get around by sea, or we don’t get around,’ Ralph adds.
‘So, what do we do?’ Delilah asks.
Ralph looks outside as another burst of rain, or spray, hits the windows. ‘We wait.’
And pray, Joe thinks.
68
Freddie
Freddie comes round to a sense of being immobile. A weight on his chest is making it hard to breathe and he can feel a warm trickle running into the crease of his neck. There is pain at the back of his skull and his ears are ringing from the sound of gunfire. He thinks a sheet of corrugated iron has fallen on top of him. For several seconds he doesn’t move, trying to make sense out of what has happened.
And then, in a flash, it comes back. He’s been shot. A woman who looks and sounds nothing like Felicity, and yet so plainly was her all the same, has just shot him. Bamber, she called herself, and she might be standing over him now waiting to finish the job.
He lies still, hearing his own breathing. In all these months of planning this visit, preparing for the first confrontation, it has never occurred to him to be afraid of Felicity. Now, he realises, he has no idea who she is any more, and he is hopelessly unprepared.
Outside the store the wind is screaming and the building shakes violently. The whole lot might come down any second and it is the thought of being crushed to death that gives him courage to move.
The sheet of iron is corroded, not heavy, and can be pushed to one side. Upright again, he sees his torch, still lit, a few yards away. He risks crawling to it and shines it around the store. The woman in the doorway – Felicity – is gone. He struggles to his feet and knows that Felicity’s shot has missed. He couldn’t possibly be standing upright, feeling more or less OK, if he’d been hit.
She’s left the gun behind. He can see it, caught in the torch beam, immediately inside the doorway. He snatches it up, checks the safety catch and tucks it into his pocket. Breathing more easily, he gives himself a minute to take stock, to come up with another plan. He will not look for her again, not in the dark. He’ll find her boat and disable it, then go back to the manager’s villa and wait until morning.
Outside, the wind hits him again, and debris comes scurrying up the street like a pack of attack dogs. Sidestepping the bigger pieces, he sets off towards the water’s edge.
He finds the RIB behind a pile of rubble a little way up from the slipway. He is debating how best to disable it when he spots a light on the outskirts of the settlement. He raises his binoculars but the surrounding hills are too dark for him to see anything much. Definitely a light though, weaving in and out of the tussock grass.
Freddie thinks back to the maps and charts he studied on the journey. She isn’t going back to Grytviken, but in the opposite direction entirely. Felicity is heading towards the glacier.
69
Felicity
Felicity ignores the pain in her wounded leg and keeps going. Terror is stealing her breath and she has to stop every few minutes to gulp in more air. She leaves the tussock grass behind and starts climbing the scree slope towards the vast expanse of white that she knows is ahead. After a while her neck and shoulders begin to ache from constantly looking back for signs of pursuit. She sees nothing but forces herself on. He will never be able to track her on the glacier. No one knows ice the way she does. If she can make it to the upper ice sheet she’ll be safe. She’ll spend the night in an ice cave that the team use as a base when they’re working up there. It will be cold, but she’ll live.
She remembers hands around her throat, the gleam of a blade in the moonlight. She has no idea why Freddie should want to kill her but there was no mistaking the intent of the person who attacked her that night.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. I’m going to kill you.
For the first time, she wonders if she’s been a fool to leave the safety of the base behind. Her friends, Jack, Nigel, Ralph, wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. But how can she explain a husband she has never mentioned, a marriage she has no memory of, and the knowledge of dreadful,