Eden Legacy (19 page)

‘Yes,’ she said, pulling off and discarding her flippers.

The
Yvette
was being dragged closer and closer with every moment. Waves were crashing around her. Knox pulled the rope taut, braced against the next wave, then dived in and hauled them arm over arm through the swell. They reached the
Yvette,
just a few metres from the reef, every wave smashing her closer. Rebecca did as he’d instructed, clambering rudely over his shoulders and head, tipping herself aboard. He hauled himself up after her, ran to the stern, began to haul anchor. The engine stuttered but then failed. A wave pushed them on to the reef so that their hull scraped coral for a moment and their centreboard retracted and they listed violently, but then backwash took them off again and their engine caught
and they began to turn. A last wave crashed against their side, water gushing over the deck with enough power to send Knox staggering, but Rebecca opened the throttle to its maximum and they began surging safely out to sea.

Davit was in bed with Claudia when he asked her to come to Eden with him.

‘I can’t,’ she told him. She was lying on her back, stroking his hand upon her stomach. ‘This is my work here. If they hire another girl, they won’t take me back.’

‘What do they need you for?’ he asked. ‘There’s no one here but us, and we’re leaving. Ask them for a holiday.’

That made her laugh. ‘No holiday,’ she said.

‘Please come,’ he said. ‘We’d pay you well. A thousand euros.’

To his surprise, Claudia looked hurt rather than pleased by this. ‘I don’t want your money. Not for this.’

‘It wouldn’t be for this,’ said Davit. ‘We could really use your help. To cook for us, translate, that kind of thing.’

She turned on to her back. ‘You want to pay me one thousand euros to cook and speak Malagasy? How many days?’

‘Four. Five. I don’t know yet.’

‘And what is this job? You look for this Eden man, yes? Why? What do you want with him? Do you mean him harm?’

‘The people I work for just want to talk with him, that’s all.’

‘Talk!’ she snorted. ‘Then why not just telephone him? Do they not have telephones where you come from?’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’ But then he wondered:
Why not?
He let the thought go, however; it was more enjoyable to stroke her belly. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘We really need you.’ He realised suddenly he had a way to prove it. ‘In fact, it was Boris’s idea to ask you, not mine.’

This didn’t please her as much as he’d expected. ‘I don’t like your friend,’ she said. ‘He’s a bad man.’

‘He’s okay.’

‘Men like him come here all the time. They are not good men.’ She turned to face him, pointed a finger at herself. ‘Me, I can always tell. That is why I am with you and not him.’

Her words cheered him immeasurably; he felt a rush
of tenderness for her. ‘Please come,’ he begged. ‘I don’t know how I’ll survive without you for five days.’

‘Sure!’ she laughed. She gave his right hand a little squeeze. ‘This is how you’ll survive.’

‘I’m serious. I’m crazy about you. I really am.’

She looked doubtfully at him. ‘You mean that?’

He took her hands and kissed them. ‘I mean it,’ he told her. ‘I want to be with you all the time.’

‘Okay,’ she said happily. ‘Then I come.’

Rebecca quickly assessed the damage. Her own blood was smeared over the controls and wheel, and the floor of the bridge was covered in half an inch or so of redstained water that washed back and forth with each lurch of the boat. She looked outside and saw no sign of Daniel, so for a terrible moment she feared he’d been swept overboard by that last great wave; but then he emerged from the engine hatch, and her heart started beating normally again. He looked her up and down with stony eyes before vanishing below, reappearing in dry clothes carrying bottles of drinking water, a first-aid kit, two towels and some bedclothes. He soaked up water with a towel, then swabbed the floor dry and laid out blankets, sheets and a pillow. He took the wheel from her, put the engine on
slow ahead, set and locked a course safely out to sea. ‘Lie down,’ he said.

She tried nonchalance. ‘I don’t take orders from—’

‘Not one word,’ he warned. ‘I’m too fucking angry. Now lie down.’

She got down and stretched out on the makeshift bedding. He poured a sachet of antibiotic into a glass, stirred in water, made her drink it all. ‘Your hand,’ he said, when she’d drained it.

‘Therese is—’

‘Give me your hand.’

‘Therese is a trained nurse. We can be there in—’

‘The longer you leave coral cuts, the worse they infect.’ He elucidated clearly, as though she were an idiot, a child. ‘The worse the infection, the worse the scarring. You want to be scarred for life? No? Then give me your fucking hand.’ She let him take it. It was trembling violently with indignation. He held it firm and studied her left palm and wrist, torn and bleeding. He rinsed it with water, cleaned out the grit and sand with cotton buds from the first-aid kit then dried it thoroughly, salved it with antiseptic cream, bandaged it with gauze, cloth and tape. He kept getting up to make sure they were still clear of the reefs. Occasionally, he’d take them a little further out to sea, where it was calmer. Night had fallen fully by now, making the lamplight seem brighter. When both her hands were dressed, he turned his attention to
her ankles, shins and calves. It tickled when he examined her soles; she clenched her toes into fists. ‘Turn over,’ he said.

‘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.

So, then. She needed help. But whose? Her first thought was Daniel, but there was no chance he’d have that much money on him, or even access to it. And nor would
anyone around Eden, except just possibly Pierre. Who else? Delpha, her father’s lawyer. You never knew what lawyers had stashed away; and even if he didn’t have the money, he’d certainly have contacts and advice. And Mustafa Habib, that Indian businessman from the police station, had made a fuss about wanting to help; it would serve him right if she went to him. She checked for his card. Yes. And he lived on the way to Tulear too. She could stop by on the way to Delpha.

One thing was for sure: she wouldn’t find the money here. She fetched the Jeep’s keys from behind reception, hobbled outside. The padding of the driver’s seat had long since been torn out and replaced by two short planks and an old pillow. Bare earth was visible through a gaping rusted hole in the floor. The windscreen was opaque with smeared mud and flies. Adam had kept it running with a hammer, string and prayer. But it was all she had. She thought briefly of asking Daniel to drive her, but it would mean having to tell him what had happened, and the note had been explicit. She lowered herself gingerly into the driver’s seat, twisted the keys. The engine sputtered as though the battery were low, but she revved it hard and thankfully it came to life. She switched on the headlights, carving chiaroscuro rifts in the forest walls, drove over to the generator building and siphoned fuel from the pearly container into her tank until it overflowed.