by Will Adams
As young girls, Rebecca and Emilia had pestered their parents endlessly for the story of how they met and fell in love. Adam had been a typical bachelor professor, scoffing at the idea of marriage; but then he’d come filming in Madagascar, and had found himself in need of a translator for his south-western leg. Yvette had been recommended; she’d taught languages in Tulear’s international school. The moment Adam had set eyes on her, he’d known. He’d found talking to her so difficult, she’d thought him mentally afflicted (she’d taken his producer aside to ask why an organisation as respected and wealthy as the BBC would employ an idiot as their presenter). He hadn’t been able to sleep or eat. He’d driven his crew crazy with his mistakes. Within four days he’d asked her to marry him. She’d had a fit of the giggles, had pointed out justly that he was a funny-looking man (they’d all laughed uproariously every time he’d come to this bit; it had become their catchphrase whenever some unfortunate had turned up at the camp) and anyway she’d never leave Madagascar. Adam had returned lovesick to England, where he’d waited to get over her, as all his knowledge of the world had assured him that he would. But time had passed and his condition had only worsened. Everything had drained of meaning. Success and fame had become irrelevant. He’d fallen seriously ill. In the end, he’d given in. He’d resigned his chair, chucked in his TV career, and flown back out.
They’d married one month later.
THIRTY
I
The seas outside the Eden reefs were blessed with extraordinary variety. On his second descent, Knox passed through fields of sea-grasses to reach a spectacular coral garden, a gaudy city of fish where vast shoals of wrasse, angels and butterflies billowed like iridescent sheets as he passed between them.
His third dive was completely different again. The seafloor here was a rocky labyrinth, as though the canyons and -gulches of a Wild West movie set had been swallowed whole beneath a lake. He swam through this maze for a while, reached the end of a ravine to find the seafloor falling away almost sheer beneath him: he’d reached the shelf. He swam north along it for a few minutes, until, away in the deep waters to his left, he glimpsed something the fluorescent orange of a life-jacket. His heart gave a little lurch; he feared the worst. But when he swam closer, it proved to be only a cluster of four buoys held down by a cable that vanished into the depths. A fish aggregating device, most likely. He’d read about these things, though he’d never seen one before. They were an occasional tool of marine biologists, who’d tie one end of a long cable to a job-lot of broken truck axles; the other to some kind of flotation device, then sail the whole rig out over deep water and dump it. The idea was that the axles would sink to the sea-bed while the buoys would stay near the surface, and the cable would stretch out between them. Algae would grow upon this cable, drawing shoals of algae-eaters that in turn drew bigger fish, and so gave marine biologists a fixed point to study changing pelagic fish populations, and local fishermen somewhere to ply their trade that wouldn’t damage the reef. This one was certainly doing its job. The cable beneath him was surrounded by a pointillist haze of small fish, and the larger shadows of their predators. A juvenile white-tip shark saw him and lazily headed his way, curiosity rather than menace. He retreated to the relative safety of shallower waters. Back through the canyons again, he reached a place like an underwater rubbish tip, where tides and currents had brought together a great mass of detritus over the centuries. He floated inches above it, careful not to stir up sediment, scoured it for artefacts. It didn’t take long for him to pick out several fragments of porcelain and coarse-ware, though he’d never have spotted them unless he’d been looking, for they lay in an almost perfect camouflage of old shells, dead coral, cartilage and bone. He didn’t find a wreck, however, or any sign of Adam or Emilia. And the day was getting on, and he’d still barely put a dent in the vast expanse of the Eden reefs.
The search area was too big for him alone, that much was clear. He needed help. There were fifteen other divers on board the Maritsa, searching urgently for the wreck, but surely in the wrong places. He needed to bring them down here. But before he could even broach that with Miles, he needed to speak to Rebecca.
He couldn’t lie to her any longer. It was time to tell her who he was.
II
Adam kept hundreds of personal photographs on his computer, with many more burned on to a set of CDs on his shelves. Rebecca started looking through them to see if any could have been used as the source shot for the ransom photo. There was nothing remotely like that, but she found herself getting hooked by all the family history she’d missed out on these past eleven years: sorrows and joys, friendships and partings.
When she’d finished the CDs, she turned to his old photograph albums. Her hand trembled a little when she pulled out the album for the year she’d left for England, and she soon came across the first photograph of herself, standing on the veranda with Emilia, arms around each others’ shoulders. There were abundant photographs of her after that: on her own, with Emilia, with her father; in the woods and on the beach. She couldn’t believe how happy she looked. Photograph albums suffered from publication bias, of course, in that you only kept the ones you liked. Even so, it was hard to reconcile these glowing portraits with her darker memories.
The afternoon drew on. She turned her mind to the following morning. She topped up the Jeep with oil and fuel, then wondered what else she might need. A bag for the money, though presumably Mustafa would have his own. The thought of simply handing it over made her feel sick. It wasn’t just the money in itself; she hated being cheated. If only there was some way to…
She frowned at a recollection, went back to her father’s desk. Yes, his income statement showed that he had been running field trials for a wildlife GPS system. She went through the lodge room by room, finally found two boxes in a cupboard in the clinic, one full, one empty. The transmitter was a thin white cylinder about two inches long, like a cigarette with its filter torn off. The tracker was bulkier and had an inset screen. Also in the box were a collar, a harness and some glue for attaching the transmitter to animals, and instructions written in such terrible English that she gave up on them, and instead turned everything on and figured it out by trial and error. The transmitter used lithium batteries to cut weight and space, sending off small bursts of data at adjustable intervals. She set it to one hour, regular enough to make tracking practical, yet without straining the batteries. Then she switched it all off again, and wondered how best to use it.
Kidnappers weren’t stupid. They’d surely search the money before handing over Adam and Emilia. If they found the transmitter, it would be the end of them. If she kept the transmitter on her, however, she could plant it when opportunity presented, yet also use it as a safeguard should she be taken too. But that meant leaving the tracker with someone she trusted, with instructions to take it to the police should she vanish. She could leave a note for Therese in the clinic, for she was due here to change her bandages the day after tomorrow. Or she could leave it for Daniel instead. Alternatively, she could just tell him everything right now, explain why she’d been acting so distantly. And she realised that was what she wanted. She wanted him by her side.
She went outside, but there was no sign of him. She climbed the steps on to the lodge’s roof. It afforded a wonderful view over a low fringe of forest down to the lagoon. Her father had set up a spotting scope here, partly for watching the night sky, but mostly to monitor Eden’s reefs and make sure no one was fishing in the protected waters. She removed the dust cover and lens cap, looked out along the shore. The resolution was extraordinarily good. She could see young boys gleaning shellfish from the rocks on the beach far away to the south, while their mothers gossiped and washed clothes in the shallows. Three shore fishermen dragged in their nets then brained their catch against the rocks. She turned the scope out to sea, searched the waters until finally she found the Yvette way out beyond the reef, her sail furled, seemingly at anchor.
She adjus
ted the focus as Daniel climbed up the stern ladder. He was wearing a wetsuit, but with a black-and-yellow pack upon his back rather than a scuba tank. She recognised it immediately-a closed-circuit re-breather, much like the one her underwater cameraman Anton used, because it let him stay underwater forever, and because there were no annoying exhalations of air bubbles to spoil his shot. But it stunned her that Daniel would have one. Re-breathers weren’t just hideously expensive to buy and operate, they also took hundreds of hours of training to master, which was why only elite professional and military divers used them. And they were a pig to fly abroad, because they used such volatile chemicals that airport security often refused point-blank to allow them on their planes. No way would some itinerant journalist just happen to have one in his bag. No way.
She stood up tall and replaced the lens cap, certain of one thing: Daniel had been lying to her. The knowledge was a gash in her heart. She hobbled down from the roof and back into the lodge, heaved his bag on to the campbed, unzipped and opened it. She caught a whiff of yesterday’s shirt as she took it out, pungent yet not unpleasant. At Oxford, years ago, investigating the nature of male sexiness, she and her colleagues had asked twenty men to wear identical white cotton shirts continuously for two days, then they’d passed the soiled shirts to a panel of women to judge for attractiveness, based only on their smell. Later, those women had also judged photographs of the same men for looks. The correlation between the scores had been remarkable. Handsome men smelled better. But why? Some of her colleagues had contended that there was a positive correlation between the perceived sexiness of smell and androsterone, a pheromone that indicated high immunocompetence. But when Rebecca had smelled the shirts herself, she’d been startled to discover that ugliness had an acrid sourness to it, disconcertingly like failure. Ugliness stank; or, at least, anxiety and low self-esteem did. They’d discussed this question with a celebrated theorist and philosopher, one of the ugliest men Rebecca had ever seen. She’d suggested mischievously that maybe self-assessment was an adaptation designed to let sexual failures appreciate and so address their shortcomings. Wasn’t it Socrates who’d remarked that the unexamined life was not worth living? Now he’d been famously ugly, a goblin of a man. Perhaps extreme ugliness was exactly what it took to be a successful philosopher, the ability to see one’s own blemishes and yet not flinch. She’d felt terribly pleased with herself for this until he’d met and held her eyes with such perfect equanimity that she’d had to look away in shame. It had been a humiliating, levelling experience, the first time she’d properly understood the ordinariness of her own intellect. And all of this came flooding back to her as she sat on Daniel’s bed holding his shirt.
She removed his other clothes, stacking them carefully so that she’d be able to replace them as she’d found them. Right at the bottom she found a heavy, mottled grey boxfolder. She pulled it out, undid the catch. It was packed so tight that the lid jumped slightly, like a broken jackin-the-box. She flipped through the papers inside: passenger lists, manifests and newspaper reports about the Winterton. She set the box back down. She knew the Winterton well; everyone around here did. The local fishermen still found the occasional piece-of-eight that they’d sell to her father for the going rate. She knew the wreck-site too; she’d sailed there often as a girl. The wood and other organic material had long since rotted away, but there were still several huge cannons, anchors, cannonballs and iron ingots lying just a few metres deep, along with some copper and iron sheets that had been too heavy to move, but which everyone had wondered about, imagining great stashes of silver beneath. A French salvage ship had arrived one day, had blasted through the sheets with dynamite. To everyone’s delight, they’d found nothing. But the rumours had persisted, and every year or so some foreigner would come to find and plunder it, thinking they alone knew the secret. Daniel, it seemed, was just the latest of them.
It galled Rebecca to remember how grateful she’d been when he’d offered to sail the Yvette up from Tulear. She’d thought he’d been trying to help her, but the blunt truth of it was that he’d just wanted a dive-boat for his search.
THIRTY-ONE
I
Boris decided to call it quits for the day while they were still some four miles north of Eden. They heaved the boat up above the tide-line, then found a clearing in the spiny forest in which to make camp. He had Davit bring up their baggage while Claudia went scouting for firewood, then he set up the laptop and IP terminal a little distance away, and called in to Georgia.
‘I have some distressing news,’ said Sandro, when he appeared. ‘About my father.’
‘He’s not…?’
‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘We have that to be thankful for. But he suffered renal failure last night. His medical team have put him into a controlled coma while they work on solutions.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Boris.
‘Thank you,’ said Sandro, who seemed to be dealing with the bad news commendably well. ‘But of course it has implications for our current project. You saw for yourself how eager he is to be part of it. I therefore think it best to put everything on hold until he is better.’
Boris had to fight not to show his dismay: people with terminal cancer didn’t just recover from renal failure. He said: ‘I imagine your father would want us to continue our preparations. After all, we don’t know how long his next remission will last. We should be ready to act swiftly.’
Sandro’s eyelids flickered. ‘That’s true,’ he acknowledged. ‘Yet I can’t see how to arrange things unless we know my father will-’
‘Leave that to me,’ said Boris. ‘That’s what you sent me here for.’
‘I’m not sure that that’s really the best-’
Boris looked around, as though he’d heard a noise. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he whispered. ‘I have to go.’ He cut the connection before Sandro could say anything more, then sat there brooding. He’d come to think of those half-million euros as already his. No way was he going to let Sandro weasel out of it now. No fucking way. He packed up the laptop and IP terminal, headed back to camp. Davit was setting up the tents while Claudia was preparing dinner. In need of a lift, Boris cracked open a bottle of cheap rum, splashed it liberally into a glass, sweetened it with a dash of coke. He knocked it back, poured himself another, then watched Claudia stirring some crushed garlic into a small bowl of oily sauce that she smeared on the silvery skins of three filleted fish and set upon a metal grill that she placed above the open flame to cook.
‘So you and Davit, eh?’ he said. She glanced up, but didn’t answer, except to sprinkle the fish with herbs. ‘I said you and Davit, eh?’ said Boris more loudly. ‘You like each other.’
‘Yes,’ said Claudia. ‘We like each other.’
‘You’re a better person than me,’ he told her. ‘If I had to spend the night with someone who snored like that…’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘If it gets too bad for you, you know where I am.’ She threw him a glare, but said nothing. He glanced around to make sure Davit was out of earshot, still putting up the second tent. ‘A hundred euros,’ he offered. ‘I can’t say fairer than that.’ She wouldn’t even look at him. ‘Fine, you bitch. Two hundred.’
‘Leave us alone,’ she said.
Davit finished the tents, came over to join them, wiping his hands on his trousers. ‘All done,’ he said cheerfully.
‘About time.’
Claudia turned over the fish. The hot grill had blistered black lines on their silver skins, spitting out oily fireballs of yellow and pale-blue. Davit pinched off some flesh, tossed it from palm to palm before popping it in his mouth. ‘God, that’s good,’ he said, giving Claudia a proud kiss upon her cheek. He turned to Boris. ‘Try some, boss. Heaven on a tongue.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
Davit put his hand upon the small of Claudia’s back. She turned and smiled up at him with a warmth that made Boris’s heart twist. ‘Did
you ever get to Gori before the Russians came?’ he asked Davit, in Georgian.
Davit frowned. ‘Once or twice. Why?’
‘They’ve got some cracking whores down there. My God! There was this dancer in this nightclub I went to-I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Or my hands.’
Davit’s face went stony. ‘Claudia’s not a whore,’ he said.
‘I never said she was. I’m just telling you about this place down in Gori.’
‘Claudia’s not a whore,’ said Davit, walking around the fire.
‘Of course she’s a fucking whore,’ spat Boris. ‘What do you think? That she’s suddenly just fallen in love with you? Are you really that stupid?’
‘You take that back,’ warned Davit.
‘She’s a whore,’ said Boris. ‘Face it. She just offered to blow me for a hundred euros while you were doing the tents.’
‘That’s it,’ said Davit. ‘That’s fucking it.’ He bunched his fist and came swinging. Boris ducked beneath it, threw a right to his ribs, but it was useless, the man was a ogre, like punching a fucking wall. Davit swung again. Boris jumped backwards to evade him, stumbled over a root. Davit came after him. On hands and knees, Boris scrambled to his bags, pulled out his Heckler amp; Koch, took off the safety and swung it round at Davit. ‘That’s enough,’ he yelled. ‘Now back off.’
