by Will Adams
‘I was in Antananarivo all week, I swear it.’ And he gestured towards the land behind him. It wasn’t much of an opening, but Knox went for it anyway, launching himself at Pierre, trying to get the boat-hook from him before he could do any damage with it. But Pierre swung it backhanded and caught Knox a glancing blow on his crown. His momentum still took him into Pierre, sent them tumbling together into the starboard lockers, the wood splintering. Knox tried to press his advantage, but the blow had left him groggy. Pierre threw him off, raised the boat-hook above his head, swung it down. Knox rolled aside; the boat-hook thunked into the deck. Behind his back, Rebecca pulled a scuba tank from the broken locker, crashed it down on Pierre’s skull. He collapsed instantly, fell sideways on to the deck, saliva leaking from his mouth. Rebecca knelt beside him, searched his throat for a pulse, nodded in relief at Knox when she found one.
Knox was still a little dazed as he got to his feet, but he found a coil of rope in the locker, hog-tied Pierre wrist and ankle. He was just finishing up when Pierre groaned and opened his eyes. He strained impotently at his knots, then glared furiously up at Knox, spat at his face. Knox took a hand-towel from the locker, wiped himself off with it, then twisted it into a rope and, with Rebecca’s help, used it to gag him. ‘Try spitting now,’ he said. He opened the main hatch above the engine hold, dragged Pierre over to it, dropped him feet first down into it, shot the bolts. ‘That’ll hold him until we get back,’ he told Rebecca.
‘Are you certain?’
‘I know my knots,’ he assured her. He put his hand on her arm. ‘But enough, eh? Let’s take him in, come back out first thing.’
Rebecca shook her head. ‘She’s my sister, Daniel. I have to look. I owe it to her.’
‘I know, but-’
‘You don’t have to do the dive. There’s plenty of gear aboard. Just stay on the boat while I go down.’
Knox sighed, exasperation matched only by admiration. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll make one dive. But only one. And then that’s it for the night. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ she nodded. ‘And thanks.’
FORTY-SIX
I
They reached the GPS co-ordinates, dropped anchor. The sea was getting frisky, but it wasn’t quite rough enough for Knox to call it off. He unpacked and prepared his equipment, checked it thoroughly before putting it on. The deck was rolling enough that he had to sit down to pull on his wetsuit and booties. He consulted his watch, made a note of the time, calculated a rough dive plan. He strapped his diving lamp and knife to his wrist, then sat on the rail, pulled on his flippers, held his breath and toppled backwards into the dark water in an eruption of bubbles. He’d weighted himself enough that it was an effort to stay afloat as he breast-stroked around to the stern. Then he let gravity go to work, the anchor chain running through his hand as he descended.
For all his experience, diving alone at night on such a macabre quest proved unnerving. There were shadows everywhere. At sea, as on land, predators were at their most dangerous in the darkness. A sudden memory of that bull shark looming up at him earlier: they were blessed with excellent eyesight, sharks, but they weren’t dependent upon it. They could track their prey instead through minute vibrations in the water, through their extraordinary sense of smell, through fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. His re-breather and other dive-gear would light up like fireworks in the electromagnetic field.
He sensed something behind him, spun round and lit up the darkness, but there was nothing there. The bottom came into view, ridged with canyons much like his earlier dive, though that had been a good distance away. His feet touched down, kicking up glowing emeralds of bioluminescence. The currents were strong, but the weights held him. He swam above gulches and canyons, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A shoal of shadows ahead scattered as he headed towards it, barracuda glinting like thin strips of silver foil. He swam down a canyon, overhangs of rock either side of him forming shallow grottoes. The floor was buried beneath white sand and dead coral, but also by vast quantities of pottery and porcelain shards. Ground Zero at last. He propelled himself along, probing crevices with light. A boulder lay half buried in sand ahead, covered not just in algae and barnacles, but also by a lattice of fine white veins. He drew closer and saw they were the filaments of a gillnet. Knox hated these wretched things with a passion, partly for the perverse cunning of their design, in which the mesh was almost-but not quite-big enough for their target species of fish to wriggle through. By the time the fish had realised for themselves the mesh was too narrow for them, it was too late for them to back out, their gills trapping them there like the barbs on a hook. But he also hated them because trawlers so often cut them loose when they got snagged on anything, leaving them to drift on the currents, or to lie on the sea-bed in deadly ambush for anyone unlucky enough to get tangled up in them.
He shone his lamp around, could see nothing save for a thin cascade of fine white sand falling in a steady stream to his right. It shouldn’t be falling like that, not unless something had recently happened here. He swam upwards to find a black gash in the rock, a tunnel into darkness. He looked back down at the boulder. Though it was hard to be sure, it certainly looked an almost perfect fit. If it had once plugged this mouth, and if it had recently fallen away, it would explain how come all this sand was leaking out, slowly burying it.
The tunnel was just wide enough to take him. He pulled himself along it. It opened up abruptly and he found himself in a vast underwater cavern. The water was exponentially stiller and clearer here, so his diving lamp just about illuminated the far wall and ceiling. It had, remarkably, the approximate shape and size of a great ship. And maybe that was more than coincidence: he could picture in his mind’s eye the great treasure ship sinking into one of these limestone canyons, or perhaps being nudged there by the tides and current. Sand and sediment and rock would soon have covered it, and coral would have grown atop it. And, as each generation of coral died, their husks would slowly have formed a great carapace above it, hermetically sealing everything inside, protecting the ship and its cargo from the surrounding currents. But the sea and its creatures would still have gone to work, decay inside a tooth, eating away all the wood and anything else organic, until there was nothing but minerals and metals left.
He swam into the cavern. Strange pillars protruded from the sand, reaching upwards like the buildings in a miniaturised city skyline. He drew closer and realised he was looking at stack after stack of dishes. With immense care, he picked up a bowl, tipped away the sand within. It was white with blue dragons around its rim, one of the most exquisite pieces of porcelain he’d ever seen; yet here it was, sitting on a tower of such pieces, surrounded by thousands of others, with who could guess how many more still buried in the sand. Presumably they’d once been packed in wadding in wooden chests in the cargo hold; but the wadding and the wood had rotted away around them, leaving them in a cocoon of sand instead. But that too was now trickling away, released by the fallen boulder, exposing these treasures for the first time in six hundred years.
The stacks of porcelain swayed as he swam between them, moved by the small eddies he was himself creating, leafless trees in a winter wind. He came across the golden statue of a giraffe, only its head and neck protruding from the sand. The Chinese had believed giraffes to be unicorns of myth, bringers of great good fortune. Not this one. He swam on, reached down for a gold bracelet set with rubies. Part of the ship’s great cargo, perhaps, or the treasure of some favoured courtesan. A great golden sphere glinted ahead. He swam over to it. It took his breath away: a globe of the world as the Chinese had seen it, lands enamelled upon it: China itself, of course; the scattered archipelago of the Spice Islands and then Australia; the fat daggers of India and Africa. Europe and the Mediterranean. He rolled it a little way to expose the Atlantic and then further underneath, his excitement intense. And there was America. The new and old worlds all captured together for the very first time, and on a globe too.
&nb
sp; Movement caught his eye; he whirled around. But it was only the swaying of the stacks of porcelain. Their whiteness and their motion put him irresistibly in mind of ghosts, and that made him realise that this wasn’t just a shipwreck, it was a tomb too, the final resting place of perhaps hundreds of passengers and crew, for only a few would have made it into lifeboats and to shore. He felt a mix of privilege and guilt for intruding upon their rest. But it was also a salutary reminder of why he’d come down here; and it wasn’t for the wreck. That would have to wait for another time.
He turned, swam back to the tunnel mouth and out. The boulder had been the cork in this ship’s bottle. It was covered in netting and had recently fallen loose. It was certainly possible that it had no connection to Emilia’s disappearance, but the odds surely pointed the other way. Much of the sand that had been trickling from the cavern had been swept away by the currents, but enough had fallen on to the boulder to half bury it and anything lying around it. The sand was wet and packed; he had to sweep it away with his arm. He was starting to hope that he might be wrong when he felt something soft and yielding. He snatched his hand away, then steeled himself and dug back into the sand. His fingers met other fingers, bloated and cold. He brushed away sand until he’d uncovered a hand, wrist and then forearm. A woman’s. It had to be Emilia. He kept at it until he finally revealed her face and confirmed his fears. Her skin was discoloured and torn, her mouth gaping, sand trickling from it. But it was her. An angel fish darted in and gave her eyeball a little kiss. Knox tasted bile at the back of his throat and hurriedly turned away. Vomiting was lethal this deep underwater. He breathed in and out until he’d regained his calm, then he resumed the patient work of freeing her. He reached his arms around her chest and gently pulled, but there was no give at all. He felt around, touched some netting with his fingertips, unsheathed his diving knife and tried to cut through it, but it tangled in the mesh and he couldn’t get it free.
Emilia wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, only blue denim shorts and a disintegrating T-shirt, but she did have a buoyancycontrol device on, along with a scuba tank, regulator and gauges. He undid the buckles of her BCD, freed each of her arms in turn, then tried again. This time he felt a little give. He kept at it and at it until finally he pulled her out. Her body wanted to rise, though she was still held down by a packed weight-belt. He took firm hold of her, then began a measured ascent to four metres, where he decompressed before surfacing.
The night had clouded over and the sea had grown rougher while he’d been below. Another storm was coming. He rose on a swell, saw the lights of the Yvette a hundred metres or so away. Holding Emilia with one arm, he paddled across and around to the stern ladder. He let go of her then threw his flippers aboard and called out to Rebecca that he was back.
FORTY-SEVEN
I
Time had been a torment for Rebecca. After half an hour, she’d begun to fear that something dreadful had happened to Daniel. After an hour, she was sure of it. She paced back and forth on deck, checking on Pierre and doing purposeless things in the bridge and cabin, just so that she wouldn’t have to think. But she thought nonetheless, berating herself for putting Daniel at risk on such a futile errand. She’d never forgive herself if he came to harm while She heard his voice, gave a sob of relief and ran to greet him. She was going to throw her arms around him, but the way he pulled a face and spread his hands, she knew at once. For a moment, she felt unsteady on her feet, but then she forced herself to be strong. ‘Where?’ she asked.
‘I want you to listen carefully,’ said Daniel. ‘Your sister was trapped by a rock-fall. She’s been underwater several days now. It shows. I don’t think you should see her like this. I don’t think she’d want that.’
‘She’s my sister,’ said Rebecca. ‘I don’t care how she looks. Where is she?’
‘Nearby. Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
She watched him climb back into the sea, take hold of a shapeless form. When he returned to the ladder, she couldn’t help herself, she gave a cry and looked away. He brought Emilia aboard by himself, then took her to the cabin. Her left arm spilled from his hold as he did so, a digital camera around her wrist dragging along the deck. He had to turn around to carry her down the companionway steps, but they were so steep that he missed his footing anyway and both he and Emilia tumbled to the floor. Rebecca gave a low sob. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Daniel, the strain in his voice betraying how hard he was finding this. Rebecca waited on deck until he climbed back up and out. ‘I’ll get us back to Eden, okay?’ he said, touching her elbow in sympathy.
‘Yes. And thank you. I know how hard that must have been.’
‘It’s okay. I’m just so sorry.’
She went below. Daniel had laid Emilia out on one of the beds and covered her with a thin white sheet that was already translucent with moisture, the button of her denim shorts showing through, along with fragments of some bold slogan on her T-shirt. For the second time that day, Rebecca pulled down a makeshift shroud to reveal a member of her family. She glanced at her sister’s ravaged pale face, then looked away again, only able to bear the horror of it in blinks.
– I’m so sorry, Emilia.
– There was nothing you could have done.
– I should have been here.
– There was nothing anyone could have done.
She pulled the sheet down to expose Emilia’s ragged T-shirt and bare arms. She noticed something odd then. The camera strap was still biting into Emilia’s left wrist, but the camera itself had gone. She searched the cabin, on and under the bed, but she couldn’t find it. Had Daniel taken it? He must have. But why? Was he trying to protect her somehow? Was there something on the camera he didn’t want her to see? But why then wait until Emilia was back aboard? Or had he simply not noticed it until he’d brought her down here and arranged her body on the bed?
The engine started up. It was louder down here than she’d expected. The light grew stronger and the boat shuddered and then began to move. She remembered, suddenly, all the troubling unresolved questions she’d asked herself these past few days about Daniel: how smoothly he’d fabricated and then kept up his coverstory; how he’d tried to dissuade her from coming out here tonight, then had insisted on being the one to dive, perhaps to make sure there was nothing down there that could incriminate him. She remembered how he’d assaulted Pierre before he could have a chance to explain himself, then had trussed him and gagged him to keep him quiet. She remembered what Andriama had told her about those two men killed at a meet with a foreigner, one of whom had been stabbed just like her father. Daniel had a knife; she’d watched him strap it to his forearm before making his descent. And the blunt truth was that he’d been only a few miles north of here when Adam and Emilia had disappeared; and he’d known that there was a shipwreck here, and that it was valuable too.
She shook her head at herself. She was letting the horrors of the night get to her. Maybe Daniel hadn’t told her the full truth about himself, but he’d explained everything to her satisfaction. Besides, telling a few halftruths were a long cry from being a killer. He’d have to be made of stone to have behaved as he’d behaved towards her these past few days if he’d murdered Adam and Emilia. But that gave her pause. She’d read the literature on psychopaths and so knew that they had certain traits in common, for example how plausible they were, how charming and completely without guilt or remorse, how famously hard they were to distinguish from the surrounding population, until they’d been caught and had their basements searched.
There was one other trait that psychopaths typically had in common: the capacity for rage. It was a valuable attribute, rage, an anger so intense that it overrode the instinct for self-preservation. Animals had a keen sense for it in others. They placated it, flattered it, steered clear of it. Because if they triggered it… For her father hadn’t simply been murdered, Rebecca realised. He’d been butchered. Savagery like that wasn’t a crime of greed. It was a crime of rage; a psychopath’s cri
me.
She covered Emilia once more, climbed the companion-way steps. Daniel was in the bridge, steering them towards home, but his dive-bag was against the port locker. She kept low, beneath his line of sight. Maybe Daniel would have simply tossed Emilia’s camera overboard. But maybe he wouldn’t have risked that, lest it be found by some future diver. So maybe he’d have packed it away in his bag for later disposal instead. She crouched to unzip each of the side-pockets in turn. In just the second, she found a handgun. She felt hollow as she pulled it out, turned it around disbelievingly in her hands. Those two dead men in Morombe had been gun dealers. Was that where Daniel had got this? She could see no other explanation. At least it gave her a way to defend herself; but then she saw that it had no magazine and so was functionally useless. She searched his bag for it but without success. She did find the empty sheath of his diving-knife, however, which made her wonder whether he’d ditched it lest it be matched against her father’s wounds.
If she couldn’t use the gun herself, she could at least deny it to Daniel. She hid it in one of the lockers, then searched his bag again, just in case. Her fingertips brushed something cold at the bottom of a side-pocket. She fished out a medallion on a silver chain and remembered that first night back at Eden, watching Daniel as he’d showered in the storm, the way the links had glinted in a burst of lightning. She looked down at the inscription.
MATTHEW DANIEL RICHARDSON
ATTENTION: RARE BLOOD TYPE
She closed her eyes before she could read any more. She clutched the medallion so tight she could almost feel it imprinting on her palm. The blood Andriama had found on the Yvette had been AB negative. It had belonged to a foreign male, but not Pierre. It was too rare for coincidence. If Daniel had AB negative blood, then he’d been on the Yvette before, whatever he claimed, whatever her heart told her. She lifted each finger in turn.
