by Will Adams
‘What are you doing here?’
Rebecca turned. One of Mustafa’s guards was at the door. ‘Ahdaf asked me to wait,’ she told him. ‘She’s fetching something from her room.’ He stayed a few more seconds, then walked off. She hoped he’d go back outside, but she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Damn it. She went to the French windows, slipped outside, went around to Mustafa’s office. There was no external door and his windows were locked. She cupped her hands to look inside, but saw nothing that might help. The guard would find Ahdaf any moment now. The alarm was about to go up. She needed to get away while she could. She walked briskly but quietly towards her Toyota, not wanting to draw attention. The front gates would be locked but maybe she could drive down to the beach, cut back on to the coastal track further north. But then she stopped. Leave now and Mustafa would know she was on to him. If he decided to cover his tracks, she’d never see her father or sister again. She couldn’t leave here empty-handed. She just couldn’t.
She turned and ran back into the house.
III
The water felt colder to Knox today, though maybe that was just the old wetsuit he was wearing, or even apprehension about what lay ahead. There was no dispute that visibility was worse, however, the sea a thin particulate soup roiled up by waves and currents. He checked constantly behind him to make sure Boris was keeping up, because the noose was already biting into his throat. That said, he wanted to set a decent pace. The only thing in his favour was that he was the better diver; he needed to make the most of that.
The deeper you dived, the greater the pressure upon your body. One effect of that pressure was to enable your bloodstream to absorb more air. In such increased volumes, nitrogen had a heady effect, much like alcohol; and the faster, deeper and longer your descent, the worse it became. Nitrogen narcosis wasn’t in itself particularly dangerous, but it made divers overconfident, impaired their judgement and motor-function, rendered them as prone to stupid mistakes as a drunk behind the wheel. And that was what Knox needed: he needed Boris making stupid mistakes.
They reached the sea-floor. Knox checked his gauge. Thirty-one metres deep already, yet he needed to go deeper still. He led Boris past the underwater tip, pointing out shards of porcelain as he went, giving credibility to his account. They followed a canyon to the pelagic shelf. With the reduced visibility, he only barely saw the orange marker buoys of the fish aggregating device. He swam towards them, continuing the descent to forty metres, then fifty, feeling a mild buzz as the narcosis kicked in. You never grew immune to it, however much you dived. You simply learned to manage it.
Dark shadows ahead. He swam towards them. Boris gave a tug on the fishing line, constricting Knox’s windpipe, making it hard for him to breathe. He stopped and turned so that the line slackened. Boris was treading water some five metres away, holding up his gauges, his expression making it plain he wanted to know what the hell was going on, where the porcelain was. Knox pointed ahead. Boris shook his head. Knox checked his gauges. Fifty-five metres deep, just fifteen minutes of air left. No wonder Boris was getting nervous. If they didn’t start their ascent soon, they’d be at severe risk of decompression sickness. It was now or never. But how the hell to get close enough to Boris to The bull shark surged up from the turbid depths, its maw already open, murderous rows of white stalagmites and stalactites within, rolling up its mean black eyes to show its whites. Knox lifted his feet, thumped its snout with his flippers. It turned and swam away. He glanced around at Boris, watching it in rapt horror, giving Knox his chance. He propelled himself across, grabbed for the knife with his cuffed hands, but Boris was too quick for him, he turned and slashed at Knox’s face. Knox ducked beneath the blade, reached for Boris’s buoyancy-control device, inflated it to its maximum, then stripped him of his weight-belt.
At once Boris began rising like a runaway hot-air balloon. The fishing line quickly played out and pulled the noose tight around Knox’s throat, cutting into his windpipe, dragging him upwards with him so fast that it put them both at risk from the bends. The moment Boris reached the surface, Knox slammed on the brakes, coming to a halt at just four metres, deep enough for him to decompress safely, not that that would be much use if he couldn’t breathe.
Above him, Boris began thrashing wildly. Symptoms of the bends typically took an hour or so to present, sometimes even a day or more. Only in the very worst cases was onset immediate. His struggles pulled the makeshift garrotte ever tighter around Knox’s throat, so that he couldn’t breathe at all, his lungs screaming for air. He needed to get rid of the fishing line now, but he couldn’t even get a fingernail beneath it. He looked upwards, almost in prayer, at the very moment that a spasm of pain wracked Boris so severely that he let go of his diving knife. And Knox watched spellbound as it began fluttering down through the water towards him like a silvery leaf in an autumn breeze.
IV
Rebecca hurried back through the drawing room to the atrium. Upstairs, she could hear Ahdaf wailing like a two-year-old while the guard shouted into his walkie-talkie. Mustafa’s office was locked, but maybe there’d be something in his bedroom. She took the steps two at a time, slipped through a half-open door into a large bedroom with a basketball hoop screwed high on its wall, a pool table with a unblemished cloth. One of the son’s rooms. Not what she was after. The passage was empty; she slipped back out and tried another door. The second boy’s bedroom, a geek rather than a jock, his desk stacked with sophisticated-looking computer equipment. She was about to go out again when she heard guards arriving on the landing outside, opening doors, beginning a search.
Rebecca cast around for somewhere to hide. The only other door opened on to another walk-in closet, suits to her left, shirts to her right. She pulled it softly closed behind her, though leaving it a fraction ajar to give herself some light. Two guards ran into the bedroom a moment later, shouting at each other where to search. She slipped between two suits, grabbed the rail and lifted up her legs. The rail bowed beneath her weight, but held. The door banged open a moment later and a guard rushed in. She could hear him panting for breath as he flipped through the suits then got down on to hands and knees, yet somehow didn’t see her. He ran back out, leaving the closet door open. She let her legs back down, her left shoulder aching from the strain. The voices grew fainter as the guards ran off to search other rooms. She got out her mobile and tried Andriama again, was again transferred to voicemail. As loudly as she dared, she told him where she was and why, recasting her suspicion as certainty. The signal cut off before she could finish her message, however. Someone had turned off the mast.
She knew she wouldn’t have long before the guards came back for a more diligent search, so she looked around for salvation. There were caps and scarves hanging from hooks behind the closet door, but she’d scarcely be able to disguise her way out of here. She risked a peek out. The bedroom was still empty. She went to the window just as Mustafa pulled up in his blue Mercedes immediately behind her Toyota, pinning it in. The driver door flew open; he stepped out and strode purposefully into the house. A moment later she heard him shouting abuse at some hapless guard.
She edged back towards the closet. Something about the baseball caps and scarves was calling out to her. Those two intruders her first night at Eden had been wearing caps and scarves. Could they have been Mustafa’s sons? But that made no sense. Why bother to break in if they already had Emilia and Adam? She felt a little nauseous as she recalled Mustafa bursting in on her meeting with Andriama, how she’d patted her heart and insisted that Adam and Emilia were still alive. Now that she thought back on it, she recalled raising the possibility of a kidnap herself, and had even told them that she’d be staying at Pierre’s that night, so that Mustafa would have expected Eden to be deserted. And he’d likely have had keys for the lodge, too; he’d have been the most likely supplier of the new steel door.
It was with a tremendous feeling of relief, then, that she remembered her father on the phone. ‘Rebecca,’ he’d said. �
��Rebecca, my darling.’ Her skin began to tingle, but not in a good way. Her mother had been Adam’s one and only ever darling, then, now and forever. Even if it had been her father’s voice, so what? It was stored on dozens of CDs and cassettes in his office. And that was all the intruders had been after: the raw material with which to fake a convincing kidnap, and so take cruel advantage of Rebecca’s own conviction that she’d get Adam and Emilia back alive.
Outside, she heard the wail of approaching sirens. Andriama must have got her messages. She walked out on to the landing, looked down into the atrium, Mustafa and his guards staring anxiously out the front doors as three police cars swept up the drive. None of them even noticed Rebecca as she strode down the stairs. She was almost upon Mustafa before one of his guards shouted out a warning. He whirled around, saw the knowledge in her eyes, and the way he blanched was full confirmation of her fears. Even as Andriama and his men ran up the front steps and inside, the fury and grief welled up within her. ‘You gave me hope,’ she yelled at Mustafa. ‘You gave me hope.’ She made claws of her fingers and went for his eyes.
FORTY-THREE
I
Knox kept his eyes fixed on the knife as it tumbled in slow motion through the water towards him, all too aware it was his one hope of escaping death. He reached up for it but it caught on an eddy and bumped the heel of his palm then bounced down his forearm and shoulder before vanishing behind his back. He spun around but it was already level with his waist by the time he saw it again. He grabbed for it but it was elusive as soap in a bath and then he reached the end of his fishing-line tether and was jerked back. He watched in horror as the knife fell past his knee and calf, but he reached out a foot beneath it, trying to keep his movements slow so as to avoid creating eddies.
The knife hit his flipper point first, then fell on to its side, half the hilt hanging precariously over the edge. He reached for it but again his tether held him back. He was out of air now, running on fumes, so he lifted up his foot. The knife tumbled over the side but he grabbed it and caught it and instantly brought it up to his throat, laying the blade sideways so that he could get its tip beneath the fishing line, then twisting it and pressing out and suddenly it snapped and he was free, able to breathe once more, sucking great draughts of air back into his starving lungs.
It was a good minute before he was sufficiently recovered even to think of next steps. He carefully turned the knife around in his hands then used it to free his wrists of the flexi-cuffs. He looked up again. Boris was still thrashing around above him. Despite everything, he felt wretched for the man. The bends were as painful as anything on earth, like having spikes hammered through all your joints. Yet there was nothing he could do for him right now; he had to give his own body time to adjust to the lesser pressure or he’d suffer a similar fate himself.
When finally he surfaced, Boris was whimpering and weeping in the water, the pain too great to manage. Mild cases of the bends could be treated with pure oxygen, which was why Knox kept a small tank of it in his dive-bag, but Boris was beyond that. His one hope was the decompression chamber on board the Maritsa. Knox grabbed his collar and tried to drag him to the Yvette, but he was thrashing so wildly that Knox finally let go of him and swam over to the boat himself then motored it back across, trying unsuccessfully to raise the Maritsa as he came, hoping to get them to meet him halfway.
Boris’s cries had diminished by the time Knox pulled alongside, exhaustion rather than slackening of the pain. Knox snagged him with a boat-hook, dragged him around to the stern, hauled him aboard. He curled up on the deck like a foetus, his teeth stained red with blood, more blood and mucus leaking from his nostrils. Knox took his oxygen from his bag, attached its breathing mask and clamped it over Boris’s mouth. ‘I need to get you to my dive-ship,’ he told him. ‘You’re going to have to hold the mask, okay?’
Boris reached up and took Knox’s wrist, dragged it down so that he could speak. ‘You lied to me,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Knox.
‘I knew it,’ he said, tears of pain and regret streaming from his eyes. ‘I knew it and I still couldn’t let it go.’
‘Keep breathing,’ Knox told him.
‘What for?’ asked Boris. Pain wracked him; he arched and clenched Knox’s hand, then he fell limp with exhaustion. Blood began dribbling from beneath an eyelid, and from his left ear too, some terrible trauma taking place inside. His head lolled back and he looked up with what seemed like puzzlement at the afternoon sky. ‘I used to be a soldier,’ he said. Then he let go of Knox and his hand fell lifelessly against the deck.
II
With Rebecca’s guidance, it didn’t take Andriama and his men long to find evidence of what the Habibs had done. In the second son’s room, beneath the desk, were a number of CDs of voice recordings made by her father: fieldnotes, podcasts and his most recent message to his late wife. A selection of these had been copied into a new folder on the son’s computer, and several snippets had been rearranged into a familiar yet heartrending message, the splices disguised by static.
‘Rebecca. Rebecca, my darling. Please, Rebecca. Do as they ask. We’re both well but-’
Each syllable a dagger in Rebecca’s heart.
They found the original for the ransom photograph too. It had been taken during a lunch party months before, at which Mustafa had corralled his guests against the stables then photographed them in groups, pairs and individually. Emilia had looked bored throughout; but Adam had looked increasingly angry at the imposition; and it showed most in the photograph of him with Emilia. They also found a separate image of one of Mustafa’s sons holding up a recent newspaper; and the blended image, too, cropped and doctored for the ransom demand.
Rebecca handed Andriama the ransom money and her copy of the loan agreement, and was giving him her statement too when a call came in on his mobile. His expression grew increasingly sombre as he listened. He kept glancing at her. He scratched his chin uncertainly and then switched to a patois she couldn’t follow.
‘What is it?’ she asked, when he’d finished.
He pulled a face to warn her of bad news. ‘They’ve found a body.’
Her heart clenched. ‘Where?’
‘Tsiandamba.’
She nodded. Tsiandamba was just a little way south of Eden. ‘Who?’
‘They didn’t say.’
‘Male or female?’
He touched her gently on her arm. ‘Let’s go find out,’ he suggested.
III
Knox sat by Boris a little while. It was partly out of respect for the dead, partly from exhaustion, but mostly to buy himself time to think through what to do next. He could see two paths open to him. The first was to take Boris’s body back to shore, turn himself in, throw himself on the mercy of the Malagasy criminal justice system. But he’d heard terrible things about the courts and jails here, and he didn’t much fancy betting his future on them. Besides, while he’d done certain things in his life that warranted judgement and penance, this wasn’t one of them. He’d acted in self-defence.
Option two, then.
He stood up, looked around. There was a trawler on the western horizon and a pirogue far to his south. But that was all. The Yvette was low on fuel, but there was a decent southerly. He took off his wetsuit, unfurled the mainsail, sailed out to deeper water. He retrieved the boathouse keys from Boris, bled the air from his buoyancycontrol device and scuba tank, packed a weight-belt with as much lead as it would take and strapped it around his waist. Then he grabbed him around his chest, hoisted him up and dumped him over the side, consigning him to the deeps.
He watched the bubble trail until it had died away, and then a little while longer. If this was revenge, it certainly tasted sour. He wanted no more of it. He sailed on a little way, then weighted down Boris’s bag and dumped it too. When he picked up the laptop case, it made him wonder what the Nergadzes would do about this. Nothing, he suspected. But that was Sandro’s decision to make, not Knox’s. He held the case
out over the water and let it drop. Then he took his seat at the stern, brought the Yvette around, and headed back to shore.
FORTY-FOUR
I
Rebecca was in no state to drive, so Andriama took the wheel of her Toyota, with one of his men following in a police car. Everything seemed out of sync to her, numb and surreal. She pressed her hands between her knees and remembered Pierre calling just a week ago, her certainty that she’d get both Adam and Emilia back alive, that force of will would be enough.
But the world didn’t work that way.
It was late afternoon when they reached Tsiandamba. Villagers lined the route, staring at Rebecca with mournful expressions that couldn’t quite disguise their underlying curiosity and excitement. They reached a whitewashed chapel, the largest and coolest building in the village. Rebecca’s legs were so unsteady that Andriama had to help her out of the Toyota, and she kept her hand on his shoulder as they walked together into the tall, cool, dark interior. After the bright sunshine, she had to blink to adjust her eyes. To her right, a vast wooden crucifix was hanging on twin steel chains from the roof-beams above the altar. Two oblique arches of afternoon sunshine fell through narrow frosted-glass side-windows on to the red-tiled floor. To her left, along the rear wall, benches had been pushed together to form a low table, and lying upon it was the unmistakable form of a human body covered by a white altar cloth. A bowl of aromatic petals had been set beneath it, and at each corner, an incense stick burned in a glass jar.
