Jack sets off running, back down the track, slowing only to shout a few words to Ralph and Skye and then he and Joe are racing back to Husvik.
88
Joe
Joe falls into the bottom of the boat as the engine roars and Jack takes it up to what feels like its top speed. For several minutes Joe lies still, getting his breath back.
When he can breathe again, he struggles against the force of the wind to get upright. Jack at the helm is looking out towards the horizon. Behind him, the buildings of Husvik have shrunk and the tiny figures of Skye and Ralph are pushing another RIB, Felicity’s, through the shallows to follow them.
‘Where are we going?’ Joe shouts.
‘Round the headland,’ Jack yells back. ‘Fortuna Bay. Explain when we get there.’
The engine roars in response to Jack pushing forward on the throttle control, they go faster and Joe pulls himself round to face the bow.
When they clear the first headland, Jack turns north. Joe lies flat against the side of the RIB and wonders how there can possibly be a point to what they are doing. Felicity and her father have drowned, their bodies trapped beneath the glacier. This frantic chase around the coast is futile.
It is impossible to argue, though, at the speed they are travelling. Joe feels the craft turn back towards land and lifts his eyes as Jack slows and then cuts the engine. In neutral gear, the RIB bounces on the rising sea.
Fortuna Bay is a long, thin cove flanked by black mountains and the hundred-metre-high white cliff of the glacier. Joe opens his mouth to ask what the hell they are doing and Jack hands him binoculars.
‘There’s a chance, a very slim one mind you, that we’ll find them here.’
‘How is that possible?’ Joe asks, even as he is scanning the water. Fortuna Bay is alive with bobbing seal heads and feeding birds.
‘See that ice cliff?’ Jack doesn’t take his eyes off the water. ‘That’s the mouth of the glacier. It calves into this bay and meltwater enters the ocean here.’
Joe thinks back. ‘The water we saw, that swept them away, it’s coming here?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘But the tunnel would have to be incredibly wide, wouldn’t it? For two adult humans to be swept all the way through.’
Jack’s face is grim. ‘It would. And, from what I saw, it is. We don’t know that it continues to be, all the way to the bay, but from the speed the water was moving, and the fact the moulin wasn’t filling up, there’s a chance.’
The radio crackles and then Ralph’s voice can be heard. ‘Jack, where do you want us?’
The second RIB, with Skye and Ralph on board, has turned around the headland.
‘Am I right in thinking the tide’s coming in?’ Jack asks over the radio.
‘High tide at eleven thirty this morning,’ Ralph replies.
‘Stay a hundred feet to my starboard side and follow us in.’ Jack takes the engine out of neutral and eases the RIB forward. ‘They’d have reached this bay before we got here,’ he tells Joe. ‘The force of the current would have swept them some way out, but the tide will bring them back in.’
Joe looks around at the vast expanse of water and a sound like thunder shakes the bay. A massive piece of ice falls from the cliff as a circular wall of sea water rises up around it.
‘That can’t be good,’ Joe says.
A few seconds later, the wash reaches them and both men grip the RIB’s rope handles. A hundred feet to starboard, Joe sees Ralph’s RIB being tossed up high.
‘That’s not an iceberg,’ Jack says. ‘It’s what we call a bergy bit. If an iceberg calves, we’ll know about it.’
‘Will it hit us?’ Joe asks. The bergy bit, the size of a house, seems to be heading directly for them.
‘Not if we keep an eye on it.’
‘Joe, your mum’s on the radio.’ Ralph’s voice crackles over the airways. ‘Channel nine.’
Joe does not want to talk to Delilah. Not now. He wants to look for Felicity and keep an eye on that menacing wall of white.
‘She says it’s urgent,’ Ralph adds.
With freezing fingers, Jack switches to channel nine.
‘Go ahead, love,’ they hear Ralph say, followed by Delilah asking for Joe.
‘I can hear you, Mum, go ahead,’ Joe says.
‘The other body has been recovered from the Peterhouse College cellar.’ Delilah’s voice is broken up and difficult to make out. ‘We haven’t officially confirmed identity but it fits the description given by our Strasbourg businessman. Small, thin, probably young. And female we think. We have reason to believe this is our killer’s body, and that her coming and going in the old foundations caused them to collapse. She was trapped and starved to death.’
What Delilah says next is lost amid static. Ralph asks her to repeat herself. Joe doesn’t need her to. He knows now who has been trapped in the Peterhouse foundations along with Dora’s dead body all these months. He knows who killed Dora, who tried to kill Felicity too.
‘Our deceased had a few personal possessions in the cellar with her,’ Delilah says, when they can hear her again. ‘We found ID. I can’t confirm it over the airwaves Joe, but we also found a pair of roller skates.’
Joe tells himself he cannot close his eyes, he has to look for Felicity. It’s all that matters now, finding Felicity.
‘I won’t keep you, love,’ Joe’s mother says. ‘Good luck.’
The radio falls silent and once again they can hear the cacophony of bird cries and the banging of water against the vessel’s sides.
Ezzy Sheeran, the roller-skating fiend, not dead after all. Ezzy who attacked Felicity in the city centre that night, only to be foiled by an old lady with the heart of a lion. Ezzy, who killed Dora in a fit of rage and then dragged her dead body into the drain before becoming trapped herself. Ezzy, who probably killed Bella Barnes as well, because like Felicity, she was young and pretty and got too close to Joe.
Felicity is not a murderer, and they have found out too late.
The radio crackles again. ‘Skye thinks she heard a whistle,’ Ralph’s voice emerges. ‘I’m cutting my engine.’
Jack does the same. They listen, but the air is full of noise. Shrieks, cries, whistles, the keening of the wind along the glacier. Skye cannot have heard a human-made sound amidst this din.
‘See anything?’ Jack asks.
‘What looks like an orange ping pong ball.’ Joe is on the point of despair. ‘Actually more than one. Probably some weird species of sea weed.’
‘Where?’ The RIB rocks dangerously as Jack stands up.
Joe points. Jack adjusts the focus of his binoculars then picks up the radio.
‘We’ve spotted Flick’s marker balls,’ he tells his colleagues. ‘I’m heading over. Follow slowly.’
‘Those balls were in the blue lake,’ he tells Joe as he turns the RIB. ‘Flick left them the day before yesterday. They’ve come the same way she and Freddie did.’
Joe understands little of this, but he keeps his eyes peeled on the tiny specks of orange. When he can see them with the naked eye, he puts the binoculars down and starts scanning the ocean surface. Seal heads, birds bouncing on the waves, even fish leaping. It is impossible, in a sea churning with life, to spot anything—