Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

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.

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.

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.

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.