The Ice House (3 page)

4

I just don’t want you to freeze.
Rebecca remembered her mother’s words right now, as the man first came into view. What else had she said? This had been one of their little ‘security’ conversations, about four weeks ago.
I just don’t want you to freeze. When you do that you give them all the time they need. Someone comes at you, someone tries to grab you, you do not freeze, you scream and yell and run, immediately.

She had cringed inside, listening to her mother, because this kind of conversation had been a refrain throughout her life. Her mother was paranoid; always stopping her doing normal things that everyone else did, because they were ‘too dangerous’. And worse, she went on like that in front of her friends. It was embarrassing.

This was the first year her mum had let her get the school bus home, despite her being ten now, despite all the other kids having done that for years. Some of them lived out in the hills too, like they did, so that wasn’t the reason.

It meant she had to walk from the bus stop to the house, along the track that led from the junction with the surfaced road, which was as far as the bus would go. It was one point nine eight kilometres from there to home, her mother had told her, a gentle slope up the side of the valley. It usually took Rebecca about thirty minutes to walk it, going slow. The weather was good right now, warm but not too hot, and the view across the other side was great, with the peaks all hazy like something out of an adventure story. If you went right up there – where it really was wild – you could sometimes see a warthog, getting out of your way, then smell it as you crossed the trail it used. Warthogs smelled like pee, she thought, all pigs did. She didn’t like ham or bacon because it came from pigs and she knew what pigs smelled like. She still sometimes ate pork though, if it was cooked in a stew. Her mother cooked fantastic stews.

You couldn’t see the warthogs from here, from the track, but you could sometimes see a herd of ibex – the little, wild, Spanish mountain goat – up on the ridges. And there were butterflies and birds, sometimes a snake, and many lizards. And the buzzing of the insects, flies and mosquitoes. These things interested her because her mum had always told her things about them when she was little, interesting details – like the fact that the lizards lost their tails if you grabbed them, but didn’t die, or that it was only the female mosquito that made the really irritating high-pitched whine that woke you up, and that it was a mating call, the same thing birds did, only it sounded nice when birds sang –
It’s just the mosquitoes’ song
, her mum would say, when she couldn’t sleep.
They’re singing for you.
That was a nice way to put it – typical of her mum – but it didn’t stop them biting her. Her dad used to come in with a can of fly spray afterwards, spray the room even though she hated the smell and didn’t want to be the cause of anything dying, not even a mosquito. Her dad was generally irritating at the moment.

Right now she couldn’t hear any insects or birds or anything, because she had the headphones in. She was listening to a track by Katy Perry when the man stepped onto the road ahead. He was still about three hundred metres away, too far to see ­properly. It looked like he had stepped out from behind the clump of olive bushes at the bend in the road, but she might be mistaken. Maybe he had just walked up from their house. Their house was the only one past that bend, the only one on this
stretch of road for another two or three kilometres. After their place, over the top of the hill, there was a long, twisting track down into the next valley, the hillsides overgrown, then, at the bottom, the big villa they called ‘The Italian’s Place’ because that was just about all they knew about the owner, despite having lived here for almost five years.

She shifted her school bag onto the other shoulder. She wasn’t used to seeing people on this road. She thought her mum was mad, but it still made her pause when she saw him there. Since she had started getting the bus back, this was the first time she had seen anyone else here. She slipped the headphones out and stopped walking. What should she do? He was in her way, between her and their house.

She looked back behind as she realised that she was doing nothing – exactly what her mum had tried to teach her not to do. But he was still far away – though walking towards her, quite quickly – no danger yet. She could turn and run back down the hill to the road. The neighbours lived at the junction there – the Ramirez family. She could go in there. He wouldn’t be able to catch her because she was an excellent runner. It was just about the only sport she liked. She had won competitions at school, both at sprint distances and longer. This year they were to enter her in a national athletics competition in Madrid, representing a group of clubs in the area. She usually found it easy to outsprint adults, unless they were runners too. He would have to be fit to catch her when he was starting so far back.

But that was silly. None of her friends would think like this. She shaded her eyes from the sun so she could see him better, and immediately relaxed. It was a policeman. When she put her hand up she could see his uniform and hat. She smiled to herself, wondered vaguely what he could be doing here, a long way out without his car (had she seen a car back at the junction? She
didn’t remember one, but she hadn’t been looking specially), then started to walk towards him.

He called out to her when he was still a little away, then shouted his name, or maybe his rank, but she didn’t quite get it. He stopped in front of her, looking down at her, but not too far down. She was already one metre sixty-five, very tall for her age. He had the sun right behind him when he was talking to her, so she couldn’t see his face too well. He looked like a teenager, she thought, spotty, slightly unshaven. He was sweating like he’d just run from somewhere, but not out of breath. He asked her for her name, age and where she lived. She told him. Spanish was her second tongue, but not far behind English. She had gone to Spanish nursery before school. She was at an English ‘international’ school now, but she had Spanish friends and spoke it all the time with her dad. ‘Rebecca Martin,’ she said, pronouncing Martin the Spanish way –
Marteen
– though her mother said it the English way quite often, as a joke, to annoy her dad. ‘I’m ten. I live just over there. The next house.’

He asked her what she was doing out on the road alone and she told him. He nodded. She did this every day after school, she said. He licked his lips and gazed off at the ridge line on the other side. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m just checking the area.’ He reached a hand out and patted her head, clumsily, because she was a little tall for that. Then he stepped around her and walked on.

She would tell her mum she had seen him, because that was another of her mum’s little rules – that she should always report back if a stranger spoke to her, no matter who they were. She watched him for a bit before starting off again. She would have about half an hour alone in the house before her dad got back. That was good. Later they would do pizza. Even better. She put her headphones back in, selected her favourite tune from Gaga’s second album – a song called ‘Born This Way’. The beat started a little after the intro, lifting her mood – then she felt like dancing her way home. She started waving her arms around, singing at the top of her voice as she went.

Carl had seen the policeman. The man had walked straight through his sights, in the direction of the house, then back again fifteen minutes later. Was he really a policeman? Hard to determine at this distance. He had looked young, but policemen were young these days; either that or he was getting older. But Jones had told him the local police were involved, so unless squad cars started to arrive in force he wasn’t going to change plan.

In between the man’s appearances the school bus had arrived at the bottom of the valley dirt track. Carl had heard it, then shifted position to search for it through the spotting scope. A stand of trees and a fold of land had prevented him from watching anyone get off or on. But he knew it would be her. Jones had given him the timings and they were accurate. It would take the girl about half an hour to reach the point directly below him. So it was on. Right now. It was happening.

He concentrated on his breathing, on keeping everything calm and slow. His heart wanted to pick up, of course, the adrenalin starting already. But a fast heartbeat made the shot harder. He could control it through his breathing, up to a point, the rest was mental state. A certain increase in pulse couldn’t be avoided.

Aside from the policeman there had been one car, an hour and a half ago, a Nissan. The same car that had come down the road, going in the direction of Marbella at 9.30 that morning. There had been a Toyota right behind it and so far the Toyota hadn’t returned. He hadn’t been able to see the drivers, but he knew that the occupants of the house used these cars, which meant there was someone back there now, waiting for the girl, probably. She would come on the school bus, and walk up the valley, right into his zone. If she didn’t then he would abort and seek instructions.

He moved off scope and picked up the spotting sight again, focused on the ridge across the other side of the valley. At 5.30 that morning, in the grey dawn light, he had seen movement up there and had got the sights onto a single man, moving in amongst the rocks, dressed in camo khaki. He had settled there with binoculars and started to search the valley. Carl didn’t recognise him, so it wasn’t Jones, but he hadn’t met anyone else in ‘the team’. He assumed it was someone involved, maybe even someone sent to locate his position and watch the hit, make sure it went to plan. He had seen no weapon – just the binoculars. He was sure the man wouldn’t have spotted him. He looked now for him in the two places he had moved between, but the hillside was empty. That didn’t mean he hadn’t moved to somewhere further up the ridge, out of view. Carl had a limited range of movement in the shallow trench.

He got his eye back on the scope, moved the gun slightly, then heard someone shouting, from back in the direction of the bus. A moment later he realised it wasn’t shouting, it was singing. He slipped his finger over the trigger and listened. It was her, he thought, singing very loud, slightly out of tune. He didn’t know the song. She sounded breathless, happy.

Then suddenly she was there, at the edge of his area, moving fast. He hadn’t expected that. She was almost running, waving her arms about, singing at the top of her voice. Rebecca Martin. Ten years old. She was tall, he thought, for a ten-year-old. The blonde hair was tied back into a ponytail. She had a small backpack on one shoulder. It took him a couple of seconds to track her because she was moving so erratically. Was she actually dancing? Either that or skipping.

He cursed silently, forced himself to stay calm. As he took deeper breaths she stopped for a moment, right in the middle of his set-up zone, catching her breath. He got the cross hairs onto her head, then he could see her properly. The scope had a twenty-five times magnification and she was just less than five hundred metres away. Her face was large and clear. He could see her eyes, her mouth, the freckles across the bridge of her nose.He thought,
Would you have shot through that little boy?
– in Russia, the hit on Barsukov –
if you had known that the woman wasn’t involved, that there would be no repercussions, would you have shot through his head?

The girl started moving again, but walking slower now. She was smiling to herself. She had earphones in, snaking away to a phone or music device. That accounted for the singing out of tune. But her voice had sounded …
what?
He realised suddenly that he was shaking. Her voice had brought to him a tiny little piece of her personality. What she was like, what she sounded like.

The singing of children. He had no children and rarely thought about them. Viktor had no kids either. Kids were not a part of his life. But the singing. It had caught hold of something in his chest, pulled a smile onto his face. That was why he was shaking. His arms were shaking, his legs, his chest. He had to get control of it.

She was still walking, oblivious. In a few moments she would be out of the zone he could aim within, hidden by the spur of land where the road curved. He tracked her movement, slipped the sights a little ahead of her, ran through the calculations. She was moving so slowly that hardly any adjustment was needed. Suddenly she stopped singing and stood still, looking down at either her phone or the music player. He slid the cross hairs over her head again. But the gun wasn’t steady now. The trembling in his limbs was getting transmitted down the stock. He thought, instantaneously,
No, I would not have shot the boy
, and something inside him paused.

This was the story they had written for her, for both of them – someone else’s plot. His part was to pull the trigger and end her life.

But he had a choice.

He took a long breath.

She started moving again, no longer singing. He slipped his finger off the trigger and his eye off the scope. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want this girl to die.

Looking down the barrel, he watched her walk right past the kill zone, then brought his knees up, rolled, shook the mud and branches off and thrust himself out of the dirt and bushes, like some giant grub being born. The sun blazed in his eyes. He looked down at her from his exposed position, now behind her. Standing up he was high enough to see straight over the spur of land where the road turned. He saw her approaching the bend with the house just beyond it. He could see the sun reflecting off the swimming pool, see the red roof tiles.

They would try to kill her without him, he knew, the guy on the ridge opposite was probably already reporting to Jones. No matter what he did she would probably be dead within twenty-four hours. A six-man team meant lots of back-up options. He had a useless thought – that he should shout at her, warn her. But right then he saw the flash at the house. He ducked automatically, knowing instinctively what it was. He saw the roof of the house lift at one end, then explode outwards and up, debris showering into the sky. There was a massive crack echoing off the valley sides. He dropped to one knee and watched a coiling fireball burst upwards in a cloud of black smoke. In an instant it was subsiding into a high column of swirling dust. He could hear the noise of alarms going off, tiles and bricks raining over the hillside.