The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  Joe does what he is told, following the other man the short distance to where the rope has been hammered into the ice. Before they reach it, the sound of the running water has become almost deafening, all the more unnerving because no water can be seen. Joe spots the moulin a few yards before he reaches it and without being told, follows Jack’s example when the other man drops to all fours. Side by side, they crawl to the edge of the shaft.

  Twenty feet below they see Freddie and Felicity standing face to face, as though embracing. Then a torrent of water sweeps into the moulin and washes them away.

  * * *

  For several seconds, both men stare down at the rushing water. Then Joe leaps to his feet.

  ‘Pull them up!’ He throws himself towards the rope.

  Jack is still staring down as Joe starts to pull. The rope comes up too quickly, too easily. There is no weight attached to it at all.

  ‘The water’s not rising,’ Jack says. ‘It’s flowing out again somewhere. They’ve been swept under the glacier.’

  Joe closes his eyes in horror.

  Jack jumps to his feet. ‘Can you run?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You look fit, you’ve kept up with me. Can you run?’

  Joe stares at him for a second. The idea seems madness but doing nothing feels infinitely worse. ‘I can run.’

  ‘Come on then. Stay behind me. Take care but we have to go fast.’

  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 danger
ously 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—

  ‘Jack, slow down,’ Joe says. ‘There’s something over there. Fifty yards. Two o’clock.’

  Both men fix their attention on the point Joe is indicating. Several of the orange balls are floating together, rising and falling on the waves.

  ‘Do you see something red?’ Joe asks.

  Jack shakes his head. ‘Flick wears black on the ice. He looked to be in khaki.’

  ‘Freddie was wearing a red life jacket,’ Joe reminds him. ‘I saw it before they got swept away. It will have inflated, won’t it, when the water hit them?’

  The RIB gets closer. A whistle sounds. They see the twin red stripes of the life preserver and the bare head of the man in the water. There is another head, a blonde one, leaning on his chest.

  They know that Freddie is alive before they reach him. He manages to raise one hand to wave. The other is wrapped around his daughter who lies, as though sleeping, against him. The two of them are fastened together at the chest and Freddie’s hands are too cold to unclip them. His face is the colour of a corpse and he cannot speak. Felicity doesn’t move.

  Joe grits his teeth together to stop himself screaming something hysterical and totally unhelpful.

  Ralph’s RIB pulls up alongside and both he and Jack rope the two crafts together. Joe watches, feeling helpless, but knowing the worst thing he can do is get in the way, as Jack pulls off his coat, sweater and boots and jumps into the water. Within seconds, Felicity is unclipped from Freddie’s life jacket and lifted into the RIB with Ralph and Skye. She slumps, lifeless, in the bottom of the boat and Skye leans over her.

  ‘Flick, can you hear me?’ Ralph is calling. ‘We’ve got you, you’re safe now.’

  Joe can’t see a thing. His view is completely blocked by Ralph and Skye.

  ‘Come on, love, come on,’ Skye is saying.

  ‘Joe, we need a hand.’

  Jack’s voice is failing. Joe turns back to pull Freddie into his RIB. The water is so cold it burns Joe’s hands but eventually Jack is back on board too.

  ‘Thermal blankets in the stern locker,’ Ralph shouts over, and Joe realises that, for the time being, he is in charge of his RIB. ‘Skye, can you do CPR?’

  CPR means she’s not breathing. They can’t find a heartbeat.

  Joe finds the blankets. In only a few minutes he can see that Jack will be fine. Already, he is sitting upright and pulling his boots back on. Freddie he is less sure about, but the man is conscious and even managing to speak the odd word. Felicity, though …

  In the other RIB, she is as pale as the ice that nearly claimed her for its own and her hair lies like weeds around her face. Skye, still pumping her chest and blowing into her mouth, looks on the verge of tears.

  ‘I’ll take ov—’ Joe begins, but doesn’t finish. A sound like that of an angry dragon fills the bay and all around them, sea birds flee in panic.

  ‘We need to get out of here.’ His eyes gleaming, Ralph fires up his RIB’s engine. ‘Hold tight everyone.’

  The two boats, still rafted together, move back towards open sea.

  Joe and Jack turn to follow Ralph’s terrified stare. The mouth of the glacier is crumbling before their eyes. An avalanche of snow slides down its sheer face, turning the bay into a churning white mass.

  ‘It’s calving,’ Jack says.

  They are little more than two hundred yards from shore and the mountain of ice that they can see breaking away. The mouth of the glacier has splintered, and a great white wall, a hundred meters high, is moving towards them. The glacier it left behind seems to be disintegrating. Boulders of ice fall into the water, until the whole bay is a thick white soup.

  ‘It’s going,’ Jack calls. ‘Everyone, hold on!’

  The ice mountain leans towards them, gravity winning the battle with momentum, and the sea begins to churn. The new iceberg topples, finds its new, horizontal gravity, and a wall of turquoise water, thirty metres high, surges towards them.

  Ralph spins them around, so that Joe’s RIB swings and threatens to tip. He fires up the engine and finally they are moving out of the bay at a decent pace but the tsunami is snapping at their heels. They can feel the chill of the iceberg like the cold breath of a ghost and then they are being swept up high and fast, they are riding the freezing wave like surfers, Ralph woops, but whether with terror or elation Joe has no idea and then finally, the waters calm, they pass the head of the bay and are safe.

  Joe turns to make sure everyone is still on board the two RIBs. They are. And Felicity’s eyes are open.

  89

  Joe

  And so the story ends, as it began, in the frozen land of the far south. The autumn snows have arrived early this year and already the land around Grytviken is the pure white of an artist’s canvas, seconds before he lifts his brush. In the harbour, the Snow Queen is back from its trip to the South Sandwich Isles and the Antarctic. The captain has agreed to an unscheduled stop on South Georgia but is eager now to weigh anchor and sail north to calmer seas and warmer winds. He is impatient for the return of his last four passengers. Had two of them not been senior police officers, he might be making more of a fuss. As it is, he contents himself with sending irritated radio messages to Nigel in the harbour master’s office.

  Nigel, in his turn, has been relaying them to the BAS launch waiting at the jetty, but Ralph has the volume turned down. He is talking quietly to Delilah who sits, in the seat of honour beside him, with the look of a woman on her way to the gallows. Delilah will never make a sailor and yet she has shown a surprising willingness over the last few days to be ferried up and down the coastline to see the wildlife. It is possible that this will not be her only visit to South Georgia.

  Their conversation is interrupted as Freddie and Skye reach the launch. Skye stumbles at the last minute, and almost goes into the water, but Freddie catches her. Completely recovered from his ordeal, he has declared a newfound interest in cold-water swimming, is trying to persuade Jack to teach him to scuba dive and is determined to take part in this year’s midwinter swim at Surf Bay on the Falkland Islands. He will spend the winter in Stanley and the supply ship that visits South Georgia every six weeks will give him plenty of opportunities to get to know his daughter again. They have twenty-five years to catch up on. Seeing his last two passengers emerge from the base, Ralph gets up to release the lines.

  Joe and Felicity walk slowly down to the jetty.

  ‘Did Mum speak to you this morning?’ he asks.

  Felicity’s right arm is in plaster, but like her father, she has recovered quickly from her immersion in the icy waters of Fortuna Bay and the station doctor has seen no reason to send her away from South Georgia.

  ‘She told me that Ezzy’s fingerprints match those found in my house the night I was attacked,’ Felicity says. ‘It was Ezzy who tried to kill me. First by the river, when that old lady saved me, and then the following night, at home.’

  Joe says nothing but in his head he is running through the likely progress of events that night. Felicity in a confused and vulnerable fugue state being attacked by Ezzy. Dora intervening and taking the knife that was meant for the younger woman. Ezzy hiding Dora’s body in the drain, never imagining that, little more than a day later, it would become her tomb too.

  ‘And she said you found those photogra
phs of me in my bin,’ Felicity goes on. ‘Ezzy’s prints were on those as well. She’d been watching me for a while before I left. I think she drew some eyes on my window one time. She was trying to scare me away, get me to leave you alone. I guess it worked.’

  ‘You don’t remember coming across her and Dora by the river?’ Joe ignores the rise of guilt at the knowledge that he nearly got Felicity killed. And probably was indirectly responsible for Bella’s death. He will have plenty of time on the trip home to come to terms with it. ‘Was that one of the – you know, the others?’

  Felicity bites on her bottom lip. ‘Bamber thinks it was Shane, but she isn’t sure. She says he won’t talk about it, that it’s really shaken him up.’

  Joe waits, knowing there is more to come.

  ‘Bamber says Shane was – born, came into being – I don’t really know the words, when I was living on the streets in my late teens. He became obsessed with the homeless, with watching over them.’

  She glances sideways at him. ‘I know it’s nuts,’ she says. ‘I hear myself and think, how can this be happening to me. How can all this be going on in my head and I have no idea?’

  ‘Just acknowledging that it’s happening is progress,’ Joe says. ‘Even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.’

  Felicity stops walking. ‘If it had been me, I wouldn’t have run,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t have left Dora to face Ezzy by herself. I know I wouldn’t. I feel so—’

  Joe puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he says. ‘Whoever you were at the time, you’re not to blame for what Ezzy did.’

  And neither am I, Joe thinks to himself, and wonders if there might come a time when he believes it.

  ‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ Felicity says.

  ‘To arrest you?’

  ‘To save me.’

  Joe feels like a fraud. ‘Freddie kept you alive in the water. Jack knew where to find you. I did nothing, really.’

  They are both silent for a moment and then, ‘I really don’t like leaving you alone here,’ he says.