The Ice House (30 page)

55

The road twisted down through the trees, dropping quickly towards the house. Julia drove as fast as she dared, her heart thudding heavily in her chest, her eyes more on the rear and side mirrors than the road right in front of her. She was frightened he would be running at her, cutting the corners where the road curved, trying to get a clear shot in. But she could see nothing in the mirrors, no shape moving through the woods, no one on the road behind. She had seen him falling backwards, hit, but couldn’t get herself to believe it.

She drove for seconds like that, not thinking clearly about where she was going. From way ahead, over the other side of the house, she thought she heard the crackle of gunfire, an automatic weapon firing off in a long burst. But she could see no one. She braked through a long bend and then suddenly it was there in front of her, no more than fifty metres away: the house. The trees dropped away, the land levelled out and she could see it. She braked harder and the car skidded to a halt. She was already where the road opened out onto the wide space in front of the place – a car park or turning circle. She could see the long façade, the big entrance, the door open, she could even see lights behind the windows.

She was trapped. She had driven the wrong way. But there had been no space to turn the car round. She needed to turn it now, to get away from here and wait for Alex. She started to pull it round and the engine just cut. She forced herself to think methodically, tried to start it again. A metallic clunking sound issued from somewhere in front of her, a wisp of smoke curled from beneath the bonnet. He had shot at it, twice, she remembered. She tried to start it again. This time there was no response at all.

She couldn’t see Alex anywhere. But she had his number. He had given it to her. She fumbled in her pockets, feeling pinned and exposed, in full view of the house, the panic rising in her gut. At any minute they could come out of the house with a gun. They were going to kill her. She would never see Rebecca again.

She needed to call Alex, tell him what had happened, get his help. She started to shake, her vision blurring so that she couldn’t see the numbers clearly on the phone. She wiped her hands across her eyes, squinted, opened them, started looking for the number he had given her. But it was the wrong phone. His number was in the one she’d just dropped. A high-pitched scream cut across the land in front of her, coming very clear through the smashed windscreen. Her heart jumped with a different kind of terror.

Rebecca. It could only be her. It had come from directly in front of her, from past the house, not inside it. She grabbed the shotgun, fumbled the car door open, stepped out into the snow. And saw her.

She was about one hundred metres distant, way past the house, at the other side of the shallow valley. She was a tiny shape running through the whiteness, the dark line of the forest behind her. She was coming from behind the house, moving up towards the far side of the hill Julia had just come down.

Julia started running forward at once, shouting her name at the top of her voice, dropping the phone, sprinting across the flat area right in front of the house. She had to get to her.

She got past the front door, her legs picking up speed, her arms swinging. She shouted again, but either Rebeca didn’t hear or couldn’t stop, because she just kept going, heading up the hill towards the forest.

Julia got past the flat parking area and vaulted a low wall, into what might have been a meadow. She sank almost up to her thighs in a drift of snow, pushed out of it and yelled Rebecca’s name with all the energy she could find. She saw her daughter pause, turn, see her, heard her small voice float over the flat, pure white field of snow – ‘
Mum
,’ she shouted.
‘
Mum
.’ She changed direction and started tumbling across the meadow towards Julia. And exactly then Viktor Rugojev came into view from the right, from round the side of the house, rushing towards Rebecca, a blur of movement as he closed the distance.

Within seconds he had caught up. Rebecca tried to dodge him, swerving sideways and going under his arm. He lunged in the snow, fell, got up, started chasing her again. She swerved again and Julia was sure she could hear him laughing. Like they were playing a sickening game of catch in the snow. She kept going towards them, running full speed, her lungs heaving at the air, running harder than she had ever run in her life, going towards it because there was nothing else she could do.

He caught Rebecca by her coat and hauled her back against him. Julia could see her struggling and kicking back. She was about ten metres from them, still going fast, when he brought a gun up and placed it against Rebecca’s head.

Rebecca stopped squirming, stood still, her eyes bulging like a crazed animal. His free hand was around her upper body, pulling her back into him. He was tall, but her head was against his chest.

Julia slowed, skidded to a dead stop, one arm stretched out towards them, the shotgun dangling limp in the other. She was paralysed with fear. She thought he was going to pull the trigger. ‘Viktor,’ she shouted. ‘Please don’t. Please, Viktor.’ She couldn’t see his face properly because her eyes were blurred from running through the cold air. She forced her limbs to move, started to walk very slowly towards them.

‘That’s right, Liz,’ he shouted. ‘You come to me. Keep ­coming forward. Get closer.’

She got to within five metres. Rebecca was very still now, catching her breath, her face twisted up. Julia could see her terri­fied, pleading eyes, looking straight at her, her hands hanging onto Viktor’s arm, the knuckles white.

‘Please leave her,’ Julia said. ‘I’m begging you, Viktor.’ She didn’t have to shout. She was close enough to whisper.

‘My brother is dead,’ Viktor said, almost in a whisper, his eyes darting off to his left. ‘There’s no point in running any more. There’s just us now.’

The words stabbed at her heart but she had no idea if he was telling the truth. She didn’t look where he had looked. She kept her eyes right on him. ‘You said you wanted to talk,’ she stammered. ‘I can talk. But
please
leave Rebecca.
Please
let her go.’

His thoughts seemed to pause, some other expression ­coming into his eyes.

‘I’m here now,’ she said. ‘I’m who you want, not her, not him. It’s me, Viktor. It’s Liz. We can talk, right now. Please don’t hurt anyone else.’

She watched him look at the ground, then up at her again. ‘You
are
here,’ he said. A strangled noise caught in his throat, then angrily he brushed a sleeve across his face, the one holding Rebecca. He took his arm off her, then stepped back from her. ‘We’re alone now,’ he said. ‘We’re finally alone.’

Rebecca looked like she couldn’t move for fear. She was almost close enough for Julia to touch. Viktor took another step back, further away from her.

‘Walk to me, Rebecca,’ Julia said. ‘Come to me.’

Rebecca took a step. Viktor was standing perfectly still, shoulders slumped, the gun hanging at his side. He did nothing to stop her, so Julia stepped forwards to meet her, caught her arms, pulled her roughly sideways. Rebecca wanted to get her arms around her, to embrace her, but he still had the gun and Julia had to keep her eyes on him, get Rebecca behind her. She stepped forwards so that she was between Rebecca and him, her body across Rebecca’s. ‘Stay behind me,’ she hissed. ‘Stay there, Rebecca.’ She could hear Rebecca sobbing violently. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK, Rebecca.’ She kept one hand on her arm, behind her, holding her there, the other on the gun.

‘Nothing is OK,’ Viktor said quietly. ‘I wanted to kill you, Liz. I wanted to kill all of you.’

She nodded frantically, her brain racking up the possible moves. What did she do now? What
could
she do?

‘I looked for you for years,’ he said. ‘I was thinking there must be a mistake, that you must have been mistaken to leave me. But I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ He looked up at her. ‘I can hardly look at you, Liz.’ He started to cry. He was standing like a helpless, grief-stricken little boy, just standing there crying, the tears running down his cheeks. ‘I couldn’t find you,’ he repeated. ‘But Mikhael Ivanovich found you. He wouldn’t tell me where you were, but I paid a lot of money to find out.’ He looked up, wiped his eyes again, using the hand holding the gun. ‘You had a daughter. I couldn’t believe it. When I first saw photos of her …’ he pointed through Julia, towards Rebecca, cowering behind her, ‘I thought she must be ours. I thought she had to be our child.’ He gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘I paid one of her teachers to get a drop of her blood, had it tested, because I thought she had to be mine. Almost my
DNA
they told me. Almost. It took me a while to put it together, a few more samples, a few more tests, because I couldn’t get myself to believe it. She was my fucking brother’s child.’ He was silent for a long time, not looking at either of them. Julia could see his jaw working away. He shook his head, as if confused. ‘I thought it would work, put things right. I thought it would be a kind of justice if that bastard killed his own kid. Justice for me. But that all went wrong. And here you are in front of me. He’s dead and here you both are.’

‘You don’t have to hurt anyone else,’ she said quickly. ‘We can talk about all of it. I can tell you why I left, I can explain it all …’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘If Alex is hurt we should help him,’ she tried. ‘He’s your brother—’

‘He’s dead,’ he said, flatly. ‘Forget him.’

‘You can tell me what you want, Viktor,’ she said, her voice so strained, so high-pitched with stress that it sounded like someone else talking through her. ‘We can talk, Viktor. That’s what you said you wanted …’

He shrugged his big shoulders. ‘I don’t need to,’ he said. ‘Not now. I’ve seen you, seen your face again.’ He brought the free hand up and rubbed it through his hair. ‘You don’t know how much my life has depended upon seeing your face again.’ He tried to smile, but it didn’t work. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand any of it. What I feel here …’ He took a huge breath, then smacked his clenched fist against his chest. ‘What I feel for you, Liz. What I felt then, what I’ve always felt. I told you it would never go away and it hasn’t. It’s
still
there, Liz, still massive inside me.’

She didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth to apologise, to start to try to explain something, to plead with him again, but he held a hand up, stopping her.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You’re only going to lie. You’re frightened of me, right?’

She nodded, biting her lip, desperately keeping Rebecca pushed behind her. She thought this was it, that he was going to start shooting, right now. She took her hand off Rebecca and held the shotgun with both hands, brought it up and pointed it at him, pulled her finger through the first empty trigger so that it was resting against the second. He shook his head, did something to the pistol in his hands, pulled the slide back so that it clicked, then looked up at her as if he had only noticed for the first time that she was armed. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked quietly, staring at the shotgun. ‘Shoot me? Do you feel nothing at all for me, Liz? Is
that
what it’s like?’

She put the stock into her shoulder, tried to hold it firmly, the little iron sight right over his chest. ‘I don’t want to shoot you,’ she said. ‘I want this to stop.’

‘But you don’t love me, do you?’

‘That’s not what this is about.’

‘Tell me the truth. Last chance. Did you
ever
love me?’

All she could hear was her heart and a scream of fright that couldn’t get out of her mouth. She pulled the trigger.

The blast took her off her feet, the recoil forcing her back into Rebecca, sending the gun flying out of her hands. She went over her and down to the ground, then spun round and got her hands over her daughter’s head, trying to protect her. They were both on the ground. She thought he would start shooting, thought he would somehow roll through the snow and come up with the gun. There was nothing she could do. The shotgun had only two cartridges – Alex had told her that – and she had fired both.

In the silence that followed, crouched over her daughter, waiting, the sequence ran through her mind several times before it all sank in.

He was not going to just roll, get up and start shooting at them. Because she had seen him take the blast in his chest and head, seen what happened to his chest and head, seen the gun flying off, seen his arms in the air, seen his body driven backwards in a hail of shot discharged at near point-blank range. The mess, the torso slamming off the ground – she had seen it all as she tumbled backwards over her daughter. And now, when she forced herself to open her eyes, move her head and look, she could see the body lying there trembling.

56

They sat for minutes in the snow, hugging each other, rocking back and forwards, crying, Julia stroking Rebecca’s head, Rebecca’s face buried into her chest.

Then her brain started to work again. She told Rebecca to stay where she was, then walked quickly over to Viktor’s body. She didn’t want to look, but she forced herself, then turned away, retching. She moved back to Rebecca. ‘Where’s Alex, Becky?’ she asked. ‘Do you know where he is?’

But Rebecca just frowned, shook her head.

‘The guy you called Carl?’ Julia tried.

That worked.

They walked slowly through the field, following Rebecca’s footprints in the otherwise pristine snow. They came to the huddled body of another man first. Rebecca said it might be someone who had worked for Viktor, someone who had been in the car with them. But they couldn’t see his face. He was dead.

Alex was just past him. He was lying near the start of the trees, at the other side of a broken wall, the ground disturbed all around him. Beside him Julia could see blood, very red against the bright, white snow. His arms were stretched out, the legs together. He was on his side. Rebecca started to sob. Julia stopped about five metres back and put her hand in her mouth, bit down on the gloved knuckles.

‘He tried to get them off me,’ Rebecca said, her voice faint.

Julia nodded. She couldn’t see his face, and didn’t want to. She didn’t think she could bear it. She had been here once before and thought he was dead. That time she had been wrong. It had been Michael hanging on the rope. But she had still run from him, tried to put it all behind her. That had just delayed it, it seemed. Now it had caught up.

She edged cautiously around him, not wanting to see his eyes, if he had been shot there, if he looked like Viktor. She was still two metres back when she realised his chest was moving. He was breathing.