The Ice House Read Online Free PDF

He bent suddenly, so that he was actually lower down than her. ‘Do you understand English?’ he asked. ‘Can you understand me?’
    She nodded. ‘I speak English,’ she stammered. ‘My mother is English.’
    He looked at her properly for the first time. She realised only then that she didn’t know him, didn’t know where he had jumped out from, didn’t have a clue what was going on. All her mother’s words came back, all the warnings. Her hand closed around the mobile in her pocket. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said, her voice wavering. She should turn and run, she thought. He was speaking English to her, but the police here spoke Spanish. ‘That’s my house,’ she said.
    ‘It was an explosion,’ he said, looking past her again, squinting towards the smoke.
    ‘Like a gas explosion, you mean?’
    He looked back at her and his eyes met hers. She was shaking now. But his eyes looked OK, she thought, his face looked OK. But her mum had said things about situations just like this, had warned her.
    ‘A gas leak …’ he said vaguely. ‘Maybe.’ He stood up. ‘Wait here. I have to go and check.’ He glanced behind them. ‘Better still. Wait over there.’ He pointed to the rocks up by the start of the lane down from the main road, where he had just run from, about thirty metres back, behind the gateposts. ‘Get behind those rocks and don’t do anything,’ he said. ‘Just wait there for me. Keep your head down – in case it happens again. OK? You understand that?’
    Had he just been driving past, maybe? She looked down at the long thing in his hands. It was a gun. Maybe he was one of the hunters who went after the wild boars, up in the scrub. But whatever he was, if he had wanted to hurt her he wouldn’t suggest leaving her alone. She nodded again. She would walk up there, call her mum, right now.
     

 
    6
    Carl waited until she was behind the rocks, just past the gates. He saw her move behind and then wave to him, to signal she was there. She speaks English , he thought. Her mother is English. He thought her mother must be in the house somewhere. Suspicions aside, he hadn’t known the girl’s nationality, or anything else about her, just her name and age. In the normal course of things he wanted to know as little about the target as possible, consistent with getting the job done, neither the personal details, nor the reasons for the hit. That was meant to be a feature of the anonymous contract system – that it distanced and protected him, as well as the client and the cartel.
    She had done well to mention the gas leak. He hadn’t been thinking about that at all. He’d been thinking about another bomb, a secondary – she had been walking towards it and he had wanted to stop her. He was still thinking about that possibility, thinking very quickly. There was the guy on the ridge and the policeman too. Both within range. And the gas thing. If they had gas bottles in there, or a gas main, then that might blow now. There was fire inside the building somewhere. A fire or burglar alarm had been ringing as he came down the hillside, but it had stopped now.
    He had to get in there, check for life, do it quickly. Both her parents were inside – through the spotting scope he had watched a car, a Nissan, returning earlier with two occupants – a man and a woman – one of the two cars that had left the place that morning. Jones hadn’t told him who else was on the list, but her parents had been his first guess. Unless the bomb had been planted to get the girl, as a back-up, if he failed to make the shot. In which case they had fucked it up, triggered it too early. The car alarm was still sounding intermittently, coming from the Nissan. The girl hadn’t realised about her parents, he assumed, hadn’t worked it out yet.
    He started to walk quickly forwards, then stooped and placed on the ground the gun and the backpack with his ammunition and kit. He checked back, but couldn’t see her. She