The Ice House

by John Connor

  He was in what looked like a kitchen, standing over a sink, splashing water onto his face. She wasn’t sure until he straightened up and turned from the sinks, walked over to the window and leaned against the sill – then she could see his face quite clearly. It was him. No doubt about it. Not who she had been expecting at all.

  When she got past the initial shock she started to scan the place again, trying to hold down the feelings, keep her breath under control. It was almost impossible.

  This was the only house for miles around, a blaze of light against the surrounding woods. From where she had lain – at the edge of the forest on the slightly higher land above the inlet – she could see straight over what she thought might be the helicopter pad, across the lawns and down to the water. The surface was alive with reflected light, a shifting pattern of flickering orange and yellow against the black forested land beyond.

  Despite that, at first she had thought no one was home. She had searched every window she could see, very carefully. There were no curtains or blinds, no attempt at privacy. There was a three-metre-high security fence that she remembered well, with cameras and floodlights every twenty metres, razor wire coiled along the top, the trees cleared either side of it so it looked like a prison camp boundary, but the gates were wide open, with no one on guard. No dogs, no security personnel patrolling the perimeter. All these things had been standard when she had been here ten years before. Now it looked like you could just walk straight through the gates.

  Which was exactly what she had done. She was standing about fifty metres past the gateposts now, watching his figure move from room to room. From where she was to the door was less than thirty metres. If he looked out he would see her.

  The car she had hired was back in the trees, at a bend in the road. She had left it to walk through the forest and get near enough undetected to be able to work out what she should do. She had hoped that she would actually see them – see Viktor, see Rebecca. There had been a strong feeling in her heart that Rebecca would be here, that she would find her. But her premon­itions and precautions had been off target. There was no security. No sign of Viktor. No Rebecca. Instead, he was here.

  At the airport, she had not been able to remember the exact address – the car she had hired had a satnav though. She had paid for it – and the binoculars – using one of the cards Drake had given her, even though she knew that meant Michael Rugojev would be able to trace the usage. Some credit cards were set up to send a text message to a nominated phone number, notifying each transaction as it happened, to prevent fraud. If it was like that then he would know already that she was in Helsinki, but she had no other source of funds and so no option.

  She had put ‘Gumbacka’ into the satnav – that was as much as she could recall – but had easily found her way once she got near.

  A year ago, when Michael Rugojev had tracked her down, she had sat in a restaurant with him and asked where his nephew was. Viktor Rugojev’s wealth had apparently grown since she had last met him: he now had properties in America, London, Dubai, Moscow, Brazil. There was some kind of rift between Michael and he, though, a source of pain to the uncle. He had sat with his hands open at the table and said, ‘Like all of us, he moves around a lot. I’m never really sure where he is based these days.’ Then he’d smiled, and added, ‘He still has the place in Helsinki.’ He remembered their visit there, wanted to talk about it, as though the memory were happy. ‘I think it’s the only place he still has in Finland,’ he said. ‘They tell me he keeps it because he remembers you, remembers your plans together.’

  His plans, not hers. But that was why she was here, because Michael had said that.

  They had been here only once, all three of them – Michael, Viktor and herself. Plus the staff and security, of course. Nearly thirty security guys at that point, because it was all still fresh – the attempt on Michael’s life – the fallout still with them. But that hadn’t stopped Viktor. He had proposed to her here, on that night. He had done it in front of Michael, as if Michael was some kind of king or high priest who would bless the whole thing. Mikhael Ivanovich. That was what they called Michael, in Russian. It was like a scene out of a movie. The Godfather – Michael as family and gang boss, giving his permission to bring her into the fold. In the beginning she had thought they were all just businessmen, legitimate – she had been very young, of course – but by then she had known better.

  Michael had been smiling that smile, watching Viktor’s clumsiness as he asked her. Michael still had the collar on his neck, the bruising all over his chest. But he was alive. Sixty-two and alive to tell the tale. Death torn from around his neck, thanks to her. She had saved his life on that nightmare day – the fifteenth of July. Hence his new-found belief in her. She could do nothing wrong now. Four weeks before he would not have permitted his nephew to even consider marrying her – she had been a mere kitchen assistant. But now he was excited about it, wanted to give money away to do it properly, spoke about feeling like a father to them both.

  That night Viktor had talked about getting some celebrity artist to create a ‘celebration’ of her, as an engagement gift. It was to be a huge sculpture that they would put in the garden – a statue of her, nine metres high. She would have to pose for it. He had costed it already. Michael was in on it, nodding with approval, a stupid twinkle in his grey eyes. A sculpture in honour of her. She had never heard of anything so crass, so kitsch. She had tried to keep a straight face, tried to give nothing away.

  She was expected to say yes to the proposal, and had, because by then she was already too terrified of Viktor Rugojev to risk crossing him. At that point – when he proposed – her escape plans were almost complete. A week later she was gone.

  That had been in August, the first week of August, just three weeks after they had all been up at The Ice House and men had come to kill Michael. She had known Michael only as Mr Rugojev then, and had barely spoken to him. Everything had been different. But that day had opened her eyes.

  It had just been announced that Mikhael Ivanovich had bought a ‘palace’. That was what Viktor had called it. The Ice House – that was a rough translation of the Russian name. An enormous, sprawling, Czarist mansion in northern Karelia. When she had first set eyes on it she had thought it looked like the palace in the sixties film Dr Zhivago. But without the snow. It had been warm then, a beautiful summer. Viktor told her the name was a reference to the decorative, arched windows, the thousands of panes of glass, which shone like ice in the sun. Most of them were smashed at the time Michael acquired it. The place needed a lot of work, a complete restoration. There was only one inhabitable wing where someone had been living previously.

  They had travelled from this house, in Gumbacka, to visit it – Michael, Viktor, Alex and her, plus two security guys. A small contingent, for those days. Alex was meant to be security too. That was why he was there. Viktor was Michael’s favourite. That was why he was there. Michael had no sons of his own. The occasion was to show Viktor the new place, talk about family succession plans. She went along because Viktor brought her, though Viktor had said nothing to Michael about them being ‘together’. And Viktor had known nothing of Alex and her – she was sure of that. She was there to do the cooking. Officially, that was why she was there.

  The thing with Alex had been huge at that point, all she could think of. They had made a decision that Viktor would have to be told, that they would have to take the consequences. If they didn’t break the thing Viktor thought he had going with her then they weren’t going to be able to stay together. But so far they had done nothing about that decision.

  They travelled by helicopter and cars. It took half a day to get there from Gumbacka. They crossed the border at a checkpoint deep in the northern forests. The house was on the Russian side, though only just. It was in the middle of nowhere. Forests and low hills all around. No towns, no people. Hardly any of Michael’s staff informed where he was. For t
hose reasons, perhaps, he had thought it safe to go with limited security. But he’d been wrong.

  They were there a week before it happened. One of the most memorable weeks of her life. Viktor had been with Michael the whole time, talking business. She had been left with Alex. The weather had been hot, the skies clear, the wild, forest landscapes breathtaking. They had wandered far and wide through the woods, finding lakes, viewpoints, rivers, never seeing another person, utterly absorbed in the intensity of the connection that had grown between them. She had never had anything like it before, nor since.

  Then, on the seventh day, Uri Zaikov and his men had come.

  Michael had shown her the hole under the floor, not because he had been concerned about her but because she happened to have been there when he came looking for it. It was in the kitchen, under the boards. She had walked over it many times without thinking.

  He had stooped and pulled on the edge of a board that looked chipped – a gap just wide enough to get your fingers in – and it had sprung open on some kind of mechanism. She had paused from what she was doing and watched. He had been laughing, pointing at it. He started saying something about it in Russian, then remembered that she didn’t speak it. Was it the first time he had actually said anything to her? Probably not. There must have been other, practical things, but she couldn’t remember them. ‘Just in case,’ he had joked, in English, standing staring into it. She had come round from behind the big work surface and looked. It was like a coffin under the floor. She had asked him what it was. ‘Somewhere to hide,’ he’d said. ‘It’s from the Revolution, when the red guards came hunting, you would get under there.’ He laughed again, then shut it and walked out. It hadn’t been his intention, but the exchange was to save her life. And his.

  42

  The fifteenth of July. She had been in the kitchen, making omelettes for their lunch. What time would that make it? Near midday. She had the windows wide open because it was hot, exceptionally hot for the area, they had told her, though the thermometer attached to the outside of one of the kitchen windows had read only twenty-eight degrees, which she thought a nice heat – you could still function in it, it didn’t drain you.

  Alex had told her that this far north they were lucky to get even a few days like this, without wind or rain to ruin it. Usually, there was no difference between Finland and here – both were predominantly grey, cold, depressing. But these days were far from dull. Everything was feverish, tinged with guilt and fear, clandestine meetings with Alex that always ended in sex, everything intensified by the danger involved; the risk that Viktor would walk in on them or begin to suspect something. She performed a shadow play of the exact same deception with Viktor, vis-à-vis Michael, and in the evenings had to invent absurd excuses to keep Viktor off her.

  During her break periods, lying in the forest, she plotted a future free of all the secrecy and tension, something that in her heart she knew they would never have. Because the thing between them was like something on fire. They talked about what it might be like years down the line, but only to assuage the constant fear of it ending at any moment. To get there – to pass into some kind of future together – what they had would have to cool into something very different, and neither could truly contemplate that. They were living in a world saturated with the colours, tastes, smells and sensations of the charge between them. Everything was a kind of constant astonishment. And always the background fugue of aching longing, crashing release. She was only dimly aware of any moral dimension. Reality was lost beneath layers of lies, but there was never a question of free choice – the emotions swept everything before them.

  Why did she go to the window? She must have heard something, though could not now remember what. Or seen something out of the corner of her eye. She was hoping it was Alex, of course. She had put the whisk down, stepped over to the open window and saw instead the man who had been seated in the small courtyard area just in front of the garden. She saw him stand up and shout something. The garden right there was only a fraction of the area that had once been landscaped, though most of it now was overgrown, returned to nature, which this far north meant mainly pine trees and scrub. The part right outside the window would have been the kitchen garden once, over a century ago, with herbs and vegetables growing in a sheltered spot, screened by a low wall and an orchard full of fruit trees.

  The orchard had long gone to ruin and the kitchen garden was like a jungle, the wall dividing it from the courtyard collapsed to knee height. The man had been sitting on a foldaway chair at the corner there, just behind the broken wall. He was one of the security guys, his job to watch the rear areas. The other was out front somewhere.

  She had been vaguely aware of him all morning she had been in the kitchen, thinking he had an easy job; he either had his head tilted back, face up to the sun, or was smoking, every time she looked. There was a gun – she was just beginning to get used to there always being guns around, mainly because they were never actually used – propped against the wall beside him.

  She thought at first he might be shouting at Viktor or Alex. They had gone up to the stable block, on a hill about a ­kilometre away. There was a route hacked through the overgrown gardens that led to a broken perimeter fence, then the forest started and you could take the track through the woods up to the stables, which were elevated enough for you to be able to see back to the house if you were there, across the tops of the trees. She couldn’t see the building from her position at the kitchen window, because the wild fruit trees were in the way, but the security guy would be able to see up there, so maybe he had seen Alex or Viktor and shouted to them. As far as she knew, the brothers had gone up there to talk business, and Michael was in the house somewhere, somewhere in this wing they were all using, though she had neither seen nor heard him all morning.

  She was going to go back to her eggs – because there was nothing in the way the man had shouted to make her worry – when she saw him turn quickly and reach a hand out towards the gun. He didn’t get that far though.

  The order of things was confused in her mind now. She could recall the brickwork behind him spinning off in tiny fragments, then a gout of blood coming out of his back. He fell against the wall, so hard she heard the breath knocked out of his lungs. Then, after that, there was a noise from far off like a whip crack, not particularly loud, and a moment later he was on the ground, on his knees, groaning.

  Frozen to the spot, she watched blood run out of his mouth in a long stream. He fell flat onto his face, his arms limp, his legs kicking. But still she couldn’t assemble the distinct parts of what she had seen into something that made sense. What had happened to him?

  She saw a puff of dust and fragments again, on the bricks lower down, nearer his head this time, then a split second later heard again the cracking noise. Then, off to the left, movement through the garden, someone coming through the overgrown vegetation.

  All of this took only a few seconds, with her just standing there looking at it, looking at the man on the ground, the pool of blood spreading out around him, then the other man running through the bushes towards them.

  She swallowed and opened her mouth to shout something – she had no idea what – then saw that the one coming through the trees also had a gun, but it wasn’t Alex, or Viktor, or the other security guy. She didn’t know this man but he was coming right at her, heading for the open kitchen door, off to her right.

  It clicked that what she had seen and heard was two gunshots. She had seen bullets go through the security guard, then a fraction of a second later heard the reports, seen him slump to the ground. He was dying now, in front of her eyes, his limbs moving strangely, his face pressed into the stone flags.

  Her mouth was open to scream but her brain was spinning into gear, alive with the danger, her heart racing in her chest. She closed her mouth, stepped back from the open window.

  She had only seconds to react. But in that time many th
ings went through her brain, were considered, rejected. Her first impulse was to rush through the kitchen, find Michael, alert him, but she had no idea where he was and in less than a minute the man she had seen was going to be at the kitchen door. He had killed the security guard, or so she thought – afterwards she was to find out that it had been another one of them who had shot him, from a position further away – so why not her?

  They were coming for Michael, she assumed. They were moving down from the direction of the stables, where Viktor and Alex had been. Did that mean that they had already found Viktor and Alex? The thought had no time to take root. She heard a noise out in the courtyard and started to cross the kitchen. By chance her eyes passed over the tiny missing piece of floorboard that was the release mechanism for the hole Michael had showed her only two days previously. Without thinking further she stooped and curled her fingers into the gap, found a trigger, pulled it, watched the boards lever themselves up. She went straight into the hole, not pausing, reached up, pulled at the leather handle hanging down and brought the cover back down onto herself as she lay down. It shut with a soft, terrifying click and suddenly she was in total darkness, her breath very loud. She struggled to control it, and the fear behind it. She could hear nothing but herself. She held her breath, but then could only hear her heart.

  She felt a slight movement in her position. Had someone stepped on the boards above her? She listened intently but still could hear nothing but the blood pulsing in her ears. She expected at any moment that the boards would swing up and someone point a gun at her face.

  But it didn’t happen. She held her breath as long as she could, twisting her head and pressing an ear against the cold surface above her. There was muffled shouting, she thought, but nothing clear. She started to breathe again.