Free The Ice House by John Connor

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