persuade her to get his help again. She had expressed some doubts about whether Michael wasn’t in on all of this, whether he wasn’t a part of the deal Viktor had spoken of, but Carl couldn’t see that. Viktor and Michael had been on bad terms for over two years. And what Viktor had done wasn’t something Michael would sanction. It was like twenty years ago, bandit country – eventually it was going to attract the kind of official attention people like Mikhael Ivanovich spent most of their time trying to avoid.