The Ice House (26 page)

46

Even without this, Rebecca was so tired the world seemed unreal. She dozed, woke up, was unsure where she was, what was happening … but then this; a palace, suddenly there in the thick black night, the trees falling away from the road to reveal it, the lights behind hundreds of windows painting the sky above, like something out of a Disney fairy tale. She squinted at it, too cold to want to look for long, more confused than impressed. She was just outside the car, with Viktor beside her. They were both shivering. ‘The Ice House,’ he said. ‘That’s what it’s called. Your mother knows it well. She’s been here before.’ She looked up at him with heavy eyes and, weirdly, thought he might be crying, but she couldn’t be sure and hardly cared any more. ‘I’m really cold,’ she said. ‘I need to get back into the car. I need to sleep.’

‘You can sleep all you want soon. First, we call her.’

‘Can I call her from the car?’

‘No. Call her from here. Tell her how cold it is. She’ll hear you shivering and come quicker.’ He winked at her.

‘I don’t want to do that …’

‘I was joking.’ He handed her a phone. ‘The signal is weak. That’s why we’re out here. Quick!’ He pointed to the phone. ‘It’s ringing already. Tell her where we are.’

When it started to ring, Julia was watching Carl for a re­action. He was standing there staring at her, his face stricken with shock. She searched in her pockets and found the phone – Molina’s phone. The number was ‘unknown’. ‘This is him,’ she said tensely. ‘He’s calling.’ But Carl didn’t move. ‘This is your brother,’ she said again, louder. This was the phone Viktor was using, the phone on which she had recognised his voice. She pressed answer and put the phone to her ear, looked away from Carl to concentrate, then heard a child’s voice speaking to her. Her legs almost gave way.

‘Mum? Is that you, Mum?’

‘Rebecca …’ The word came out in a hoarse rasp, her breath pushed past an unbearable tightness in her chest.
She was alive.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Carl move closer to her. ‘Rebecca. It’s you. Thank God it’s you.’ She started to cry immediately, put her hand up to her mouth. She felt a relief so strong she had to sit down in case she fell.

But reality returned quickly. There was no cause for relief. She had to think, calculate, and with desperate speed. She had to guess what might be happening, what she had to say.

‘Mum. Yes, it’s me. Are you OK, Mum?’ She could hear Rebecca breathing sharply, big breaths.

‘Rebecca, I’ve missed you so much …’

‘Me too, Mum.’ There was a pause. She could hear Rebecca sniffling. Was she crying? ‘But you’re coming here now, right?’ Rebecca asked. ‘I need you to come here, Mum …’

Julia swallowed, screwed her eyes shut, pressed the fear away. Everything was urgent.
He would take the phone away from Rebecca in moments.
‘You’re with Viktor?’ she asked rapidly. ‘Where are you? Tell me
where
you are …’

‘Yes. I’m with Viktor. We’re at a place called The Ice House. I don’t know where it is. He says you know though …’

The Ice House.
‘Where is he?’ she asked quickly. ‘Where’s Viktor
right now
?’

Carl moved beside her and started to whisper something, but she put a hand out, telling him to keep his distance. ‘Where is Viktor?’ she asked again. The tears were running down her face but she tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Can he hear you?’

‘No. He’s over by the car. I’m freezing. It’s freezing here. Are you coming, Mum? I miss you really badly. I don’t know what’s been happening …’

‘I’m coming. I’m coming right now. But it will take me a few hours. Now listen carefully. Listen to this – are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t let on that I’m saying this. You have to try to understand me. We might not have long before this call is over. So listen carefully. You are
not
to trust him. No matter what he says or does, you are not to trust him …’ She heard a gasp of breath, then another noise, like a sob. ‘Are you still there, Rebecca? Are you there?’

‘Yes, Mum, I’m here.’

‘Be strong. Don’t cry. Do as I tell you. Do not let him hear. Can he hear?’

A pause. ‘No.’

‘Act as normally as you can, but the first opportunity you get then get away from him and hide. You understand? Do not trust him. Do not trust anybody. Get away and hide and I will find you. I’ll be there in five hours. You have to wait—’

‘But, Mum—’

‘You have to hold out that long … Do you understand?’

‘He’s coming over.’ She spoke in an urgent whisper.

‘I love you,’ Julia said quickly. Then heard a scratching noise, like wind across the microphone, followed by voices she couldn’t make out. ‘Hello?’ she said, helplessly. ‘Rebecca? Are you there still?’ She felt the lump in her throat, the fierce, terrible longing.

‘Hello, Liz.’ A different voice. ‘Is that you, Liz?’

‘Is my daughter there?’ Her voice started to rise hysterically. ‘What are you doing to my daughter? I want to speak to my daughter …’

‘She’s fine. She’s cold. That’s all. She’s gone back to the car.’ He sounded far away but not like he was laughing at her. More like he was talking to an old friend, like everything was normal. It was obscene. ‘You have to come here,’ he said, quite calmly.

‘Don’t hurt her, Viktor,’ she pleaded, lowering her voice with difficulty, her jaw trembling. ‘Please don’t hurt her …’

‘Don’t be stupid, Liz. I’m not that kind of man. She’s only a child. She’s innocent.’

But he had already tried to kill her. He had tried to get her own father to shoot her. He was a fucking psychopath. ‘I’m begging you,’ she said. ‘Please don’t hurt her. She has nothing to do with anything. She is—’

‘Can you get here? Or I can send someone for you … We need to talk, Liz. That’s all I want – just to talk to you again. This is where it all started. Right here. I need to know why. I thought you loved me. But you were with him, with my brother …’

‘We can talk about all that. But don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her. I will get there. Promise me you won’t hurt her.’

‘Of course.’

‘I will drive there. I’ll come right now.’

‘Of course you’ll come. I’ll text you the coordinates. Ring me when you’re near. You understand?’

‘I understand. Please don’t hurt her, Viktor.’

‘Come alone. It would be a bad error to call the police.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. You have my word.’ Her voice was ­choking. She fought the tears back, struggling to sound intelligible, to get him to believe her.

‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘Just us. Waiting for you. She told you where we are?’

‘The Ice House.’ She said the words in Russian, as she remembered them.

‘No more discussion, then,’ he said. ‘Just come.’

‘This isn’t her fault, Viktor. Please don’t harm her. I will—’

But the line was dead already.

47

Julia was halfway up the drive on her way to the gates before he could get her to stop. He caught hold of her arm and pulled her round. A hand came up to slap his face and she screamed something at him. Something about his family. He took the blow.

‘Tell me what he said,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me.’

She hit him again and started to walk away, still facing him. ‘Keep away from me,’ she yelled.

He stepped forward and grabbed her arm again. ‘You’ve just told me she’s my daughter,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t keep away from you.’

She sank to the ground, sobbing, then started to tell him in a rush, sometimes so incoherently he couldn’t make out the details. Rebecca was alive. Viktor was in Russia, with Rebecca, he had told her to come there, to The Ice House.

‘Did he say anything about me?’ he asked, crouching beside her. ‘Did he ask if I was with you?’

She shook her head.

‘He doesn’t know I’m with you, then.’

‘You’re
not
with me. I left to get away from you, from you and him and all of it. I don’t want you near my daughter.’

He stood up, emotions churning. He had all the pieces now. He knew it all, or enough to fill the gaps. What she had said had to be true:
Viktor had contracted him.
He had got behind the cartel, or faked that it was the cartel.
He
had paid the money, not Zaikov. Zaikov had nothing to do with it. There might still be a deal between Zaikov and Viktor, there might be money between them, an extra incentive, but that wasn’t what was going on. What was going on was
personal
. Because Viktor
knew
. He knew what had happened ten years ago – he knew about Carl and Liz. Somehow he had found out where Liz was and that she had a child.
He had tried to get Carl to kill his own daughter.
Deliberately. It was devastating, like a hammer blow to his head. It felt like the sudden, violent death of someone close – he couldn’t begin to assimilate it. He was just completely and utterly stunned.

But he couldn’t let it cripple him. Because Rebecca was his daughter. ‘I saw it in her eyes,’ he said, ignoring Julia’s words. ‘I saw it the first time I saw her eyes.’ Something had passed between them on the hillside, with his finger on the trigger. That was why he had done it all, why he had tried to save her. ‘That’s why she trusted me,’ he said. She
had
trusted him. At some level, he thought, in her heart, she had known too. He wanted to believe that. He bent down and took Liz’s hand. ‘Stand up, Liz. Stop crying.’

He got her to her feet, holding both her hands, speaking carefully. He told her they would go together to get Rebecca. He was looking at her face, standing so close that even in this poor light he could see the freckles again, see the colour of her eyes, see that it was, somehow, the same Liz as ten years ago – older, distraught, yes, but beyond those details still
her
nonetheless, still recognisably everything she had been to him. ‘Do you have a Russian visa?’ he asked.

‘Maybe.’ She wiped a hand across her eyes and started searching through the pockets of the jacket she had on. Her whole body was shaking. It was shock, brought on by the adrenalin. She pulled out a handful of papers and started looking clumsily through them, wiping her eyes again, breathing hard, trying to see, to organise the documents.

When he took them off her she didn’t object. There was a passport, not in her name, not with her picture either, credit cards in the name on the passport, various other bits of paper. He flicked through the passport. There were six or seven valid visas in it, including a Russian business visa. ‘There’s a car in the garage,’ he said. ‘We’ll take that.’

‘I have a car.’

‘We’ll take Viktor’s,’ he said. ‘I read there was already snow up there, and it’s his winter car. It has winter tyres and four wheel drive.’

He started to walk towards the garage block, and heard her hurrying after him. ‘How long will it take?’ she asked. ‘How long till we get there?’

The last time he had been to the place was ten years ago, but he doubted much had changed. The roads were poor once you got to the eastern part of Finland, worse over the border. ‘We can get to the border in four hours,’ he said. ‘After that it depends …’

‘I told her I would be there in five hours.’

‘It will be more like seven.’ He strode back through the house, through the kitchen and down the passageway that led to the garage. He pulled the door open and switched on the lights. She was still with him. ‘Don’t worry. We will get there. We will get her.’ He could hear the confidence in his voice. He wasn’t faking it. He was absolutely certain he would get to Rebecca and she would be alive. There was no other way he could think about it.
She was his daughter.
He felt his heart leaping with a kind of absurd exultation, despite everything. But Liz started to cry again and he stopped in front of her, not knowing what to say to help.

‘I’m so frightened,’ she said. ‘I’m scared he will kill her before we get there …’

‘He couldn’t. He couldn’t do that.’ He said it without thinking and saw the look she gave him. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He could hire someone to do it, but he couldn’t do it himself. Not to a little girl. I saw him with her. He couldn’t do it.’

Her face twisted into a grimace. ‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ she said. ‘He could easily do it. He’s fucking insane. He’s a psychopath. The only reason he hasn’t already done it is because he can use her to get me too.’

He turned away from her. She was right, but he didn’t want her to see that he knew that. He didn’t have a clue what Viktor was capable of, not any more. There were a massive questions in his head, each one a malignancy threatening to rewrite the entire history of his last ten years. He would need to get to them, work them out, try to get some sense back. But right now, he just needed to get them out of there, get started.

He found car keys hanging on a rack. There were three cars in the garage but the
BMW
X5 was Viktor’s winter car, so he took the keys for that. There were covers on it. He started pulling them off, while she stood a little away from him, her face in her hands.

48

Rebecca stood alone in the room, staring at the door. She felt dizzy, like she might fall over. She leaned against the wall and tried to think. Viktor had brought her up here himself, left her here, walked off. She had heard his footsteps in the passageway beyond. She could come or go as she wished, he had said. He had promised the door would never be locked.

When she had come off the phone she had been very confused, not sure why her mum had said the things she had, or why she had sounded so frightened. But she had already been too tired to speak properly by then. She hoped she hadn’t upset her. Freezing, she had got back in the car when Viktor had taken the phone, so hadn’t heard anything he said after that.

When he had returned she had looked him in the face and told him her mum had sounded worried. It had felt scary, keeping what her mum had said from him. He hadn’t done anything bad to her since she had met him. Not really. He had talked a little weirdly in the car, kept her awake, but that was it. Yet she was definitely frightened he might guess what her mum had said.

She thought he might start asking about it. But he didn’t. He wasn’t even watching her closely. She had concentrated carefully on his eyes when she spoke to him, because her mum had taught her you could tell if a person was lying by watching their eyes. But he had only looked down at her with a slight smile and said, ‘Your mum’s probably missing you. That’s all. She’ll be here tomorrow. Not long to wait.’

There was nothing in his eyes that would scare her. He was acting the same as before, the same as he always had. As they walked back to the house he even held her hand, to guide her across the ice on the driveway. So what was the problem? Why had her mum said those things?

Her problem right now was that she could barely keep her eyes open. Every now and then she felt them close and then woke suddenly – immediately, it seemed – with a start, frightened again, wondering where she was. She tried hard to think clearly, to remember her mum’s instructions. What had she told her to do?
Hide from Viktor?
But where? And
why
?

Viktor had said one of them would bring her up a hot chocolate in a few minutes, but she didn’t know whether she could wait for that. She went over to the huge bed and sat on it.

The room – like the whole house – resembled something out of a film, something for a princess. She had said that to Viktor, on the way in, and he had laughed. ‘You
are
a princess,’ he had said. The ceiling was very high, with patterns painted across it that she couldn’t quite decipher. There was a huge double bed, with a massive quilt, as if the room might get cold. But the house was very warm – radiators along the walls, three of them, and though she couldn’t now be bothered to get up and feel them, she was sure they would be hot. There was a window, but there were heavy curtains in front of it, with some kind of dark, floral pattern embroidered into the fabric. On the walls many pictures, hunting scenes, one that looked like a prince or king – someone on a horse with a crown – visiting this place, or a place that looked very similar. Crowds of people bowing in front of him.

In the ceiling there was a small chandelier, but with candles that would need to be lit, real candles. She had never seen that before. They weren’t lit now – the light instead came from two tall standard lamps with very ornate stands. Black metal with bronze vines growing up to cup the hidden light bulbs. The carpet on the floor was like a tapestry – another hunting scene, she thought. There was a big flat-screen mounted on the wall in front of the bed – modern and out of place – but she couldn’t see a remote.

Not that she wanted to switch it on. All she wanted to do was sleep. She sank back into the soft quilt, then tried to shift herself up the bed a little, to reach the massive, plump pillows. She should take her clothes off, she thought, or she would be too warm. But she didn’t have the strength. When had she started to feel like this?

She tried to keep her eyes open by focusing on one of the pictures on the wall, but couldn’t even see it clearly now. Moments before it had been OK. She didn’t feel uncomfortable, far from it. Or rather, only if she tried to fight it, to keep her eyes open, then things would start to spin a bit and she felt slightly sick.

It had started after Viktor had given her the drink of water, just as they got in here. Or had it? Hadn’t she been like this since they had been in the helicopter? She needed sleep, that was all.

But her mum hadn’t wanted her to sleep. What was it her mum had wanted her to do? It was important she remember.

It had got worse after the water, she decided. Definitely. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t beat it, couldn’t think any more. Her head was heavy, her eyes rolling up. She tried to turn onto her side, but couldn’t even do that.