She is hungry. She hasn’t eaten since morning but to get to her food she’ll have to go outside again. Most of her stuff is in another building, tucked away behind debris. Anyone looking for her in Husvik will come to the manager’s villa first so she cannot keep her stuff here. She has to be able to leave quickly, leaving no trace behind.
She checks the small kitchen and bathroom before going out again but neither show any sign of her occupancy. Neither does the office and field lab that takes up the greater part of the building. She’ll bring back soup, maybe a tin of ham. She’ll eat quickly then wash up. If he comes, she will need to leave without a trace. She opens the door and goes out into the wet and windy night.
17
Bamber
High above Husvik, in the lee of an outcrop of rocks, otherwise oblivious to the cold and the increasing storm, Bamber sits watching. The settlement below her isn’t still, the wind won’t allow that, but it is in darkness. Not the faintest trace of light can be seen from the manager’s villa but it will still be the first place he’ll look. Felicity has been smart to store her things elsewhere, but he is smarter. Felicity has never been a match for him and she won’t be now.
Freddie will have made plans. Freddie will have learned everything he can about South Georgia before setting out. He will know the places she can go and where she can’t. Her attempts to throw him off the trail and send him all the way north to Bird Island can’t be relied upon.
Lucky for Felicity that she has Bamber to watch out for her. She feels for the gun in the inside pocket of her jacket, and imagines Freddie’s fair-haired, handsome face bursting apart in an explosion of blood and bone.
She looks out to sea, because it isn’t impossible that he’ll come by boat. Stealing one will be easier after dark and the treacherous journey around the coast from Cumberland Bay at night won’t faze Freddie. The insane have an unshakeable belief in their own invincibility. Even in this storm, even with the swell beyond the bay reaching ten metres or more, he might risk it.
It is far more likely though, that he’ll come by land, that he’ll have found a way to cross the glaciers. So, for every minute she’s spent watching the waters of Stromness Bay, Bamber has spent four or five looking south-east towards Grytviken. It is ten miles, as the crow flies, between the two settlements and his ship docked more than twelve hours ago.
Something. Movement on the hillside. A light.
She watches until she is sure. A light, probably a head torch, is making its way down the last stretch of hill towards the station. Bamber presses further into her shelter beneath the rocks and waits. The light descends until it reaches the level ground on the edge of the settlement. The manager’s villa, where Felicity plans to sleep, will be the first building he’ll come to. Of course he’ll look there first.
He’s found her.
Bamber gets to her feet. It’s time.
18
Freddie
The door to the BAS sub-station, once the home of the whale station manager, is locked, but the four-digit key code is conveniently written on the underside of the mechanism.
The door opens into an office. Two desks face opposite walls, a bookshelf sits atop a cupboard and noticeboards are littered with charts and listings. Computer monitors are protected by plastic dust covers. Through an open door, Freddie’s torch picks out the steel cupboards and storage equipment of a field laboratory. There are powerful lights on the ceiling but he doesn’t switch them on. Instead he goes through another door into a rear corridor and a small galley kitchen. It is neat, no sign of recent cooking. The sink is dry. He sniffs the air but the smell of guano, rotting kelp and the sea has crept in here too. He is on the brink of leaving the kitchen when he spots a towel hanging from a rail. He touches it and finds it damp.
The next room he comes to is the bathroom. Again, no sign of occupancy. He walks on to the first bedroom. Empty, like the rest of the place. Without much hope of finding anything, he opens the cupboard door. Rolled on the top shelf is a padded blue sleeping bag. He pulls it down and presses his face against the slippery fabric. The faint floral scent he remembers from her room back at King Edward Point. This is hers. She is here.
He feels excitement building. He is close.
He puts his gear in the other bedroom and leaves the station, quickly crossing the few hundred metres to the main settlement and trying not to be unnerved by the great ghostly shipwreck that rears above his head. He tries the foreman’s residence first. He isn’t surprised to find her gear beneath canvas sheeting but there is no sign of Felicity herself.
Outside again his nerve breaks.
‘Felicity!’
His voice echoes back at him. Christ, she could be anywhere. They could spend all night dodging each other around this ghost town.
‘Felicity, we need to talk.’ The wind takes his voice and whisks it away.
The shipwreck is freaking him out. Leaving it behind, he walks inland. At this end of the settlement, there are several buildings more or less intact.
He takes a detour around the oil tanks, banging on the rusting iron and calling her name again.
‘Felicity! For God’s sake, where are you?’
Reaching the end of the tanks he thinks he sees the shadow of a woman slipping inside a building directly ahead of him. He follows, running over the rough ground and finds himself inside an old provision store. He shines his torch around. Nothing, but beyond a central counter is a chaos of fallen shelving units.
‘Felicity?’
‘Felicity isn’t coming.’
He jumps round. She’s tricked him somehow, slipping outside and doubling back to block the doorway. Except, it isn’t Felicity. The height is similar but her posture is all wrong. This woman’s voice is entirely different and her walk, as she steps inside the store is nothing like the way he always pictures Felicity’s graceful way of moving.
He moves his head, trying to focus the beam of his torch on her face, but she half turns away. Not before he’s seen what she is carrying in her right hand. Christ. Whoever she is, she is armed.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he asks.
His headtorch beam reaches her face a second before she raises her arm. Jesus wept, how is this—
‘I’m Bamber,’ she says. ‘I won’t let you hurt Felicity. Never again.’
She fires.
Part Two
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND
Nine Months Earlier
‘The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.’
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
19
Felicity
It is unseasonably warm in the city of Cambridge. As dawn breaks on the morning after the Trinity May ball, chiffon-clad girls are sleeping on the lawns and river banks, their heads resting on the dinner jackets of boys with whom they may, or may not, have begun the previous evening. The boys lie beside them, still as fallen statues.
Yards from where they sleep, the River Cam winds its way through trailing willow fronds, relishing the silence. Within hours the punts will be out, and punts cannot move through water without an accompaniment of shrieks, cries and general merriment. For now, only the college rowing teams skim across the surface like water-borne insects. Below Jesus Lock, the canal boats, like dusty jewels, begin to rock on their moorings as their occupants wake up.
In the market square, traders greet each other with the news that it’s going to be a scorcher. They’ve said the same thing every day for over a week now and will go on doing so without embarrassment for as long as the heatwave lasts. The early sunshine lifts their spirits, though, and the two carrying crates down the main thoroughfare don’t even grumble as the androgynous figure on roller skates speeds past them, almost sending everything tumbling.
Through the claustrophobic heart of this medieval city, a crocodile of choristers winds its chattering way to choir practice, or maybe
back for breakfast. It is impossible to silence pre-teenage boys and the choir master has long since given up trying. The line weaves its way around the woman with pink hair who is walking in the opposite direction, and if one or two of the boys snigger – well, they’re young.
On heels that are too high and clothes that she has slept in, the woman barely sees the boys or their smirks. She is no May reveller, her studying days are long over, but her head throbs as intensely as that of any waking student, and for the same reason. Unlike the careless young, though, this woman’s heart hurts more than her head. Odd as it may seem, she is a senior police officer and a little over a week ago, a young woman was murdered on her watch.
The rough sleepers, because even a city as enlightened and progressive as Cambridge has them, don’t wake to see her staring down at each dirty, sleeping face. They don’t notice her counting, ticking them off on a page in her notebook. All present and correct; this morning at least. As she walks past a terrace of houses built by merchants in the seventeenth century, she glances up at a row of three windows on the top floor. Her steps falter, and the line between her brows deepens, before she walks on and passes out of sight.
Staring out of one of those windows, standing in a room full of sunshine, is Felicity. Morning light floods the yellow walls and pale orange carpet. The sofa, empty for the moment, is the salmon pink of a sunrise. From the top floor of the old house, she can see towers and spires, crenellations and turrets, all gleaming gold. It is the most beautiful city in the world, she thinks.
A male voice says, ‘Why do you think you’re here, Felicity?’
The voice is at odds with the feminine room. Surely no man bought vases the exact shade of apricot as the bon-bon bowl on the coffee table. No man would have chosen armchairs in a warm white, patterned with orange and crimson daisies.
‘Felicity?’
The man who almost certainly hasn’t decorated the room, because if he had, he wouldn’t be wearing frayed jeans, trainers and a Nike sweatshirt, is waiting for an answer. Dr Grant, who has asked her to ‘call me Joe’, is young, late thirties at most, although his dark brown hair is receding above his temples. Below the stubble of his beard, his neck is thin and pale.
Felicity says, ‘I like this room.’
She likes his eyes too, hazel green under dark brows. He smiles readily, but gently, and his voice is soft and low pitched.
‘Thank you.’ A blush warms his cheeks. ‘My wife decorated it. I was away for a week and she said leave it to me, I’ll have it all sorted by the time you get back.’
The corners of his mouth turn down as he looks from the swagged curtains to the plump cushions. ‘A month later, she asked me for a divorce. I should have seen it coming.’
Felicity is not sure how she is supposed to react, and wonders if perhaps he didn’t intend to reveal quite so much about himself. With a sudden insight, she sees that he too is nervous.
He says, ‘Why don’t we start with how you got those bruises on your face?’
‘I fell.’ She says it too fast. It comes out slick, rehearsed. Her first mistake. On the surface, Call-Me-Joe’s face doesn’t change; behind his eyes, though, something has shifted. It’s what beaten women always say. I fell. I walked into a door. I didn’t see the drawer was open when I bent—
‘Where was this?’ he asks.
‘The common. I live next to it. I must have gone out and … fallen.’
His face is still open, interested, but she no longer trusts it.
‘Must have?’ he says. ‘You don’t remember?’
He will know this already. The police were called to Midsummer Common that night. The people who found her had been scared at the sight of her torn clothes and bleeding limbs. She’d told the police and the hospital staff that she couldn’t remember what had happened. They didn’t believe her, and now Call-Me-Joe isn’t believing her either. She can hardly blame them, and yet she is telling the simple and complete truth. The events of that evening on the common are – absent.
‘That was quite some fall,’ he says. ‘According to your notes, you were bleeding and distressed, with concussion, a badly bruised face and lacerations on your arms and legs. You were kept in hospital overnight.’
Call-Me-Joe is drinking strong black coffee. Every time he sips she catches a whiff of its steam. She regrets, now, turning down his offer of a cup.
‘How did your employers get involved?’ he asks. ‘Did you tell them?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have made a fuss, but it was too late. The police went to my house while I was in hospital. They couldn’t find any information on my next of kin, so they contacted my employers. The head of human resources came to see me in hospital and then it all became official.’
He is still nodding. He knows this too. ‘Your employers need your GP to certify you fit to return to work and your GP isn’t happy to do that without a psychiatric assessment?’
Felicity’s voice lifts, but her cheeriness is forced. ‘And that’s why I’m here.’
She waits for him to acknowledge that finally she has answered his question. Instead, he says, ‘Do you want to go back to work?’
‘Very much. Work is all I have.’
Suddenly, his soft hazel eyes are sharpened and he does not blink as he stares straight back at her. She is unnerved by his stare. This man sees more than he has a right to.
‘What about friends?’ he says. ‘A significant other?’
‘An opportunity has come up,’ she hurries on. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime. If I’m not fit, I won’t be considered for it.’
‘I see. Let’s go back to that night on the common. What do you remember?’
‘I remember being at home before it happened. Having some dinner, catching up on admin. After that, nothing.’
‘We’re talking about a gap in your memory of several hours?’
‘Four hours. I sent an email at eight o’clock. I was taken to hospital shortly after midnight.’
He waits, as though he knows she has more to say. After a moment, she drops her eyes. Still he doesn’t speak. When she looks up again, Call-Me-Joe has a file on his lap.
‘Tell me about your job,’ he says. ‘What do you do for a living?’
He knows. It will be in her notes. This is not about what she says, it is about how she says it. Or maybe, about what she doesn’t say.
‘I work for the British Antarctic Survey,’ she says. ‘I’m a glaciologist.’
‘You study glaciers?’
Felicity opens her mouth to give the stock response about how glaciology is an interdisciplinary Earth science that involves geology, physical geography, geophysics, climatology, meteorology, hydro—
‘I study ice,’ she says. ‘It’s mainly about ice. And its decline.’
He nods, vaguely, already losing interest. ‘The polar bears,’ he says politely. ‘Very worrying.’
He is humouring her, as so many do, and for a moment she forgets herself.
‘Ice isn’t just about polar bears.’ She leans forward, closing the distance between them. ‘The bears are dying because their entire food chain, just about every living thing in the Arctic region, is under threat.’
He smiles and looks down at his notes, already seeking a retreat, but she is only getting started.
‘Ice is an insulator, a cushion,’ she tells him. ‘As ice melts, heat from the ocean escapes into the atmosphere, warming the planet even more and creating a vicious circle. Without ice reflecting back sunlight, the oceans get warmer still. Cold seas produce a huge amount of methane; ice keeps it under the surface. You know that methane is a greenhouse gas, don’t you?’
He nods, a little nervously. ‘I knew that.’
‘Ice stops water evaporating. More water in the atmosphere means more of the big catastrophic storms we’ve been seeing, with the resulting loss of life and economic devastation. And don’t get me started on nearly two hundred Arctic communities that are struggling to maintain their way of life as the ice shrink
s.’
‘I won’t,’ he says.
‘Ice is everything. Without ice, the planet’s finished. We all die.’
Silence. Joe picks up his pen and writes.
‘You’re writing crazy person, aren’t you?’ she says.
He laughs. ‘I’m writing knowledgeable, caring and passionate,’ he says. ‘And thank you. I won’t make that mistake again.’
He closes her notes with a decisive snap. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘You’re twenty-eight, in good physical health, with no recorded history of mental illness. Your parents died when you were very young, and you were raised by a maternal grandmother and then in local authority care when she passed away. You’re single, with no other nuclear family. You’ve worked for the BAS in Cambridge for a little over five years and even though you’re still quite young, you’re considered one of Europe’s leading experts in your field. Have I missed anything?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Just trying to save us some time. Normally, the background can take the entire first session.’ He smiles again. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling right now, Felicity. How do you feel about being here?’
She weighs her words carefully, knowing he will be listening for what she leaves out. ‘I’m angry,’ she says. ‘Because someone I’ve never met before has what I believe to be an unreasonable power over me. I can’t get on with my life without your permission.’
He makes a thinking face and waits for her to continue. She doesn’t.
‘I’d say that’s an extreme interpretation of the situation but I commend your honesty,’ he says after a second or two. ‘Anything else?’
‘I’m scared you’ll say no. That I’m not fit to go back to work.’
‘Do you think you’re ready to go back?’
‘I’m fine. It’s been over a week.’
He doesn’t respond.
‘I can’t afford to be ill,’ she says. ‘Who employs a mad woman?’
The Split Page 6
