The Ice House (27 page)

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 needed 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 sinks 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.

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 sunlight 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.