‘Another emerged under hypnosis one time,’ Joe says. ‘A child who was very afraid of her father. And one night she was very different with me. I think I was dealing with another then, but I never learned who it was. A woman, I think. Yeah, definitely a woman.’
‘She denied having seen you that night,’ Delilah tells him. ‘I thought she was lying, but maybe she genuinely didn’t remember.’
‘If she has no memory of what she does when another personality takes over, how can she be held responsible?’ Jack asks.
‘She killed two homeless women,’ Delilah says. ‘And I don’t care who she thought she was at the time. I know you’re both sweet on her, but you have to accept that. She has to be brought in before she hurts anyone else.’
79
Freddie
He thinks he is gaining on her. A couple of times, he has caught a glimpse of dark clothing, vanishing around an ice column. He has seen several drops of blood on the snow.
The night is departing fast. For some time now, he’s been able to see his own shadow running ahead of him on snow that is losing its deep-plum colour. Another shadow appears in the snow, alarmingly close, but it is only a bird directly above him. Huge and silent, its feathers are turned gold by a sun that he still can’t quite see.
Freddie makes his way around a boulder of ice and there she is. About twenty yards higher up the slope, standing as still as the columns and peaks around her. She turns and sees him.
‘Daddy!’ she calls and then the earth shudders and she is gone.
80
Felicity
One second Felicity is falling, the next all breath is knocked from her body and she is trapped in a freezing, white cloud. Avalanche, she thinks. She hears the sound of running water and it makes no sense. Pain runs through her arm and shoulder as she realises she has no idea which way is up.
We’re going to die, we’re going to die.
At last, this is it. It’s over.
Stop it!
This last is her own voice. She isn’t speaking out loud, she would choke on snow, but she can hear it dominating the others in her head. We’re not going to die, she tells her panicking alters.
The voices die down as she realises that she can breathe. And that she is no longer falling.
See, she tells the others. We’re not dead yet.
They aren’t convinced. They are clamouring at the edges of her brain, fretting and snapping at each other, at her, fighting to get control.
Felicity tells herself to focus. She tries to move and the weight of her own body gives her a sense of direction. Slowly, knowing how volatile the glacier can be, she pushes herself upwards and her head breaks free. She blinks snow out of her eyes and thinks it might have been better if the fall had killed her.
The ground around her, still out of reach of any dawn light, is a tortured mass of ice boulders and snow piles. In every direction, sheer walls of ice rise up like the cruellest prison imaginable. She has fallen into a circular shaft that is a common feature of glaciers. This one is unusually short, or she would have been killed for sure, and the dawn sky is, at a guess, twenty feet above her.
Where are we, where are we?
It is like having a pack of wolves in her head. ‘It’s a moulin,’ she says. ‘You find them a lot on glaciers. They’re part of the drainage system.’
Get us out, get us out, get us out.
A pack of wolves, and she must be its leader.
The walls of the shaft are pitted and rough and were she able-bodied she might stand a chance of climbing. She is certain, though, that her right arm is broken. Worse she is sitting in a fast-running stream of glacial meltwater.
That should not be possible.
Getting up, she turns a slow circle and sees that the base of the moulin is dissected by a tunnel. For a moment, she forgets her predicament. She has heard of these tunnels, seen photographs taken on glaciers around the world, but this is the first time she has come across one.
What is it? Where are we?
‘Be quiet.’
The moulin tunnel is huge. A car could be driven through it. A frisson of excitement and dread runs through her. She is in the glacier’s drainage system.
‘Felicity!’
This voice is real. She looks up to see Freddie peering down at her. ‘Are you hurt?’ he calls.
‘That edge might not be stable,’ she shouts back.
‘I know. I can feel the ground moving. What’s going on? Is it an earthquake?’
She thinks about the huge expanse of blue water, just a little further up the glacier.
‘Can you climb out?’ Freddie shouts.
‘My arm’s broken.’
‘I’m coming down.’
‘No!’
That will not help. She cannot climb with or without his assistance. ‘Can you go back to the equipment hut? You’ll find rope in it, and a pulley system.’
‘It’s locked.’
‘Twenty-four-ten,’ she tells him. ‘That’s the combination.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
He vanishes.
81
Joe
The RIB flies back towards Husvik. Bundled up against the wind, the three passengers cling to the hand grips as Ralph planes the craft over the waves. They reach the coast of the mainland while it is still dark and cross Right Whale Bay as the sun is coming up. In the Bay of Isles, when Ralph has to cut the speed to steer around a cluster of rocks in the water, a school of dolphins keeps pace with them until they reach the eastern headland.
The derelict whaling station of Prince Olav Harbour is gleaming copper red in the morning sun as Joe’s phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out to see his mother is calling but when he presses answer he can’t hear a thing. A few minutes later, a text comes in.
Call me. Urgent.
Ralph cuts the engine and Joe tries again. No luck.
‘There’s a radio at Husvik,’ Jack tells him.
‘We should press on,’ Joe says.
Ralph fires up the engine again.
82
Freddie
Freddie tugs off his backpack and starts to run down the glacier. It will take him an hour to get to the equipment hut and back and he has left his daughter in a stream of freezing water. An hour in such conditions will see the onset of hypothermia. Her voice, as she called up to him, was already shaky, possibly with shock, but more likely indicating that shivering has set in. Within the next hour, her pulse will weaken, her breathing turn rapid and shallow, and she’ll start to feel drowsy. She’ll become confused, clumsy, possibly make stupid decisions. The pain from her broken arm won’t help. If she loses consciousness, he’ll never get her out.
He runs on, knowing there is no danger of him forgetting the combination number that will unlock the hut. Twenty-four-ten. The twenty-fourth of October. His birthday.
83
Felicity
When Freddie goes, the voices start up again, telling Felicity to give up, that it’s hopeless, that the water level is rising, and that she might as well lie down in the freezing stream and have done with it. Some of them sound terrified, others gleeful. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she can hear laughter. Other voices urge her to keep going.