The Ice House (7 page)

10

It didn’t hurt to confuse things, so Carl took the right hand of the one behind the Audi, and pressed his fingers all over the rifle. Then he put the rifle carefully on the back seat of the Audi, made sure it was in neutral and released the handbrake. The car was on the edge of the slope leading into the car park, blocking the entrance, and a short push was all that was required to get it rolling backwards. The dead man was lying behind it, a little further back, so the car rolled over him with a couple of bumps, paused, then careered back down the dirt track to come to a halt about twenty metres lower, off the road, rear end in a clump of bushes with the front facing the valley below.

Rebecca was sitting in the front of his own car, shivering and shaking, barely able to speak. He worked very quickly, not only to exit the scene, but to get back to her. Way off in the distance he could hear sirens now, many of them, though it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from.

He took the gun from the other one, the one he had left still alive, though by the time he’d moved the car the position there had changed and the haemorrhaging had done its work. The gun was lying on the ground and he found two clips in a side pocket of the crumpled, bloody jacket. One of them was sticky with blood, so he left it. The weapon was a Sig Sauer 1911-22, a lightweight common handgun that Carl was familiar with. He spoke to the guy again as he went through the pockets to remove the ammunition. The eyes were still open, so it didn’t seem totally mad to say things to him. Carl wondered if he had kids. He looked too young.

When he got back in the car Rebecca stared at him like she was about to start screaming. He said some reassuring things – or what he thought might fit that bill – then he drove carefully past the dead body blocking the entrance, talking to her to distract her, making sure the wheels didn’t contact.

Five minutes later they were approaching the little village he had seen from higher up when he heard her phone beep. He’d forgotten it was still on. ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked her. She was sitting ramrod straight, glaring out of the window, her face looking blanched. He wasn’t sure she had heard the beep. ‘That’s your phone,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a signal.’ She pulled the phone out and looked at it. The text would have been sent, he assumed. She would want to call her mother now. ‘Do it,’ he said.

She called and, predictably, got a message that the phone wasn’t operational at that moment. Her mother’s phone would be somewhere near her dead mother, in the house. If it was still working, which he doubted, then it was likely it would still have no cover. They had a signal now because they had moved into the range of a different mast. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve sent her the text. She will reply if she can.’

She didn’t reply. She was in a stranger’s car. She had just seen him shoot three people. She would be terrified, no doubt about that, even if she knew, at some level, that those men had been trying to kill her. He had to change the situation, reassure her.

He pulled the car over when they were still half a kilometre from the village. ‘I have to make a call too,’ he said. ‘You can try your mother again.’ He got out and walked a little away, then quickly got her number up and composed a text to her.
Rebecca. I have had to change phones. I’m OK. I got your message but don’t
use that number any more. I will explain everything when I see you. Don’t worry. You can trust Carl. He will protect you until I can get to you. Give me two days.
He looked at it, trying to work out if it was too much or too little. He wanted to sign it off ‘mum’ or ‘mamma’, or do an ‘x’, but wasn’t sure how her mother would do that, so left it out. It couldn’t be from anyone else. He thought for a moment about her crying, then added,
I love you. Everything will be fine.
He sent it.

Back in the car he asked her if she had reached her mum. She shook her head and started crying uncontrollably. She was sitting pressed up against the window, as far away from him as possible. ‘You can get out if you want,’ he said. ‘I’m not stopping you.’ She pulled at the door handle immediately but it was locked. She started to shout something at him, becoming frantic in an instant, but he quickly pressed the button to release the lock. ‘It’s automatic,’ he said. ‘It locks itself. It’s open now.’ She was out at once, door swinging wide. She ran to the other side of the road and stood there, panting, looking back at him as if she thought he might get out the little gun and shoot her.

He leaned across the passenger seat and closed the door, started the engine. He counted slowly to ten, then put it in gear. She was still standing there.
I will have to leave her
, he thought.
It’s her choice.
But he didn’t want to now. If he left her he was certain she would be dead within twenty-four hours. He didn’t want her to die. She was his responsibility. Because he had done this, brought this situation about. If she died then he had killed three people for nothing.

But he couldn’t force her to come either. He started the car rolling, saw she was looking down at her phone. He slowed, stopped, lowered the windows. In the wing mirror he saw her running towards the car, heard her shouting for him to wait. She got to the door and looked in through the open window.
‘She had to change phones,’ she said, breathless, voice really high-pitched. ‘That’s why I couldn’t get her.’

‘OK,’ he said.

She opened the door and got in. ‘She says I’m to stay with you.’

11

The shop was so busy Julia was going to have to turn people out to get away on time. It was typical – slack all morning, and now a rush. She’d forgotten about the delivery too. A new freezer unit that had been on order for weeks. There were two guys manhandling it through the rear service doors now, as she stood watching them. She’d had to leave the teenager serving out front.

The shop/ice cream parlour – selling ‘speciality ice cream’ made mostly by Julia herself from frozen yogurt – was right on the beachfront road, the pedestrianised lane that ran along the embankment wall from the tip of Marbella old town, as far as the marina. It was hers – or at least the long lease on the place was. She had used all of her money, none of Juan’s, kept it separate, got a lawyer involved. Juan had resented that, at the time – they had been about to get married, after all – but she had just weathered that storm, waited for him to forget it. Now he worked about as much as her in the place and she assumed that gave him some rights, given their legal status. She had never checked, but maybe she should.

She was almost certain he was having an affair with a young waitress she had employed until about a month ago. If true it wouldn’t be the first time in their marriage. The third, in fact, and each time she had confronted him he had reacted the same – he had been crestfallen, seized with panic that she would leave him or tell Rebecca, crippled with guilt and full of apologies and promises. He insisted, of course, that it meant nothing. Maybe she believed that the first time.

She shouted out some instructions to the delivery guys, to stop them taking half the wall away as they came through, then walked back through to the front to check. There was still a queue but it was getting smaller. The girl was doing OK. Beyond the open doors she could see the sun, bright on the sea. The weather had brightened up mid-afternoon – that was what was doing it – a little heat and it had brought them out.

She walked back to the storeroom and saw they were almost done. She looked in her pocket for her mobile, to check the time, remembered it had died on her and was by the till out front, charging. She needed to call Rebecca, check she was back safe, check Juan had got there, as they had arranged.

As one of the men stripped the protective card and styrofoam from the edges of the unit she switched the phone on. A text message came in straight away, but then the other man was in her face wanting her to sign something, saying she had received the fridge in good working order.

She argued with the men, telling them they needed to plug it in and start it up before she would sign. Whilst they were doing that she walked back through the shop. There were only two customers left. ‘Well done, Ester,’ she said to the girl. ‘Sorry about that.’ She nodded a smile at the front customer. Everyone looked happy enough. She looked at her phone, got the text up. It was Rebecca’s number. She started to read the message. She frowned. Her heart skipped, the blood drained from her face:
Mum get home qckly scared dont know what to do. Some kind of explosion at the house. OK, but need u to get here phones down so cant get anyone. A policeman dead. He tried to kill me.
POLICEMAN TRIED TO SHOOT ME
. This man says u r also in danger. Someone trying to kill us, he says. He thinks thats wot explsn was. knows my name, says here to help me. Carl. Says u have paid him to protect me. On hill. Will try to wait. He says I need to come with in his car. He saved my life. Call me back. Quick.

She threw the bunch of keys at the girl as she was running out. The shop suddenly didn’t matter – she had to get to the car, get up the valley.

She tried desperately to call Rebecca as she ran. But her phone was off, or disconnected. She composed a quick, clumsy message telling her she was on her way, then got to the car and tried to concentrate on getting up there as fast as possible.

The fear was screaming in her skull all the way up through the town, then out onto the twisting, terrible road home. She kept the phone lying on the seat beside her whilst she kept her eyes on the road. She used the voice recognition to shout at the thing to call Rebecca without having to stop. But there was only ever the same dead voice telling her Rebecca was unreachable. She got the same message when she tried Juan. She wanted to send texts to both of them, but driving was the priority. She wanted to call the police too, but the message itself stopped her each time she started – she had to try to work out what the message meant. She couldn’t get her head round it.
A policeman had tried to shoot her???
Was that a mistake? She had to get up there, see what Rebecca meant for herself.

The drive took half an hour, if there were no tractors or ­tourists, forty-five minutes during the rush hours, when the routes out of Marbella were blocked. She cursed again and again that she had ever bought a place out in the hills.

It had been cheap, spacious, isolated, and back then isolation was what she thought she had needed most of all to be safe. But that was a stupid idea, and she had known it was stupid for many years now. Isolation hadn’t kept her hidden, it had merely left her exposed without help and witnesses. Michael Rugojev had
found her here a year ago, his assistant turning up at the shop out of the blue. She should have done something then, moved house, sold the shop, moved countries, but she had trusted him, trusted the promises he had given. So here she was.

She told herself it would be OK all the way up. Rebecca was clever, she had been told how to protect herself, taught caution. She would do what she had to.

But when the phone signal went down she started to really panic inside. Cars passed her coming back the other way and she had to slow to check who was in them. Was it anyone she recognised, with Rebecca bundled into the back, out of sight? She knew no one called Carl. She remembered again the most prominent part of the message. Rebecca had written it in caps, shouting it.
A policeman had tried to kill her?
Maybe someone
dressed
as a policeman, or who looked like police. It had to be that. An error. But someone had
shot
at her. Julia went into a kind of frozen stupor thinking about it, unable to process the information in any useful way.

As she got past the Ramirez place she saw smoke hanging in the valley, in the distance, and felt the shock kick at her heart. Was that from her house? Now she had to call the police, regard­less of the message – she would have to
assume
Rebecca had made a mistake. But then she saw a yellow ambulance and a red fire brigade truck crawling up the road ahead, saw a ­police car with lights flashing just behind them. The police were already onto it.

The road was a one lane dirt track, barely maintained by the local council. It was just under two kilometres from where it turned off at the Ramirez house to their place. She knew the ruts and potholes well and was driving furiously, so that she quickly caught up with the trailing police car, but there was no room to pass. The passenger in the police car kept waving to her out of his window – trying to signal that she should stop or turn back.

As they came to the last stretch of straight road she saw the house in the valley below and went numb with fear. It looked like the roof was completely destroyed. Both the fire truck and the ambulance had turned down the short lane to the front of the building. She could see there were already at least three cars there, on the flat parking area outside the front door, one another marked police car. She was going to drive straight down there, join them. But the police car she was following stopped abruptly in front of her, by the little olive trees at the bend, blocking her way. She braked to a halt and was already out and looking to run round it, her engine left on, door wide open, when one of them got out of the passenger side and moved to block her with hands in the air.

‘I live here,’ she shouted at him in Spanish, trying to push past, desperate. ‘It’s my home. I have to get to my daughter …’ She dodged low to go round him but he dropped an arm across her chest and caught hold of her arm. ‘You can’t go down there,’ he said firmly. ‘It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s dangerous …’

‘My daughter is down there. I have to get to her.’

‘Calm down and I will call my boss to speak to you. You can’t go down there.’

She stepped back. She felt like hitting him, but that wasn’t going to work. She thought she might be able to twist away from him, duck under his arm, head down the valley side and run through the trees, but then the other one – the driver – appeared, shutting down the space between them and the car. She began to plead with the one holding her, telling him again and again about Rebecca, then started to shout for Rebecca at the top of her voice. The other was on his radio. She heard something about someone being killed. ‘Who has been killed?’
she yelled, voice becoming hysterical. ‘I live here. You need to tell me. This is my house.’

She couldn’t get her eyes off it. It didn’t look like the place she lived in. She had an unreal sensation of being somewhere else. Walls were caved in, smoke coming through the roof. There were firemen moving in through the holes. For some reason she didn’t notice the half-buried car until they started to break its windscreen. She put her hand to her mouth. She thought it could be Juan’s car. Was he in it, was he the one who had been killed? She took a huge breath, feeling a premonition of something terrible, something truly terrible, coming right at her.