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