was here last, the buildings that were the meat freezers and the blubber cookery have become unrecognizable. Wood, tiles, bricks and pipework are strewn down to the shore and beyond. She will have to make her way through the settlement.
She sets off, walking inland, careful where she puts her feet, because machinery parts in the tussock grass have become treacherous as mantraps. A penguin chick, separated from its parent, stares at her curiously as she reaches the first corner and for a second, she wants to pick it up, because its soft brown feathers and mild gaze offer a crumb of comfort in this horrible place. She’s almost stooped to touch it when a clatter of falling tiles a few yards away sends it scurrying into the tussock.
Reluctantly leaving the chick to its own devices, she makes her way between the barrack blocks and the boilers. The wind, rarely still on South Georgia, seems to revel in the old whaling settlements. It bounces off sheets of corrugated iron and whistles through felled chimneys and broken pipework. On the wrecked ships, it echoes the moans of dying whales. In Grytviken, it is easy to remember the years of slaughter. In Husvik, one need only close one’s eyes and hear it happening still.
Halfway along the remains of the street, when she is surrounded by the creaking, groaning buildings, Felicity hears someone call her name.
13
Freddie
Freddie has already spotted the accommodation block from the deck of the ship, and he makes his way over to it as soon as he reaches King Edward Point. A one-storey, white-painted, red-roofed building, it lies in the centre of the linear settlement. He keeps his hood up as he approaches. Tourists do visit King Edward Point, mainly to have their postcards franked in the harbour master’s office, but they typically arrive in groups. A lone traveller will raise questions. In particular, he doesn’t want to be spotted by the policewoman from the ship or either of her two companions. Something about that trio didn’t feel right.
He leaves the track as he draws near, crossing mossy ground to cut the corner. Up to thirty people work for the British Antarctic Survey in summer but two thirds, he reckons, will be away from the base at any one time on field trips. Some will be in the boatsheds, others in the lab. He steals a glance through the lab window as he passes but the white-coated bloke rinsing glass tubes at a sink doesn’t look up.
The accommodation block lies like the rest of the buildings a few yards from the shoreline. He walks along its rear and the rooms he glances into seem identical. Small, single-occupancy, simply furnished. The fourth window along has a pair of enormous hiking boots drying on the ledge. The fifth has its curtains closed. The next room, the sixth, is neater than the rest, the only visible sign of an occupant a white dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. It looks small, a woman’s size.
There is no one around, so he steps closer and presses his face against the glass. On top of the bedside cabinet is a trinket box that, with a start, he recognises, and a wooden framed photograph of a young blonde woman, dressed all in black, standing amid blue, white and grey columns of glacial ice. On the desk is what looks like an incubator, but he cannot see what, if anything, is inside.
Counting windows, he walks quickly to the corner of the block. There is a side door and he isn’t surprised to find it open. There is no need for security here. He hears voices, the blare of a radio and the rattling of crockery as he walks down the corridor. A credit card slid into the gap between door and frame makes short work of the simple Yale lock.
The room beyond is neat, with the functional simplicity of a college student’s room. The watercolour prints of seabirds look mass produced, and the colour scheme is the bland cream and blue of a budget hotel. The narrow bed is as neatly made as one in a hospital, there are no clothes lying over the armchair nor shoes behind the door.
A high-pitched chirruping catches his attention. He had forgotten the incubator on the desk. He steps over and peers inside to see two fat, brown feathered creatures with long, thin beaks looking back at him. Penguins, he thinks, although he has no clue which species.
The faint smell