The Ice House (8 page)

12

More police cars appeared from the road behind her, then a woman officer took hold of her arm and the others walked off. The woman started asking questions in an aggressive voice but she couldn’t answer any of them, could barely understand them, because all she could think about was Rebecca.

Rebecca was somewhere here and they weren’t letting her get to her. She gave the woman her ID, got her phone out to check for a signal, only to have it promptly snatched from her grip. She started to protest hysterically – the phone was her last link to Rebecca. But no one was listening.

Because of the position of the police cars she couldn’t see the body on the ground or the group of people around it until the woman moved her forward. It was lying in the road almost exactly in the middle of the turn-off down to the house. There were two police officers in uniform crouched beside it, someone in ordinary clothes standing a little further away. She couldn’t see it properly, only that it was an adult, too large for Rebecca. It looked like a policeman – she could see the uniform. But if it was the man Rebecca had texted about then she assumed it wasn’t a policeman. Because why would a policeman try to shoot her daughter?

When the guy in charge appeared she started shouting at him, angrily, repeating over and over again that she was the girl’s mother so she had to be allowed to be with her and to use her mobile phone. ‘It’s my ten-year-old daughter Rebecca. She’s down there somewhere. I know she’s here.’

‘There is no little girl here,’ he said. He looked tired and irri­tated. ‘Your daughter is not here.’

She forced herself to stand still in front of him, to look at him, to deal with him. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘Do you have ID?’

‘Diego Molina,’ he said, but he didn’t offer any ID as he turned hers over in his hand, scrutinising it as if it might be fake. He had her mobile in his other hand. ‘I’m an inspector.’ His face came into focus. He pocketed the phone and ID, held out his hand for her to shake. She ignored it, but he barely ­noticed. ‘I’m in charge here,’ he said. ‘You are Julia Martin? This is your house?’ He looked too young to be in charge of anything – thirty at most, clean-shaven, pretty features, unusually blond, wearing a pastel-blue open-necked shirt and off-white slacks, as if about to enjoy an evening in town, before this had struck. A beautiful lock of hair dangled over his forehead. He smelled strongly of aftershave.

‘This is my house, yes. Are you saying my daughter isn’t in the house, or
anywhere
here?’

‘No. There is no little girl here. Or anywhere near. Why do you think she would be here?’

‘She texted me. She told me she was here, only twenty ­minutes ago. She said she was on the hill, waiting.’ She was on the verge of reporting other things Rebecca had texted, but simple ­caution stopped her. What if the dead man, lying there, really was a policeman? She had a sudden thought that she should have erased Rebecca’s last text, then immediately thought the idea foolish, because surely Rebecca had made a mistake. In any case this man would need her access code before he could read the text. He hadn’t asked for that. Not yet.

‘OK. Then we will search again,’ he said. He motioned back to a man she saw was standing just behind him, also in ordinary civilian clothes, who nodded and started speaking softly into a handheld radio. ‘But not in this immediate area,’ Molina added. ‘We’ve already searched the house and grounds for survivors. We’re waiting for the helicopter now. It’s on its way from Malaga. It has specialist search capabilities. It will quickly cover these hills – better than we can on foot alone. Is there anywhere nearby that she would run to, if she was startled?’

‘She could be hiding in the garden, or down the slopes there. I think she probably meant the slopes below the house when she said she was on the hill. She knows them, she plays there. You need to let me through, I can look and I can shout for her …’

‘You already have shouted. I’m sure she would have heard. I did, very clearly. And we’ve already been through the property. She’s not there. If she’s further out we will find her soon enough. She will not come to harm.’

He didn’t have a clue. He didn’t know what he was up against, what had happened. But she couldn’t put him right. She had to keep her mouth shut or she would end up in some cell answering questions about the past instead of free to look for Rebecca. He was meant to be in charge though, so he was the one to work on. He looked honest – the way he looked at her, spoke to her, the way he wasn’t bristling with male hormones and the need to stamp his authority all over her – more intelligent than the types she was used to dealing with from the national or local police. When they came to the shop asking to see paperwork she was never sure whether she was meant to bribe them in some way.

He suggested they get into a car and he would take the details he needed, instead of standing out in the open. ‘We are not sure it’s safe,’ he explained. ‘There has been an explosion. We thought it could have been an accident – a gas leak, perhaps – but then we found the dead man. He has been shot.’ He looked closely at her as he spoke. She struggled to assimilate it, her mind wanting to link it to what Rebecca had texted. She needed to know more, but he was already starting on his questions.

‘Did you have anything particularly valuable in your home?’

She shook her head, then said, ‘That car – the one buried there – I think it belongs to my husband …’

‘Yes. We can talk about that,’ he said, and she had a feeling that he was holding something back. She thought,
So Juan is in the car or the house. That must be it.
If he was, she assumed he would be dead, because if he was only injured they would be taking her to him. The thought disrupted her concentration like an awful shadow. She tried to turn away from it. ‘I don’t want to sit and talk to you,’ she said. ‘Right now I need to be looking for my child.’

He nodded sympathetically, looked like he was considering that, then said, ‘In a short while they will have checked the house and made sure it’s safe. But it’s only firemen I have in there. They are pursuing ordinary checking procedures, on the basis that burglars set a fire, which ignited something in your home. Maybe they did that deliberately. Is there any reason that assumption might be false? Is there any reason you can think of why I should pull the firemen out, to protect them, then wait for a specialist bomb disposal team to get here?’

She looked straight at him, straight into his eyes, held his gaze and said, ‘Why would someone plant a bomb in my home?’

He stared back. ‘I don’t know. You don’t know either?’

‘No. I sell ice cream. My husband too. Why would someone want to plant a bomb here?’

He considered that for a while, brows knitted, still looking at her, then looked away and moved a hand up to push the beautiful blond lock away from his forehead. ‘OK,’ he said, looking at his feet. ‘There’s something I need you to do for me. I’m sorry, but it’s not pleasant and it may involve something tragic for you.’ He looked up at her again. ‘There are two dead bodies in your home …’ He saw her reactions starting at once. ‘Not your daughter. There is no child here, as I told you. We will find your child. But two other people were killed in the blast and I will need you to come in with me and try to identify them.’ He took a breath. ‘I should warn you – it is possible that one of them is your husband.’

13

She hadn’t loved Juan Martin, not ever, not how she understood the word. The only person she had ever loved, as she saw it, was Alex. But love like that – an overwhelming thing that dominated your existence – love like that was useless in the real world. It was like a life on heroin. You couldn’t live with it, at least not a normal life.

In the beginning she had shared something different with Juan, something a little like love, a little like friendship, something that had allowed them to lead normal lives – an accommodation with the real world. The shared sentiment had trailed off, without either of them properly noticing, years ago – but they had remained bonded nevertheless, pending a resolution that would now never occur. So his death would be affecting her, she knew, beneath the surface. If it were all that was happening his death would have been a fact close to devastating.

They had taken her in to identify him. They hadn’t warned her about the woman he had been with – perhaps because they had wanted to watch her reactions – and it had been an unpleasant surprise to see her body there, in their ruined house, and work out what must have been happening. Juan had come home early with the ex-waitress called Maria. The fact quickly paled into insignificance as the horror of the scene sank in, but it was an additional shock nevertheless, something more she had to absorb and control.

She told them the identity of the woman, though without seeing her face – they hadn’t let her see the face – it was really a guess. It was possible it was someone else, she told them. It was possible Juan was seeing more than one woman. She had only glanced at Juan’s face, from a distance, and nodded. She hadn’t wanted to look at him, lying there like that, so obviously interrupted in something, humiliated, naked. She hadn’t wanted to let any of it in. She didn’t want to collapse crying. So she had flicked her eyes onto him and off, bolted down the thoughts. The desperation caused by Rebecca’s absence was constant, her panic reactions so barely suppressed that she felt continually on the edge of an uncontrollable screaming fit.

She had waited now nearly three hours at the house, either in the car Molina placed her in, her own car, or standing around outside as the helicopter clattered overhead. The helicopter had quickly found something – over in the next valley – but it wasn’t Rebecca. Two more dead bodies. She wasn’t told who they were.

Molina had obviously briefed a couple of the uniformed officers, who were now hanging around the garden and road, to watch that she didn’t leave. They seemed unsure whether they should treat her as a suspect or a victim. When Molina wasn’t personally occupied with asking her questions, there was always one of them near, ready to tell her to wait, or stay where she was. They had confiscated her phone and then later demanded the access code using some official, legal wording. Was it meant to scare her? She had given the code, hoping that would be it, but then they wouldn’t let her leave. She hadn’t been formally arrested, and they hadn’t searched her, so she wasn’t sure what her rights were.

Before the helicopter started she had wanted to run down into the valley, where the stream was, about five hundred metres below the garden wall. She knew Rebecca went for walks down there. There were men she could see searching down there, but she thought Rebecca might be hiding, and wouldn’t come out unless she could hear her mother calling for her. But Molina wouldn’t let her go near the house again.

At some point they had found Rebecca’s school bag, lying at the side of the road. Molina had shown it to her – to identify it – wrapped up in a big brown paper bag with a transparent window. She had wanted to touch it, but that too was forbidden. It was ‘evidence’.

They were saying now that it looked like a bomb had been planted in the guest bathroom. It meant someone had got into the house at some point without them knowing, someone who had wanted to kill Juan. Or so Molina was suggesting. Now that she had made Juan’s infidelity clear she wondered how long it would be before he arrested her. She had to be a suspect, though presumably it suited him to pretend she wasn’t at the moment. They were asking her lots of questions about Juan and his past, but she knew that was the wrong track.

There were three of them who spoke to her – Molina and two sidekicks, one of them the aggressive woman about her own age. Usually they did it in the back of a car, whilst other cars and vans arrived and left all around them, emergency lights flashing interminably. Molina had told her she would have to come to the station in Marbella and answer formal questions, put to her by an investigating judge. They were still waiting for the judge to arrive.

In between questions, she sat in her car, angry and scared, fretting and crying, digging her nails into her palms so much that they bled. The panic was like something alive twisting inside her. She kept telling herself that she was being un­reason­able, because by five o’clock there must have been nearly a hundred police officers searching the valley, plus the helicopter. They were doing their best. They were professionals. But she couldn’t stand not being a part of it. She wanted to drive out of the valley and try calling Rebecca from somewhere where there was a signal. There was no signal throughout the valley and they were trying to work out why – they thought it was part of the ‘attack’. But leaving the scene was out of the question. So all she could do was wait, uselessly, answering their misguided questions while the fear ate at her insides, the constant adrenalin making her shiver like she had a fever.

It was almost six now. Soon the light would be fading. Molina was walking up to the car again, signalling her to get out. She got out and stood in front of him, then listened as he told her that the helicopter was leaving, that her daughter wasn’t in the valley or on any of the adjoining hills. ‘It has infrared search devices,’ he explained. ‘It’s very easy to find people. She’s not here.’

She felt an acid emptiness opening inside her, a different feeling to anything she had ever experienced before, even back in Russia – it was something physical, real, like a heart attack. She had to crouch down and gasp for air. He bent beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, said half-comforting things about finding Rebecca, about the resources available.

‘Where is she, then?’ she stuttered. ‘Where is she, if she’s not here?’

‘We have to work on the assumption that she’s been kidnapped,’ he told her. ‘By this person she called “Carl”.’ There was tremendous sympathy in his eyes, but she didn’t want it. She wanted to wake up, she wanted this all to go away. She wanted to be sick. She could see a group of plain-clothes officers back down by the body of the shot man. The body was still lying there in front of her driveway. They were taking photos of it now.

‘Do you know anyone called Carl?’ he asked quietly. ‘We have to identify him.’

She shook her head.
Her daughter had been kidnapped.
She felt like she would fall over, black out. She didn’t want to ­believe it.

‘You read her text?’ she said, then forced herself to look up at him. Her legs were shaking and the bile rising in her throat. He nodded.

‘She’s confused,’ she said. ‘She might have got it wrong. She said there was a policeman shooting at her …’

Molina nodded again. ‘I’m assuming the officer was trying to shoot the man she was with, trying to stop him. She made a mistake.’

She frowned, then pointed towards the dead man. ‘You mean that man
is
police?’ she asked. ‘He’s a police officer? Rebecca was right?’

‘She was right he is a police officer, yes. But he won’t have shot at her. He’s from the municipal police here. Ricardo Perez. He was only twenty-two years old. We think he tried to save your daughter and was shot. Again, we assume this “Carl” person has killed him.’

She glanced towards the body, in disbelief, then looked back to Molina. He was staring at her, questioningly. Her eyes shifted focus to the house behind him, all the movement and activity, the policemen going in and out. The images moved and rearranged themselves. What she had seen before – all these police­men working to find her daughter – was suddenly in doubt. She knew her daughter, knew how she had brought her up. If Rebecca said that the policeman lying there, on her drive, had tried to shoot her, tried to kill her, and had been stopped by this stranger called Carl, then she had no doubt that that was exactly what had happened.

Now there was a new tension in her muscles, a different kind of fear.
I have to get out of here
, she thought.
I have to get away.
She leaned in a crouch against the ground and tried to make sense of all the options and interpretations. But she couldn’t do it. There were too many open questions.
A policeman had tried to kill her?
Until this moment she had thought it could not be true. She started to retch, but there was nothing in her stomach.

‘I need to leave,’ she muttered. She stood up and faced him. ‘I need to go right now.’

He shook his head.

‘Am I
under arrest
?’ In confusion she used the English phrase.

‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘If you wanted to leave I would have to detain you – you can be detained as a suspect or witness. But if you don’t try to leave then we don’t get into all that. I need you to stay because I need your help. It’s the quickest way to get Rebecca back.’

Could she trust him? She didn’t think so. Now she didn’t know
what
was happening. She needed time to think it through. She turned abruptly away from him and got into her car, closed the door with a bang. The car was empty. She pressed the button to wind up the passenger window, shutting herself off from him. He watched her for a moment, looking concerned, then another officer came up to him, said something in his ear. They both walked off quickly.

Up the hill she saw one of the green military vehicles belonging to the guardia civil arriving. It stopped because it couldn’t get down any further – there was a queue of vehicles all the way back up the track. A man in military uniform got out and started walking down towards Molina. She had the impression someone of higher rank had arrived. Molina looked bothered as he went up to greet him. They exchanged salutes. The man was tall, older – at least fifty years old. He stood in a way that suggested he was in charge, that Molina was nobody. He leaned over Molina, jabbed a finger into his chest. She half considered opening the door and making a run for it while they were distracted. But at that moment the female officer opened the driver’s door and got in. She leaned back and demanded the keys. ‘I will drive you to the station,’ she said. ‘That’s where they want you now.’