‘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.
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.’