Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘What?’

‘Turn on to your front.’

‘I can do this myself,’ she told him.

‘Don’t be a child. You can’t do anything with those hands.’

She turned reluctantly on to her front. He grimaced when he saw the damage, causing her to look around at the back of her right leg and the inside of her thigh, so badly torn by the coral that blood had glued her skin to her shorts. He tried to peel the fabric delicately away, so that he could get at the cuts beneath, but it hurt enough that she sucked in breath. ‘Quickly,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’

She clenched her legs and buttocks in anticipation. ‘Now.’

He ripped the fabric away, scorching her tender skin like a match struck against a wall, but she didn’t make a sound. It wasn’t as bad beneath as she’d feared, however. She watched him as he cleaned, waiting for him to take some kind of liberty; but he did nothing. It made a woman wonder. Homosexuality was an intriguing topic for an evolutionist. If natural selection insisted on anything, after all, it was the primacy of procreation. She’d had fierce arguments on the subject with colleagues convinced there must be some sophisticated genetic advantage to homosexuality, like co-operative breeding; but dedicated adaptationists were always looking for convoluted explanations where none were needed. They forgot that a drive was distinct from its purpose and effects. The purpose of a car engine wasn’t to radiate heat after a long journey; yet it did. Human blood was red because red was the colour of its optimum chemical composition under certain conditions, not because the colour itself was useful. The blunt truth was that natural selection was imperfectly efficient. It left anomalies and glitches everywhere. Nature favoured lustful creatures because they left more offspring; but the mechanisms of lust existed separately from procreation, too. ‘So do you have someone special, then?’ she asked. ‘Back in England?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean a woman, Daniel. Or a man, maybe.’

He returned to his work, snipping neat strips of gauze, bandage and plaster. ‘They call it a private life for a reason,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ she coaxed. ‘You can trust me.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve just proved that I can’t.’

Something pulsed inside her. This man wasn’t gay. She’d known it from the moment he’d arrived at the lodge, from the way he’d treated her last night, how he’d watched her oiling herself earlier. He was just in control of himself, that was all. He pinned the last bandage in place. ‘You’ll need to change them tomorrow. Maybe your friend can do it for you.’

‘Yes.’ She struggled to her feet, refusing to show pain. ‘And thank you.’ She nodded towards the reef. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘You need me to guide you through the reefs?’

He nodded at the charts, the GPS, the sonar. ‘I can handle it.’ He turned his back on her, opened the throttle a little, headed them towards shore.

Rebecca stood there uncertainly, but he didn’t look round. She left the bridge and hobbled below, changed into fresh dry clothes. Her cuts reopened as she stretched and turned; the sensation sharp yet not altogether unpleasant. The engine churned into reverse; they came to a stop. Home already. She climbed back up, one step at a time, just as Daniel grabbed the marker buoy with a boat-hook and then secured the Yvette to her fixed mooring. When he was done, he stripped down to his boxers and jumped into the sea to test it for deepness. It came up to his chest. He beckoned her over to the stern, gave her a fireman’s lift to the beach, set her down. He nodded at the Yvette. ‘I need to put her to bed,’ he said. ‘You okay to wait?’

‘I’m fine,’ she assured him. She hobbled over the dunes, up the dark path to Eden. Black birds screeched and scattered from the lodge’s roof. Wild turkeys squawked. She had the strangest sense of being watched as she unlocked and opened the front door. A brown envelope was lying on the floor inside. Her heart gave a double thump. She lit an oil lamp, the better to see what she was doing, grimaced as she picked up the envelope. It had her name written in block capitals upon it. She tore it open, pulled out a colour photograph of her father and sister standing against a whitewashed wall, holding up an English-language newspaper. She turned it numbly over. Five hundred million ariary, someone had written. Independence Square, Tulear, 9 a.m., Monday. Tell the police and they die. Tell anyone and they die.

Euphoria. Terror. Joy and relief counterbalanced in Rebecca’s heart by the cold fear that if she examined this too closely, she’d find out that it was a hoax. She knew only too well how easily photographs could be manipulated these days. Her own people did it all the time, enhancing the look and sound of footage for her programmes. She limped around and around reception trying not to let her hopes soar too high. Yes. Someone had got hold of an old picture of Adam and Emilia, taken another of some stooge holding the newspaper, overlaid the two and She stopped dead, halted by a sudden bout of severe cramps; the birth-pangs of hope. Because she knew, too, how difficult it was to fake photographs convincingly. It took specialist software, experience and expertise. You needed high-quality originals to work with. Light, shadow and perspective had to match exactly, or the result would look phoney; and these didn’t. Tulear wasn’t Seattle in these matters. There were no graphic design shops, no software houses. Most telling of all, though, was her father’s expression as he stared at the camera. He looked trapped. He looked angry.

Oh Jesus Christ, let it be true.

Her mouth opened and a feral sound came out. She felt acid swilling in her stomach, could taste its sharpness in the back of her throat. She rocked backwards and forwards until both had subsided, read the note again. Her eyes were blurred, and when she tried to wipe them, her hand rattled a little against her cheekbones. Five hundred million ariary. She did the maths in her mind: it worked out at fifteen million pounds. The bile rose to her throat and she promptly vomited it out on to the floor. But the evacuation helped her. Her hands steadied and her mind became cold and clear. She’d misplaced the decimal point by a couple of places, that was all. It was actually one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, not fifteen million. The cramps started again, but more gently. There was something almost reassuring about them. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds and she’d have her father back. She’d have Emilia…

One hundred and fifty thousand pounds! Oh, Jesus Christ! How in the name of hell was she supposed to Perhaps she should take this straight to the police. Kidnappers would always warn against going to them, after all. And Andriama, that police chief she’d met in Tulear, had struck her both as intelligent and sympathetic. But the Malagasy police were famously incompetent and indiscreet, and if word should somehow get back to the kidnappers and they were to… Rebecca couldn’t even bear to think about it. She had at least to try to raise the cash. She had at least to try. If she failed, she could go to Andriama then. But not before.

So. Five hundred million ariary. She read the ransom note again with a growing sense of unreality. The deadline was 9 a.m. on Monday. It was already Saturday night. She had less than forty hours, and tomorrow was Sunday, which meant that all the banks and moneychangers in Tulear would be closed. There was no way she could raise that much cash by 9 a.m. on Monday morning, even if she’d had it in her account. No bank would hand a foreigner that much cash, whatever ID they produced, however good their credit. It was crazy. The kidnappers weren’t giving her even a fighting chance. Panic welled again. She had to breathe rapidly to soothe herself.