The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  Around him, the ice is closing in. Columns stand like armed ranks and small cliffs rise up on either side. Pushing down his disquiet, he follows Felicity’s trail into a long V-shaped crevice. The walls soar above him, reaching fifteen feet or more and the floor is only inches wide. His boots, encrusted with snow, can barely move through it.

  He isn’t claustrophobic. Few people can spend years in prison and have a fear of small spaces, but as he makes his way through the fissure, that gets narrower as it climbs, he finds his heartbeat accelerating. If these walls move even a few inches, he will be crushed. His torch beam spots a mark of red on the fissure wall. He touches it to find it damp. Blood. Felicity, too, is injured.

  He pushes through the fissure for ten yards, and then it veers to the right. Turning the corner he sees the trap that Felicity has led him into. Ahead the crevice becomes too narrow for him to carry on. She has squeezed through but for him this is a dead end and if he has to go all the way back he might lose her completely. He turns, and a thick lump of ice, heavier and more deadly than many rocks, narrowly misses breaking open his skull.

  74

  Felicity

  Again, hisses Bamber in her ear. Another one. Kill him.

  Above the fissure where Freddie is trapped, Felicity is surrounded by blocks of ice. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do what Bamber is asking. She lifts a block high and steps to the edge of the crevice.

  Drop it. Now.

  Freddie is several feet below her, looking up. Even in the strange, half-twilight coming off the ice, he is impossibly handsome. The lines of his face are long and straight and in perfect proportion. The glimpses of hair not covered by the thick woollen cap are more grey than blond but his brows are still perfectly shaped, his lips full. The habitual sternness of expression is there, of course, given the circumstances, but she remembers how it disappears when he smiles. It is a face she once loved, completely and utterly.

  She could crush that face, smash it to a pulp. She is standing directly above him. All she has to do is let go.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she orders.

  He’s got the gun, Bamber says. I dropped it.

  A picture flashes before Felicity’s eyes. A shop in South America, handing over money for a gun. She has no idea whether the memory is hers, or Bamber’s, or whether perhaps the two are starting to merge.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks. ‘I’ve seen blood. Are you hurt?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  Don’t talk to him. Don’t listen to him. Throw it. Just throw it.

  He calls up to her. ‘I only want to talk to you. I came here to explain.’

  He ruined your life.

  This feels so true that Felicity is compelled to repeat it. ‘You ruined my life,’ she shouts down.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘What I did was unspeakable.’

  See, he admits it. Kill him. Do it now.

  The ice she is holding is growing too heavy. She must either throw it or put it down.

  ‘There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t regretted it,’ he says. ‘I should have been there for you. I should never have left you. You were the only thing that really mattered, and I lost sight of that.’

  This is making no sense.

  Don’t listen to him.

  ‘What does he mean, he left me? Do you remember that?’

  The face below her turns puzzled. ‘What did you say? Felicity, I didn’t catch that.’

  Yes. I mean no. He hurt us. He raped us. He locked us in the cupboard, you remember that, don’t you?

  She thinks she does. Except—

  He broke into our house in Cambridge. He tried to kill us. Have you forgotten that?

  She hasn’t forgotten that.

  He’s come to finish the job. He’ll never stop. You have to end it.

  Felicity lowers the ice to the ground. Bamber may be a killer. She is not.

  ‘It ends now,’ she calls down. ‘Today. This minute. I want you out of my life, once and for all.’

  It won’t work. He’ll trick you.

  She spots then, for the first time, that there is blood on Freddie’s head. He is hurt.

  ‘I should never have married you,’ she shouts down. ‘I’ve no idea why I did, but it ends now. We get divorced, if we’re not already, and then there’ll be some sort of restraining order that you agree to. I’m not going to run away again and you’re never going to hurt me again.’

  ‘Felicity?’ It is impossible to read the expression that has taken hold of his face.

  ‘That’s what’s going to happen. We’re going back to King Edward Point, you’re getting on board that ship, you’ll agree to a divorce and we’ll never see each other again. Agree to that now, or I’m leaving you up here.’

  ‘Felicity.’ He is shaking his head, and finally she recognises that look. He is bewildered. He leans back against the ice wall, as though exhausted. ‘I’m not your husband,’ he says. ‘I’m your father.’

  75

  Joe

  Joe is dozing on a sofa when the door opens.

  ‘This came through for your mother.’ Frank, the BAS scientist, holds out several sheets of paper. ‘I didn’t like to wake her up but it looks important.’

  Rubbing his eyes, Joe takes a print-out of an email from one of Delilah’s colleagues in the Cambridge police station. Before leaving England, she’d asked her team to do some digging into the twenty-five-year-old Salisbury murder. Joe scans the covering note and turns to the attachment to see the front page of the Salisbury Gazette dated Saturday 20 May 1994.

  * * *

  Mother Killed in Horror House. Husband Suspected.

  A nationwide hunt is underway for the chief suspect in the murder of a young Salisbury mother. Wilfred Lloyd is believed to be on the run after killing his wife, Faye, and subjecting both her and their three-year-old daughter, Felicity, to a sustained period of torture and abuse.

  The body of Faye Lloyd was found by local police on Friday night, after neighbours reported a disturbance at 22 Clockhouse Road. The couple’s little girl was found, injured and dehydrated, in a cupboard, where it is feared she may have spent some days. She is currently in the care of social services.

  People are warned not to approach Lloyd, but to report any sightings to the police.

  Joe needs a moment to take it in. Felicity’s father was Wilfred Lloyd. Freddie Lloyd. The man who has followed her to South Georgia, the man who, according to what he’s just read, she has every reason to fear, isn’t her husband, but her father.

  The story was still front page news on the following Monday.

  * * *

  Wilfred Lloyd is still at large nearly forty-eight hours after he is believed to have killed his wife Faye in a vicious attack at their home in Clockhouse Road, Salisbury. Sightings in Andover, Basingstoke and London have proved inconclusive and police believe he may be attempting to leave the country.

  Police have refused to confirm that luggage and travel papers found in the Lloyd family house indicate that Lloyd arrived back in the country from where he was working in Brazil on Friday afternoon. A source who declined to be named, though, told the Gazette that the findings threw doubt on the previous belief that Lloyd had subjected his wife and daughter to a prolonged period of abuse, before murdering his wife.

  ‘He’d only just got back,’ neighbour Mrs Singer told the Gazette. ‘He couldn’t have hurt his wife and kiddy.’

  The couple’s daughter, three-year-old Felicity, is recovering in hospital. It is believed her maternal grandmother is travelling to Salisbury from North Wales to take care of her granddaughter.

  * * *

  The story was covered again in both the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of the papers, slipping to the inside page and then to page four, as no further news emerged. Then, on the Thursday, it was back on the front page.

  * * *

  In a grim twist to the Lloyd murder investigation, Wilfred Lloyd handed himself into police custody at Basingstoke Police
Station in the early hours of this morning and was immediately arrested. Police spokesman, Detective Chief Superintendent Allan Edwards would neither confirm nor deny that Lloyd’s arrest is linked to the discovery, yesterday, of the remains of three men in a house in the Shepherd’s Hill district of the town.

  * * *

  Once again, the story went quiet. The paper carried picture-stories of friends and neighbours leaving flowers and gifts for the dead woman and her daughter, and there was a small piece that was mainly speculation on the part of neighbours and friends, most of whom believed the young couple to be very happy and devoted to their daughter. Finally, on 29 May, an update.

  * * *

  In a statement given today at 2 p.m. this afternoon, Detective Chief Superintendent Edwards told waiting reporters that Wilfred Lloyd has been charged with three counts of murder, of Thomas Lee, 35, Ron Lovell, 29 and Jake Ellery, 34. All three men were known to have carried out work on the Lloyds’ property in recent months. Edwards went on to confirm that Lloyd would not now be facing charges for the murder of his wife, or for the abuse of his daughter. The police are not seeking anyone else in connection with those crimes.

  * * *

  The next day, a very brief piece.

  * * *

  Wilfred Lloyd pleaded guilty yesterday at Salisbury Magistrates Court to three charges of murder. The magistrate referred the case to the Crown Court and remanded Lloyd in custody. The trial is expected in the summer.

  * * *

  The door opens again and Jack appears. Without speaking, Joe hands over the articles before turning back to the email from Delilah’s detective sergeant. The detective wrote:

  Faye Lloyd hired three men to help her clear the garden before the summer. If she’d known that two of them had convictions for sex offences and the third for GBH she probably wouldn’t have. They realised she and the little girl were alone in the house and decided to move in.

  They kept her as a sex slave, subjecting her to abuse and torture, for three days before her husband arrived back on extended leave. He got in, arms full of souvenirs, looking forward to a marital reunion, to find his wife dead in the bedroom. Felicity had been locked in the under-stairs cupboard for God knows how long.

  * * *

  ‘Did these blokes hurt Felicity too?’ Jack asks, when he’s caught up.

  Joe nods. ‘Medical evidence suggested she’d been raped and beaten too. The public were hugely sympathetic to Lloyd, but he’d deliberately hunted down his wife’s killers and murdered them in cold blood. And showed no remorse. The judge had no choice but to send him down. He got a whole life tariff.’

  All colour seems to have drained from Jack’s face. ‘Does Felicity know any of this?’

  ‘She was three years old. People retain very few memories from being so young. She did recall some of it under hypnosis one time but it was very confused.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She remembered her mother screaming and being locked in the cupboard. And she talked about the bad men coming to get her out of the cupboard and hurting her.’

  Jack is looking through the newspaper reports again. ‘According to this, her father found her.’

  ‘Found her and then fled, never to reappear in her life. So, her terrified, toddler brain confused him with the bad men. All Felicity’s fears of a man she knew as Freddie stem from inaccurate recollections of when she was three years old.’

  ‘So, she has no reason to be afraid of Freddie?’

  Joe drops his head into his hands. ‘No. He’s the one in danger.’

  76

  Freddie

  ‘Felicity? Felicity? Are you still there?’

  She has backed away from the fissure edge. For several seconds there is no response, and then Freddie hears her voice, low and unhappy.

  ‘Bamber?’ she says. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  ‘Felicity,’ he shouts up. ‘Lissy, why on Earth do you think I’m your husband? Are you married? I suppose you could be, and you might have married someone who reminds you of me, people do that, but how could you even remember me after so much time? Felicity, please come back. Please talk to me.’

  There is movement above, loose snow falls, then she reappears. Thank God, she’s put the lump of ice down. Instead she holds her flashlight and shines it directly onto his face.

  ‘Stop trying to trick me,’ she says. ‘You’re Freddie.’

  The light half blinds him. ‘Yes, Freddie is my name. Wilfred, actually, but your mother always called me Freddie and you did too when you were tiny. You said Freddie, not Daddy. Do you remember anything about back then?’

  She mutters something.

  ‘What? What did you say? Is there someone up there with you?’

  ‘I have a wedding ring,’ she tells him.

  ‘Is it this one?’ He fumbles inside his jacket until he finds the ring he stole from her room the previous morning. The torch beam shifts to focus on it. ‘This is your mother’s ring. See the F & F on the inside? Freddie and Faye. You’ve got a silver lily on a chain too. That was your mother’s. I bought it for her when we were students. She kept it in a porcelain box with violets on the lid.’

  Seeing the look on her face, he is glad the gun is in his pocket now.

  ‘Felicity, what’s going on? How can you not know who I am?’

  ‘There is a wedding dress in my loft,’ she tells him.

  He nods his head, ignoring the thump of pain. ‘White lace, with long sleeves and a sweetheart neckline? I’ll bet you’ve never tried it on, have you? It won’t fit. You’re three inches taller than your mother was, and a size bigger. You take after me, Lissy, although your face is a lot like hers.’

  The face above him, so like that of the woman he once loved more than his own life, seems to change. Her eyes open wider, her eyebrows lift, and her lips purse. ‘Seven, eight, nine, ten,’ she says, in the voice of a young child. ‘Coming ready or not.’

  ‘What?’ Afraid, suddenly, Freddie backs away, retracing his steps. He remembers the gun in his pocket and knows it can’t help him. He will not aim a loaded gun at his daughter.

  She speaks again, and her voice is normal this time. ‘If you’re my father, why do I not know you? Why can’t I remember you?’

  Freddie takes a deep breath. He’d known this would be hard. ‘I’ve been away, Lissy,’ he says. ‘Do you remember anything about what happened when you were tiny?’

  Again, the child’s voice. ‘Eight, nine, ten, coming ready or not.’ Then, Felicity’s own voice again. ‘You attacked me in my house. You tried to strangle me.’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, I did not. I came to your house once. It was June last year. I knocked on your door. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have taken you by surprise. You ran away. Lissy, you must remember that. You ran across the common. I went after you but I lost you. After that, I didn’t see you again until that time in the bookshop.’

  ‘You broke into my house.’ She is shouting at him now. ‘You broke a window. You put a knife to my throat.’

  He keeps moving backwards. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You locked me in the cupboard. You gave me to the bad men. They raped me and they killed Mummy.’

  Absolutely not. I would never hurt you.’

  ‘Liar!’

  She screams down at him. And then she bends and picks up a block of ice. It is huge, over a foot in length, and narrowing to an evil spike. He turns, tries to run. His foot catches in the narrow V of the fissure and the ice block comes thundering down.

  77

  Felicity

  Felicity runs, and the voices drive her on.

  So, you’re not married. It makes no difference, he still wants to hurt you.

  He hurt you when you were a baby. It was his fault, everything that happened.

  He should have been there. He should have saved you.

  Run, run, run!

  She flees through snow that is getting deeper as she clim
bs, and she knows she is running from herself, as much as from the father who, her whole life, has been the hidden monster in her nightmares. She runs, and finally, her memories start to emerge.

  The men who’d worked in the garden, who’d played with her and given her chocolate, turning into bad men, coming into the house and locking the doors, holding her down while they pinned Mummy onto the kitchen floor and did horrible things to her.

  Stop your screaming. Shut the little bitch up.

  She reaches a snowfall, the result of a recent avalanche and can go no further this way. She heads west, knowing that to leave the familiar route is foolish, but compelled to keep going.

  You’ve killed him. That block of ice split his head in two. You’re a killer now.

  He deserved it. He would have killed you. It was you or him.

  She has no idea of the time, but the night sky has turned the deep mauve of mourning. The clouds are low and heavy but above them she can see the lighter hues of an impending dawn. A streak of gold, the width of a human hair, appears on the horizon and, in the distance, the mountain tops are becoming visible.

  Has she really just killed her father?

  Distracted, she misses her footing and drops the flashlight. Before she can grab hold of it again, it rolls away down a snow slope that is the same purple colour as the sky. She doesn’t chase it. Soon she will have no need of a torch. She pushes herself to her feet and goes on. The slope becomes steeper. She isn’t entirely sure where she is any more. She looks around for a familiar peak, a landmark of some kind, but it is too dark and the mountain tops are unfamiliar from this angle. Her muscles are burning and each breath comes out as a sob. Still the memories keep coming. The dam has broken now and there is no holding back the flood.