The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  The men put her in the cupboard under the stairs. She’s hungry and terrified of the dark, but the games they play with her when they take her out are even worse. They take her clothes away and when she soils herself, because she is only three years old, and can’t hold on, especially when she is so frightened, they slap her. They pin her down and climb on top of her and the pain is beyond anything she could have imagined. This pain will kill her. She hears Mummy sobbing and screams for Daddy, but Daddy doesn’t come and she’s in the cupboard again and she can’t decide whether she is afraid of the cupboard because of the dark and the rat she can hear scrabbling around, or whether the cupboard is the only place she will ever feel safe again.

  It goes on, for days and days, until she thinks it will never stop, that the only sound she will hear for the rest of her life is that of Mummy sobbing and screaming, and then Mummy stops screaming, and she doesn’t sob any more, and the three-year-old Felicity knows that this is far worse. And still they keep coming. Seven, eight, nine, ten, coming ready or not, and the footsteps get closer and the door opens.

  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 gentl
e young woman. The woman you’ve seen here.’

  ‘So, just Shane?’ Jack asks. ‘Not fifteen or sixteen, or thirty?’

  ‘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.

  Walk up the tunnel, look at the size of it, it’s huge, it must lead somewhere. We can get out that way.

  ‘Stop it, all of you.’

  Like chastened children, the voices hush.

  ‘Glaciers are my thing,’ she tells them. ‘I’m in charge.’

  Knowing she has to keep out of the water, she spots a boulder of ice and heads towards it. She finds that by edging her way around the shaft’s wall, she can keep her feet out of the wet. When she reaches the ice block, she climbs onto it and pulls off her backpack.

  She has barely managed two bites of chocolate before the world around her t
rembles and a fresh fall of snow flutters down the shaft. Above her, the dawn sky is the palest shade of blue and she wonders at the irony of the man she has feared for so long being the one person who might save her.

  As the sun gets higher, light creeps down the moulin until she can see it properly. About twenty metres in diameter it is an almost perfect circle; white, of course, but gleaming silver in the light and streaked throughout with flashes of blue.

  The tunnel, too, is as huge as she first thought. A great deal of water has travelled this way very quickly to carve out both the tunnel and the moulin.

  The water’s getting higher.

  This is Bamber’s voice, but Felicity too has noticed that the milky blue stream of meltwater running through the base of the moulin has swollen even in the brief time that she has been here.

  The world quivers again, unleashing a blizzard of snow. She looks at the ice blocks around her, most of them already partly submerged, and knows that if a boulder falls from the top, she will be crushed.

  ‘This is how the lake drains,’ she says. ‘Meltwater around the glacier accumulates over the summer and the ice starts to break apart. The plug at the bottom of the lake gets dislodged and the water empties through this drainage system. I’ve solved it.’

  I’m really happy for you, Bamber grumbles. Tell me something, is this about to happen now?

  Felicity doesn’t reply, but Bamber can see as well as she that the water level is rising. The plug probably hasn’t broken yet, or the stream would be a torrent, but it can’t last much longer.