‘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 good 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?