Free The Ice House by John Connor Page A

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.
     

 
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    More police cars appeared from the road behind her, then a woman officer took hold of her arm and the others walked off. The woman started asking questions in an aggressive voice but she couldn’t answer any of them, could barely understand them, because all she could think about was Rebecca.
    Rebecca was somewhere here and they weren’t letting her get to her. She gave the woman her ID, got her phone out to check for a signal, only to have it promptly snatched from her grip. She started to protest hysterically – the phone was her last link to Rebecca. But no one was listening.
    Because of the position