The black silhouette that would prove her worst fears doesn’t materialise.
Unable to take her eyes away from the door, she backs further into the store, only to hear the sound of something moving in the shadows behind her. Impossible. He cannot be approaching from outside and be in the store with her at the same time. All the same, she is definitely not alone. In the darkness, something slithers. There is a clattering sound. She has no idea which way to turn.
Her foot backs up against a fallen shelf unit and she loses balance. Something strikes her head. She lands hard and dust surrounds her. She hears the sound of something sliding closer and then all light leaves the store.
Ten, nine, eight, I hope you’re in a good hiding place, Felicity.
This is a dream. It has to be. It is exactly the same as all the others. She crouches in the darkness, naked and terrified, and somewhere outside the man she dreads plays a grotesque parody of hide and seek.
Seven, six …
She presses herself against the rough wall of the cupboard beneath the stairs. No, no, she is in the provision store at Husvik, a dreadful enough place, but not the one that haunts her nightmares. She really has to wake up now.
Five, four, three – oh, my, this is exciting!
She can’t scream. Screaming makes him worse. It always hurts more if she screams.
Two, one, coming ready or not. Are you ready, sweetheart, because you can bet your ass I’m coming.
Felicity screams, long and loud and the sound brings her back to herself. Pain in the back of her skull tells her she may have blacked out for a few minutes. Outside the store, a flurry of gulls takes to the air. Spotting a broken stretch of pipework she grabs it and gets to her feet.
She remembers the sounds she heard from inside the store and spins on the spot. The shadows remain still, but is that heavy, laboured breathing she can hear?
Outside, the wind keens its lonely path around the chimneys.
The doorway is empty. The footsteps have gone. She waits for that cruel, teasing voice to call out her name again. Nothing. He isn’t here. He can’t be here. Everything is fine. She’ll make her way to the manager’s villa, find somewhere en route to hide her stuff, and then sit it out. When the Snow Queen has gone, she’ll return to King Edward Point, with a story about how an oncoming storm and problems with the RIB engine forced her to take shelter for several days. She’ll apologise for any alarm and then she’ll get on with her work. There are no more cruise ships due until spring and private yachts never come in winter.
She’ll be safe. Her troubled mind will heal itself again, and no one will know that anything was wrong.
She pulls herself up onto the counter, is about to swing her legs over and down the other side, when a great lumbering beast, nearly four metres long and weighing well over a ton, looms out of the shadows with a great, throaty roar. She feels the elephant seal’s huge snout against her thigh a second before it bites.
15
Freddie
In May 1915, at the height of the South Georgia winter, British explorer Ernest Shackleton landed his open boat along with a handful of crew at Haakon Bay on the north-west coast of the island. Exhausted, half-starved and frostbitten, Shackleton and two of his men began the first confirmed land crossing of South Georgia’s interior.
Their twenty-mile hike took them into the history books. With no map, they improvised a route across uncharted terrain, hammering nails into the soles of their boots to help them grip the ice. They scaled mountains, stumbled down shale fields and fought their way out of snow drifts. Crossing glaciers riddled with crevasses they knew that each step they took on virgin snow could be their last. They walked and climbed without a break for thirty-six hours before reaching Stromness and safety.
A little over a hundred years later, nothing in that barren landscape has changed. The two advantages Freddie has over Shackleton and his crew are that he is travelling in summer and doesn’t have quite so far to go.
Felicity isn’t heading for Bird Island, he is sure of that now. She would never have left such an obvious trail. There is only one other place she can be.
He wonders, if she has been planning to hide from him for as long as he has been planning to find her. It was a mistake, sending that letter, warning her of his plans, but how could he have known she’d become so fucking unreasonable?
He leaves Cumberland Bay trekking north-west, up a path that is little more than an indentation in the grass. Weighed down by kit, he nevertheless is over the first rise and out of sight of Grytviken by noon. He pauses on the brink of the hill to train his binoculars on King Edward Point and thinks he can see people at the wharf. As he watches, a launch with several passengers on board pulls away and heads north.
From this point on, he is forced to leave the path behind and hiking over tussock grass slows him further. After another hour he stops to rest and by two o’clock he is descending the steep shale slope into Cumberland West Bay.
This side of the bay differs substantially to its eastern counterpart. Three glaciers finish their journeys here and even in summer, their icy feed has a constantly chilling impact upon the water and its surrounds. Small icebergs, known as bergy bits, litter the water.
Freddie has a decision to make. Hiking around the bay will involve climbing and crossing the mouths of three glaciers. There is no way he can do that before nightfall, and he might not survive a night on a glacier. The bay, on the other hand, is only two miles across.
The canoe inflates in fifteen minutes. It takes him five more to assemble the paddle and transfer his life jacket to the outside of his coat. From the waterline along the shale beach, he knows the tide is high and that its pull will be at its weakest. The bergs are moving slowly close to shore, sometimes hardly at all, suggesting little or no current. Only when they reach a mile or so out, do they pick up speed. If he stays close to land, he should be able to avoid being sucked out to sea.
He pushes off. Immediately, the cold seems to wrap itself around him. The bergs radiate frigid air, and the wind sweeping down over the glaciers chills his bones. He paddles hard and seems to make no headway. He hadn’t realised, from the shore, how strong the wind is. Keeping an eye out for bergs floating too close, or over-curious seals, he tucks his head down and paddles for his life.
16
Felicity
Felisssitee.
That voice again. And footsteps coming down the stairs. She can hear them, thumping above her head, each one slightly different in tone as though the stairs are a musical instrument and he is playing a scale.
Three, two, one. Coming ready or not.
The last step creaks. From there it is six strides to the cupboard door. She always counts the strides. She can’t help herself.
The door opens, she starts awake, and remembers.
She is in Husvik.
She remembers nearly being bitten a second time by the huge seal but managing to slip past it and run until it stopped chasing her. She remembers hiding her stuff and then limping towards the shelter of the manager’s villa.
There are two bedrooms in the villa and her sleeping bag is unrolled on a bunk not two feet away from where she is huddled in the corner. It is unzipped, so she must have been in it at some point.
She is shivering and yet her clothes are damp with sweat. The wound on her leg where the elephant seal bit her feels hot and sore in spite of the paracetamol she took earlier. How much earlier? The room is entirely dark. She glances at her watch. Nearly two hours have passed while she’s been sleeping. She shouldn’t have slept. She has to keep watch. If her decoy hasn’t worked, if he’s managed to get hold of a boat, he could be here by now.