She is staggering over the snow now, exhausted, hardly knowing which way she is going. There is no point in running anyway, she realises, not if she’s killed him. She thinks about the blue lake. It will kill her in minutes. All she will have to do is jump in and start swimming. It will claim her before she can even think about trying to get out.
Another memory pushes aside thoughts of suicide. Footsteps, approaching the cupboard. The tiny naked Felicity huddles as far from the door as she can get. They’re not saying the words this time. This is a new game.
‘Faye?’ A voice calls, hesitant and nervous, a voice that knows something has gone horribly wrong. ‘Felicity?’
Daddy’s voice. Daddy at last.
The door opens and it is Daddy, it is. He lets out a strangled cry. He bends down and lifts his daughter out.
Felicity sees a peak she recognises. She is only a short climb from the ice sheet. The sky in the north-east is growing lighter now and the world around her is losing the dark chill of night. In less than an hour the sun will be up. She turns and sees, fifty yards below her, the man whom she has tried to kill twice.
‘Daddy!’ she calls, a second before the ledge she is standing on gives way. She feels a moment of sickening weightlessness and then plummets into the icy heart of the world.
78
Joe
Joe is putting the phone down when he hears footsteps. He looks around and Delilah appears. She has slept in her clothes, her hair is like straw and the dark shadows under her eyes could be bruises, but she has lost the ghastly colour of the previous evening.
‘Skye’s on her way,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how that woman can look so chipper after what we’ve been through. I’m not sure she’s human.’
‘How are you feeling?’ Joe asks.
Delilah looks around as though not entirely sure where she is. ‘Like I died in the night.’ Her eyes linger on Jack in the kitchen area. ‘Tea please. White, no sugar.’ She turns back to her son. ‘I’ve read the stuff the team sent over. Frank says you took a phone call a while ago.’
Late the previous day, Delilah’s colleagues in Cambridge had got through to the Snow Queen in Grytviken harbour. During the night, the captain relayed the message to Bird Island. Joe doesn’t bother with the details. ‘You might need to sit down,’ he tells her.
‘I need to sit down anyway. This room is moving, isn’t it, it’s not just me?’
Jack hands Delilah a mug. She takes it with shaking hands and lowers herself into an armchair.
‘They need you to call them back,’ Joe tells his mother. ‘But they wanted you to know right away that they’ve traced Freddie Lloyd’s movements since he left prison.’
Tea spills onto Delilah’s hand. ‘Hit me,’ she says.
‘Morning all,’ Skye, fully kitted up, enters the room. ‘Tea, lovely. Anyone seen Ralph?’
Joe joins his mother in the seating area. ‘He was given temporary release from Durham prison on the tenth of June last year, but he broke the terms and left the north-east to travel to Cambridge. We can assume he was looking for his daughter. He also wrote to her several times before his release.’
Delilah thinks for a moment. ‘Eleventh of June is the date Felicity was admitted to hospital after her mysterious adventure on Midsummer Common.’
Eleventh of June is also the night Bella Barnes was murdered. Neither of them say it, but Joe is pretty sure both are thinking it.
‘Exactly,’ he agrees. ‘And her problems stemmed from then or shortly before. I think Freddie’s appearance after so long triggered her mental health problems and led to the other personalities emerging. Just as they did when she was a teenager, after he wrote to her from prison.’
‘So, this stalker she talked about, it was him? Freddie, her dad?’
Joe has spent much of the night thinking about this. ‘Impossible. After he broke the terms of his temporary release, he was sent back to prison until his final release on the twenty-fifth of July. The day before she saw him in Heffers.’
‘So, he wasn’t stalking her in Cambridge?’
‘Couldn’t have been. The stalker was a figment of her imagination, as she herself argued, but one that arose from her real fear of the man who’d come back into her life.’
As he speaks, Joe remembers the photographs he found in Felicity’s bin. Weren’t they actual physical evidence of a stalker? But Freddie couldn’t have taken them.
‘So, what’s he been doing the past nine months?’ Delilah asks, before he has a chance to speak.
‘Living in Nottingham, working with a small building firm,’ he tells her. ‘Getting the money together to fund his trip out here.’
The outside door opens and a gust of wind blows inside, bringing Ralph with it. ‘Well, you can get back to bed, missus,’ he says to Delilah. ‘I’m taking you nowhere.’
‘You’re not bloody well leaving me here.’
‘Take a wildlife walk. I’ll pick you up in the launch when we’re done.’
Delilah pulls herself upright.
‘He’s right, Mum,’ Joe jumps in. ‘The RIB will go at twice the speed of the launch and be twice as rough.’
‘Three times,’ Ralph adds. ‘It planes across those wave tops. Bounce, bounce.’
Delilah glares.
‘And your office want to talk to you,’ Joe reminds her. ‘It could be important.’
‘No phone on the RIB.’ Ralph turns back to the kitchen area. ‘Don’t go near the seals. They bite.’
Jack comes to join them. ‘That stuff you said last night, Joe,’ he begins, ‘about how what happened to Flick when she was a baby led to her personality fracturing? How many personalities are we talking about?’
‘I can’t say,’ Joe replies. ‘There’s a documented case in America in the early twentieth century of a woman with sixteen different personalities.’
‘Sixteen? You’re kidding?’ Jack says.
‘There are reports of even more than that. Numbers reaching twenty, even thirty.’
‘Christ.’
‘We only really know of one with Felicity, don’t we?’ Delilah says. ‘I’m talking about Shane now.’
Joe sighs. He’s already broken so much of Felicity’s confidence, it hardly matters now. In any case, if they are to take her back to Grytviken safely, he’ll need the others on side.
‘We have proof that a young bloke, going by the name of Shane, who is wanted by the police in Cambridge, is actually Felicity.’ He holds up a hand to quell the outburst he can see is coming from Jack. ‘Mate, you’ve got to take our word on this.’
‘It’s very worrying,’ Skye says.
‘One feature of her disorder is that at least one of the personalities takes on an aggressive, confrontational role,’ Joe explains. ‘I think Shane emerges when Felicity is afraid and he copes by being violent. It’s terribly sad. Without the early trauma, she’d have been a normal, rather gentle young woman. The woman you’ve seen here.’
‘So, just Shane?’ Jack asks. ‘Not fifteen or sixteen, or thirty?’