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 trembles 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