She pulls herself to her feet and using only the headtorch, rolls up the sleeping bag and tucks it away at the back of a cupboard. Then she checks the bandage on her leg. The bleeding seems to have stopped but an infection is entirely possible. She glances around the bedroom as she leaves it and sees nothing to indicate she’s ever been in.
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.