The Ice House (2 page)

2

It was a nightmare – the recurrent nightmare. She was in a tightly constricted, airless space, chilled to the bone, shivering so her teeth were chattering. Where her hands were pressed against the trapdoor centimetres above her face – trying to force it open – she could feel a slippery layer of ice covering the wood, rivulets of meltwater running through her fingers, dropping down into her eyes. Beneath her was a half-frozen puddle, getting deeper by the minute.

She got her elbows against the trapdoor and heaved at it with all the strength she could summon. But the angle was restricting her. It wouldn’t move. Yet she had shut it herself, it wasn’t locked – she
knew
it wasn’t locked. She gave in momentarily and started shouting out for him, the words swallowed dead in the pitch-black enclosure, then held her breath and listened to the noises from above. The seal was so tight she could see nothing, but the sounds came through clearly enough. Had they heard her? Her muscles twitched and shuddered as she strained to hear. The temperature below her had to be sub-zero. The living heat was being sucked out of her. She wanted to scream with panic, kept moving her hands away from the trapdoor, down to her mouth, pushing her knuckles between her teeth and biting down on them.

She had to get out. Not for herself, but because if she didn’t they were going to kill him. She had to get out and get to him. She could hear shooting now, and screaming. She knew what they were doing. She could hear him gasping for breath, could see it happening as if she were up there, in the room with them – they were putting a noose around his neck, hauling him off the floor …

The image shifted without warning. The person under the boards vanished and now she
was
outside the hole, not even in the house, but on that hill where the stables were, to the west of the place. She was standing looking back at the house – the enormous, beautiful sprawl of it – up to her knees in snow, her breath puffing out in front of her, ice crystals on her eyelids and in her nostrils. And he was right beside her, standing with her, holding her hand.
Alex.
She whispered his name. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel his presence like something intoxicating, exactly as it had been back then. An enormous wave of relief flooded through her. There was no danger, no screaming or gunshots, they hadn’t got to him, or strung him up, or killed him. She had been imagining it – none of that had happened. He was here, back with her, everything OK.

I thought I’d lost you
, she said, and started crying quietly.
I thought I’d never see you again.
She let her head rest against his shoulder, felt him squeeze her fingers. She took a huge breath.

It was something she had only ever experienced with him – a feeling that she was
home
. Not here in this place in the snow – not anywhere that depended on a specific place. She belonged
with him
. As if it were programmed into her
DNA
.

She moved in the bed, opened her eyes. For a few seconds she couldn’t orientate herself. She lay in confusion with the aching loss like a gap in her chest, her heart thudding uselessly, his absence blotting out the fear that had preceded it. She tried to listen to the real night around her. Then gradually her pulse slowed, the feeling of his physical presence slipped away. She put her hand on her chest, over her heart.

The transition was painful. From that intense, rich feeling, coursing through her, filling her with an overpowering, physical sense of completion – to
this
, the shabby reality of where she was, who she was. The horror, the trapdoor, the feeling of his hand –
none
of it was real. She had been dreaming.

She turned her head and looked to where her husband was, in the bed, centimetres away. She could smell him, smell his faint night odour of male sweat. Juan Martin. That was his name, and that was who she was – Julia Martin. She started to piece together the essential elements of the existence she was living – who she was, who she was with, who she loved, what she did, where she lived.

When she was relatively calm she slipped the sheet aside and slid her feet onto the floor, stood up quietly, carefully, not wanting to wake Juan, not wanting to have to explain. She looked around, noting the objects that should be familiar to her – the bed, the man, the pictures on the walls, the bathroom, her clothes on the chair, the mirror. She was here, at home, in the warm Spanish night, in the hills to the west of Marbella, windows wide open, mosquito frames in place. No danger anywhere.

She moved quickly and silently to check the room next to theirs, stared at the bed where her ten-year-old daughter lay. Rebecca. She could see her in the half-light, on her back, sheet bunched up around her, sleeping peacefully, her face beautiful, yet unlike anything else Julia might call beautiful. Something consoling kicked into her blood like a drug and brought a smile to her lips. But it couldn’t get rid of the memory of him.

She disabled the alarm and walked out onto the terrace in her T-shirt and pyjama bottoms. The night was hotter out here, replete with insect noises, the dry smell of undergrowth in need of a downpour, and the ubiquitous, intermittent dogs, barking somewhere off in the distance. She sat down on one of the chairs by the little metal table and looked at the dark, jagged line of the mountains almost ringing the house, the lights from the next house twinkling down the valley, about two kilometres distant. She thought it must be about three in the morning. She could smell the sea.

The recurrent nightmare. It wasn’t the same every time but the key elements were always there. The snow and ice were new this time, not even part of her memories of the place. When she had been there, a naive silly girl, out of her depth and barely out of her teens – or so it seemed now – it had never been like that, frozen in midwinter, everything frosted and glacial, clothed in shimmering ribbons and fantastic shards of ice, the thermometers showing thirty below zero. That wasn’t how she knew it at all. Her imagination had supplied all that, maybe because the place had been called
The Ice House
, though not in English – she had seen the name in Russian, in indecipherable Cyrillic lettering. She had even learned how to say it in Russian.

A vast eighteenth-century mansion in a forgotten corner of Russia, hundreds of unused rooms, cupolas of gleaming glass, copper domes rearing out of nowhere in the endless forest. It belonged to a man called Michael Rugojev, the man she had gone there to work for, the man who had showed her that hole beneath the kitchen floorboards,
just in case
. But when she had been there it had been high summer, with long, bright northern nights and heat. And the place had been like a dream for her, not a nightmare.

Until that day. The fifteenth of July. Her whole life had changed that day. She was thirty-five now, but it was still with her, waking her each night. Parts of the dream were false, invented – figments of her dream consciousness – but parts of it were terribly real, indistinguishable from memories she had worked hard to lose. Because men
had
come there dispensing unspeakable brutality, and she had been under the floor, cower­ing in terror, in that hole with the trapdoor flat against her face, struggling to breathe. She had heard it all happening above her – just like in the dream – heard the screams and the blows. And she had come out to see him hanging on the end of a rope.

3

He hadn’t always killed for money. But once it had started he hadn’t looked back, and hadn’t ever wanted out, something that, in any case, would have been virtually impossible. Once you were in, you were in – they made sure of that. But he was OK with it. He lay beneath the covering of dry soil and leaves, the tight bushes shading him from the midday sun, his face resting on the stockpiece, his eyes closed and his concentration relaxed, and he thought that overall he was OK with it.

He was thirty-five years old and he had killed five men – pulled the trigger and watched the consequences, but without anything tugging at him inside, telling him it was wrong. Instead, it had felt insignificant. The men he shot fell to the ground and life moved on, almost immediately.
Everyone
moved on, even the people who stood wailing above the corpses. Because they all knew they were headed there, into the vast forgetfulness of history. Time was short.
Carpe diem.

That was one way to look at it. There were others. For example, he could see himself slotting into their lives like bacteria or fatal accidents slotted into other people’s lives. What did the precise timing or method matter? And the five he had killed had been in the same game, one way or another – the money-making game. They had killed too – business rivals, witnesses, in two cases even members of their own family. They were as dirty as he was, morally indistinguishable from those who paid him. They were all pissing in the same pot. Except this one, of course. There was no getting around the fact that this one was different. A ten-year-old girl. Rebecca Martin. Viktor had told him not to go through with it.

But he still didn’t need justifications. Children were dying all over the world – in Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq. Hundreds each day, probably. So what? Death was a natural process, however it arrived. There was nothing to make this child special. He thought his attitude probably meant that a part of him was missing, a capacity to empathise. That was why it didn’t bother him much. He could date it to Liz, perhaps – to Liz Edwards disappearing, to the end of that chance and everything he had felt then – but that would be just glossing the truth, twisting a familiar story to fit himself. But real life wasn’t like that. More likely he had always been this way, even when he was with her, or even before that – as a teenager and a child. The oppor­tunities to reveal himself just hadn’t yet arisen.

The name he had been living with for many years, the name on his fake passport, was Carl Bowman. The passport was Swedish, but he wasn’t from there. His mother was from a sparsely populated border region that seventy years ago had changed hands more than once between Finland and Russia, so that her passport had originally been Russian. But she had moved, at some point, abandoning the house, the land, the relatives, the husband – discarding all those attachments – and had met his father, who was from Helsinki, and started again.

She had insisted always, throughout his childhood, that she was Finnish, because that part of the world she was from – Eastern Karelia – was rightfully a part of Finland. Russia was the enemy who had occupied it, and hence though she had been born there and her birth certificate said she was Russian,
he
– her second son – was one hundred per cent Finnish. That was what she told him. But he didn’t feel it.

It was different for his older half-brother, Viktor, whose father was the Russian she left behind, the man her family had insisted she marry at sixteen years old, the man whose violence, family and criminal connections she had finally fled. Viktor had been old enough to remember all that, but his memories had a warmer tint; loss of a loving father, friends and home, that was what he carried with him, and Finland hadn’t filled any of it. So he had chosen to return as soon as he was old enough, leaving Carl behind.

At fifteen and sixteen Carl had missed Viktor like a part of himself. The way Carl thought about it, the way they had been, it was more like they were twins. They were that close. They looked similar too, walked the same, spoke the same – at least when they used Finnish. In their twenties it had been possible for strangers to mistake them for twins, despite the age dif­ference.

He had joined the Finnish military at the first opportunity. At that point Viktor had been virtually untraceable, lost into the chaos that was the failed Russian state. But four years later he was back with cars and houses and money and offers too good to be turned down. So Carl had quit the army and followed him. He hadn’t even considered that there might be a choice. Russia had been just opening up – ripe with oppor­tunity. Viktor had looked out for him, protected him, passed on the chances and connections he had cultivated, introduced him to key relatives – the criminals his mother had railed against. And that had led – eventually – to here, to what he did now. To lying in the dirt in the mountains north of Marbella, waiting for a human target to walk into his kill zone.

When he thought back on it, thought about the trajectory his life had taken to this particular point, he felt like he hadn’t ­chosen
any
of it. His life had run along rails that other people had laid out. The truth was that it was a massive struggle to change direction, to actually take the chances you were dealt and
choose
, and he hadn’t managed it. Neither of them had, neither Viktor nor himself. Yet they were successful. ‘Successful’, in that they were alive, surviving –
biologically successful
– the rest wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. He liked to stick to essential facts, clean details. He didn’t like his head to feel cluttered, out of control.

Still. What he was doing right now – this particular job – it
was
different. Different enough to worry him. Earlier, lying here with nothing better to do, he had imagined bumping into Liz in the middle of a London street, maybe as he was making his way to Heathrow to get here. It was one of the peculiarities of London life that that kind of thing could happen. He had run into other people he knew, despite the odds, so why not her? She would appear in the crowd of faces – the mindless single face of the commuters – she would separate out from it and be there, standing in all her shocking singularity, as amazed as he was, speechless.
Imagine running into
you
here.
What are you doing?
She would be standing very close, with the crowd ­moving around her. What are you doing these days? She would ask something like that.

And what would he say? He couldn’t tell her what he had been doing, couldn’t get near it. In fact, he wouldn’t even be able to look her in the eye.