The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  Skye looks miserable. ‘It can’t be done, Joe. South Georgia is too far for a helicopter to travel.’

  ‘We get around by sea, or we don’t get around,’ Ralph adds.

  ‘So, what do we do?’ Delilah asks.

  Ralph looks outside as another burst of rain, or spray, hits the windows. ‘We wait.’

  And pray, Joe thinks.

  68

  Freddie

  Freddie comes round to a sense of being immobile. A weight on his chest is making it hard to breathe and he can feel a warm trickle running into the crease of his neck. There is pain at the back of his skull and his ears are ringing from the sound of gunfire. He thinks a sheet of corrugated iron has fallen on top of him. For several seconds he doesn’t move, trying to make sense out of what has happened.

  And then, in a flash, it comes back. He’s been shot. A woman who looks and sounds nothing like Felicity, and yet so plainly was her all the same, has just shot him. Bamber, she called herself, and she might be standing over him now waiting to finish the job.

  He lies still, hearing his own breathing. In all these months of planning this visit, preparing for the first confrontation, it has never occurred to him to be afraid of Felicity. Now, he realises, he has no idea who she is any more, and he is hopelessly unprepared.

  Outside the store the wind is screaming and the building shakes violently. The whole lot might come down any second and it is the thought of being crushed to death that gives him courage to move.

  The sheet of iron is corroded, not heavy, and can be pushed to one side. Upright again, he sees his torch, still lit, a few yards away. He risks crawling to it and shines it around the store. The woman in the doorway – Felicity – is gone. He struggles to his feet and knows that Felicity’s shot has missed. He couldn’t possibly be standing upright, feeling more or less OK, if he’d been hit.

  She’s left the gun behind. He can see it, caught in the torch beam, immediately inside the doorway. He snatches it up, checks the safety catch and tucks it into his pocket. Breathing more easily, he gives himself a minute to take stock, to come up with another plan. He will not look for her again, not in the dark. He’ll find her boat and disable it, then go back to the manager’s villa and wait until morning.

  Outside, the wind hits him again, and debris comes scurrying up the street like a pack of attack dogs. Sidestepping the bigger pieces, he sets off towards the water’s edge.

  He finds the RIB behind a pile of rubble a little way up from the slipway. He is debating how best to disable it when he spots a light on the outskirts of the settlement. He raises his binoculars but the surrounding hills are too dark for him to see anything much. Definitely a light though, weaving in and out of the tussock grass.

  Freddie thinks back to the maps and charts he studied on the journey. She isn’t going back to Grytviken, but in the opposite direction entirely. Felicity is heading towards the glacier.

  69

  Felicity

  Felicity ignores the pain in her wounded leg and keeps going. Terror is stealing her breath and she has to stop every few minutes to gulp in more air. She leaves the tussock grass behind and starts climbing the scree slope towards the vast expanse of white that she knows is ahead. After a while her neck and shoulders begin to ache from constantly looking back for signs of pursuit. She sees nothing but forces herself on. He will never be able to track her on the glacier. No one knows ice the way she does. If she can make it to the upper ice sheet she’ll be safe. She’ll spend the night in an ice cave that the team use as a base when they’re working up there. It will be cold, but she’ll live.

  She remembers hands around her throat, the gleam of a blade in the moonlight. She has no idea why Freddie should want to kill her but there was no mistaking the intent of the person who attacked her that night.

  Bitch, bitch, bitch. I’m going to kill you.

  For the first time, she wonders if she’s been a fool to leave the safety of the base behind. Her friends, Jack, Nigel, Ralph, wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. But how can she explain a husband she has never mentioned, a marriage she has no memory of, and the knowledge of dreadful, shameful abuse that she will never be able to prove?

  The terrain grows steeper and her footsteps noisier as each step sends loose shale scurrying down the slope. Once, she looks back and sees a torch beam near the water’s edge, a long way below. The voice she hears next, though, is as clear as if someone walked beside her.

  He’s not dead then?

  Felicity stops walking and remembers. There was a shot, a sound so loud that even the chaos of the wind seemed to die down in shock. She remembers the building shaking, parts of it falling, she remembers turning and running. Did he shoot her? Shoot her and miss?

  No. She looks down and sees her own right hand raised, clutching the torch, as though holding a gun, and she remembers seeing the gun in her own hand. She remembers firing and dropping it in horror at what seemed exactly the same moment. She remembers Freddie crying out and then falling. She shot him.

  How is that possible? She doesn’t own a gun. She has never even fired a gun.

  Felicity’s chest tightens and suddenly her head is full of voices, each of them clamouring to be heard. They tell her to flee up the glacier, to turn around and head for Grytviken, that she is a killer, that she is useless, that she’s always been useless, that she deserves everything she gets and more. So much is being shouted at her, each voice contradicting the last.

  She starts to run and realises she is heading the wrong way, back down to Husvik. Stopping again, she struggles to get her breath. She has a vision of her skull bones, pulsating outwards, being stretched to the point where they might shatter, because the contents of her head has become a virulent, violent mob.

  Bewildered, fighting back sobs, she sets off again, up this time, pushing her body to climb higher, move faster. If she slows down for even a moment, she’ll have to ask herself what the hell is happening. She pushes on, as the great towers and peaks of the glacier emerge from the darkness and she closes her ears to the rancour in her head. She’s reached the snowline when a single voice sings up, louder and clearer than the others.

  He’ll come after us, you know that, don’t you? He’ll never give up.

  Felicity stops walking. She knows that voice. She’s heard it before.

  ‘Who are you?’ She speaks quietly, knowing her voice doesn’t need to carry. The conversation she is having is entirely in her own head. The voices have always been her own. A gust of icy wind blows down from the glacier, lifting her hair and cooling her hot scalp. She has a sense of having reached a fork in the road. The noise in her head abates a little, and with the settling quiet comes a sense of – more.

  She is bigger than she knows. She is more.

  ‘Who are you?’ she repeats and this time she wants the answer.

  I’m Bamber, says one of her other selves. Hello, Felicity.

  Felicity takes courage and says, ‘Are you me?’

  Oh no. The denial is instant and immediate. A second later the tone becomes more considered. But you might say so.

  The voice is her, but not her? It makes no sense. What the hell is happening to her? ‘Stop it,’ Felicity says. ‘Go away.’

  She sets off again, faster, but this time, she isn’t entirely sure who she is running from.

  70

  Joe

  ‘Christ, does nobody in this place sleep?’

  It is nearly one o’clock in the morning when Jack enters the common room of the Bird Island research station, where Ralph and Joe have been sharing the last few inches of a bottle of scotch. The station can sleep ten, mainly in two dorm rooms, and they’ve all been provided with beds. Neither Joe nor Ralph have been to bed yet.

  ‘My mother,’ Joe replies, ‘went out like a light at ten.’

  ‘Seasickness does that to you.’ Ralph tops up both their drinks. ‘She ate well though. Glasses in the cupboard, Jack.’

  Earlier, they’d had a surprisingly go
od dinner of reindeer steak with a salad of dandelion leaves and tussock roots. Jan had even baked her own bread. The station is warm, given the storm blowing outside, and Joe is surprised at how comfortable he’s been made. He still doesn’t feel like sleeping though.

  ‘Takes a lot to put Mum off her food,’ he says.

  ‘So, is there a dad in the picture?’ Ralph asks.

  Jack is hiding a smile as he joins them.

  ‘They divorced when I was fifteen,’ Joe replies. ‘He lives in Wales with his second family.’

  ‘Any news?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Storm’s clearing,’ Ralph tells him. ‘Should be OK to head out by four. It’ll take us three hours if we borrow Jen and Frank’s RIB. I’m not taking your mum though, Joe. Not at that speed. I’ll collect her later, when she’s had time to recover.’

  Joe isn’t arguing. ‘She needs to talk to her office anyway.’ He turns to Jack. ‘We had a message from the ship a half-hour ago. Cambridge CID have been trying to get in touch with her.’

  ‘Any news on the missing passenger?’ Jack asks.

  ‘They called off the search at midnight,’ Joe says. ‘They think he must have gone onto the glacier. They’re bracing themselves to find his body in the morning.’

  All three men drink in silence for several minutes.

  ‘He can’t have reached Felicity,’ Jack says. ‘He can’t have crossed three glaciers.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think so,’ Ralph agrees

  ‘Nigel will send a boat to Husvik in the morning,’ Ralph says. ‘It’ll be touch and go who gets there first. Them or us.’

  ‘Nobody should approach Felicity,’ Joe says. ‘We need to warn the other group. Make sure she’s OK and then stay away from her until we get there.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Jack scoffs. ‘Felicity isn’t dangerous.’

  Joe thinks for a second. He is going to have to take these people into his confidence or they’ll never take him seriously.

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ he says. ‘But she isn’t always Felicity.’

  71

  Freddie

  By the time he reaches the snow line, Freddie has no idea whether he is still on Felicity’s trail or not. Over the last hour he has caught glimpses of her light, but there are no paths to follow and more than once he has had to stumble sideways across fields of scree to get back on track. He has found, though, that the closer he gets to the glacier, the better he can see. The great expanse of white is acting like a mirror, reflecting back and increasing the light from the moon and stars.

  When he sees the hut, a small black rectangle against the white, his heart leaps but before he is close he knows that he won’t find her inside it. It is padlocked shut with a combination lock. He tries her birthday and her mother’s birthday but neither works. There will be equipment in this hut – crampons, walking sticks, even skis – that she has had access to and that he will have to manage without. He kicks the door in frustration and carries on. Unsurprisingly, it’s grown colder as he’s neared the ice and the wind has picked up.

  The snow beneath his feet hardens and the bedrock becomes ice. Walking without bespoke footwear is almost impossible. Occasional drifts of snow give him some purchase, but the sheets of solid ice are treacherous. Every few steps he slides a little way back. He stumbles often and the ground is sharp as broken glass. Before long there are several cuts on his hands.

  As he’s neared the glacier the moaning of the wind has taken on an almost human tone and there are times, with a particularly strong gust, when the human voice sounds close to insane. From somewhere in the distance he hears a roar like that of a great animal and a thundering crash. He falls, hurting himself again. When he is upright once more, he carries on with an increasing anxiety, knowing that time he didn’t lose his footing. The ice beneath him moved.

  An instinctive, primitive fear grips him; this is a wild and dangerous place.

  A hundred yards higher up and the smooth surface of the ice has become ruptured and cracked. He stops for a second and wonders how he can possibly go on. The slope ahead of him, that would be punishingly steep were it smooth and stable rock, is like a turbulent sea that has frozen solid. The ice rears and drops all around him, forming tunnels and crevices and holes that might be bottomless. It soars above his head in majestic columns and cuts across his path with peaks as sharp as knives. He knows that on glaciers, flimsy bridges of snow can conceal drops of forty feet or more. Worse, he knows that glaciers move, especially at the end of the summer. Meltwater erodes the massive structures, weakening the glue that holds them together. As long as he is up here, he is in constant danger of avalanche, of crevices opening beneath him, of being crushed beneath giant boulders. The glacier is a deathtrap.

  His foot slides again and he tumbles several feet before landing hard against a low ridge of ice. He lies, winded, on the verge of giving up, and has a moment of luck. There are six indentations in the crusty covering of snow on top of the ice. She is wearing crampons. And she has left a trail.

  72

  Felicity

  Felicity is moving dangerously fast up the glacier but after two hours she has to rest. She is hotter than she should be, even given how quickly she’s been moving, and the wound on her thigh is throbbing. She finds a smooth patch of ice to sit on and pulls her pack from her shoulders. Sipping water and nibbling chocolate, she knows she has to keep moving. The storm is dying away but if another comes up, she cannot be on the glacier without shelter. A strong gust will send her skidding over a cliff or into a deep fissure. Worse, she suspects a bigger movement of the ice is imminent. As she’s climbed, she’s felt tremors, heard the regular thunder of falling snow and ice, even the sonorous groaning of shifting ice plates. She knows she has some distance to go before she reaches the ice sheet and the hidden cave. This is not a good place to linger.

  The physical exertion has helped, though, and her head is more like itself again. She can no longer sense a host of trapped creatures scrabbling to get out. They are still there, but they are behaving. They are a little like children, or pets, waiting to see what the woman in charge will do. The sense of authority makes her feel calmer. Ready to take a risk.

  ‘Bamber,’ she says. Are you there?’

  The voice snaps back. Always.

  She shouldn’t have asked. It is too horrible, this sense of a parasite inside her. Felicity shuts her eyes tight, and clamps her hands over her ears, but there is no shutting out a voice that comes from her own head.

  ‘Who are you,’ she says, ‘if you’re not me?’

  Silence.

  Felicity tries again. ‘Is it, I don’t know, a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing?’

  A subdued giggle.

  How can part of her be laughing, when there is nothing remotely funny about the situation? How can she have no control over her own feelings?

  ‘Do you hate me?’ she asks, remembering the journal she found at home in Cambridge. ‘Are we enemies?’

  Another fast response. No. I look after you.

  From somewhere nearby comes a crashing that echoes around the mountain. A huge piece of ice has fallen from one of the upper peaks.

  He’s coming. We have to go. Now.

  Felicity feels an urgent compulsion to get up and run, as though hands are on her shoulders, tugging her upwards. She resists, but it isn’t easy.

  ‘Who are you afraid of?’ Felicity asks.

  Freddie, replies Bamber. Freddie, Freddie, Freddie. Come on, we have to go.

  There is no mistaking the fear in Bamber’s voice, a fear reflected inside Felicity. Still she stays where she is. ‘Can you remember Freddie?’ she asks. ‘The things he did, why we’re so afraid of him? Because I can’t.’

  Yes, of course I remember Freddie. He hurts us. He puts us in the cupboard. He attacked us in Cambridge. He tried to kill us.

  It is too frustrating. Felicity wants to bang her head against the ice, to release the memories that have to be in there somewhere. How can Bamber know all this and she
not?

  ‘Did he rape me? Us, I mean.’

  Yes, yes, yes. At least, I think so.

  ‘What do you mean, you think so?’

  I can’t remember. Long time ago. Ask one of the others.

  ‘Others?’ Felicity feels physically sick. ‘There are others?’ Even as she says the words, she knows it is true. They are with her now, watching, waiting for their moment to step in. A memory strikes her, a phrase in a journal entry. The others tell me …

  Beneath her, the ice shudders. She has to move.

  ‘Did you write the journal?’ she asks.

  No, that was – someone else. I told you, I don’t hate you. I look after you.

  ‘Who? Who else? Who hates me?’

  Bamber is silent.

  Another sound from the glacier, but not tumbling ice this time. She hears a muffled cry and the sound of something heavy sliding down the ice. Freddie has almost caught up.

  Come on, come on.

  This time Felicity can’t resist Bamber’s panic. She gets to her feet and sets off again.

  73

  Freddie

  Freddie has heard Felicity speaking. Her voice has drifted down to him on the wind. Knowing her to be close, he picks up his pace, takes risks he is neither fit enough nor properly equipped to take safely. He falls and slides back nearly ten feet. By the time he has retraced his steps he is tiring fast but the blackness of the sky in the east is softening.

  His head is bleeding. He doesn’t think he’s losing much blood, but there is a smear of crimson on the ice where he fell. He gathers a handful of clean snow and holds it to his wound to numb the pain. Then he sets off again.

  Momentarily distracted by a flock of birds flying towards the ocean he looks up, but in the darkness, can only make out their linear shapes, the beating of strong wings. There is something about the birds’ flight, though, that suggests panic. They are fleeing a place they can sense is no longer safe.