Eden Legacy (22 page)
Authors: Will Adams
Daniel reappeared with a tray of coffee and fruit salad, toast and jam, set it upon the desk. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘What about searching the reefs?’
She smiled and showed him her bandages. ‘I can’t exactly go diving, not like this. And I’m hopeless at doing boat things.’
‘Then maybe I could take the
Yvette
out, see if I can’t find something.’
‘By yourself? Is that safe?’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘Then thanks. That’s really kind.’
‘No problem.’ He shouldered one of his bags. ‘See you later, then.’
Rebecca watched him leave, feeling bad about shutting him out like this when he so clearly just wanted to help.
But it wasn’t only the kidnappers who’d insisted on her silence; Mustafa had, too. She resumed totting up her father’s assets. Without even taking Eden into account, he had over three-quarters of a million pounds invested in British bank and share accounts, and he still owned a house near Oxford. He had more income than she’d expected too, and not just from rent, dividends and interest. The Landseer Trust ran at least two expeditions a year here, each made up of twelve to twenty volunteers paying through their noses for the privilege of collecting data from the reefs and forest. He’d also written several journal articles, had conducted field trials on a new GPS tracker system, had acted as an agent for local craftspeople, selling their works to dealers in London and Munich. And now that tourists had started visiting this coast in greater numbers, he’d begun taking in paying guests too, offering day-trips on the
Yvette,
even the occasional deep-sea fishing expedition. Everything was scrupulously documented and declared, kept here in these drawers. And it occurred to her then that anyone with access to the lodge could easily have found out about her father’s wealth; and that would have made him a very tempting target indeed.
I
Boris sat bolt upright in his bed as he remembered last night’s gunfight. It wasn’t remorse for the two men that had pricked him, but the belated memory of a mistake he’d made. He’d gutted that tomato with his knife before the Raging Bull had taken his face off, but then he’d wiped off his knife and put it back in its sheath and taken it away with him.
How could he have been so stupid?
The Malagasy police wouldn’t be up to much, from what little he’d seen of them, but even they would have to wonder where the knife had disappeared to. And that would surely lead them to conclude there’d been someone else at the scene.
He threw back his sheet, pulled on trousers, went over to Davit’s cabin. The big man was still fast asleep, Claudia snuggled against him, holding hands like teenage lovers. He gave their bed an extra-hard kick.
‘What time is it?’ grunted Davit.
‘Time we got shifting.’
They dragged the boat down to the sea’s edge, stowed their camping gear, food and other supplies, fixed the outboard. Davit helped Claudia to her seat, then he and Boris pushed it out beyond the breakers and clambered aboard either side to make sure it didn’t capsize. With all that weight, however, it sank low in the choppy water.
‘Maybe we should leave Claudia behind,’ suggested Davit.
‘Maybe we should leave you behind,’ grunted Boris.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘It was a joke,’ he sighed. ‘Look at the size of you two.’
‘We’ll see how it goes,’ said Davit. ‘We’ll just have to take it slow and stick close to shore in case anything goes wrong.’
‘And if it does?’
The big man shrugged. ‘Then we’ll just have to try something else.’
Knox waded out to the
Yvette,
then spent a few minutes studying the chart of the Eden reefs pinned to the cork-board. Nothing he’d learned so far had given much support to his hunch that Adam and Emilia’s disappearance was connected to their upcoming salvage; but nothing had disproved it either. And, rather than simply search the sea at random, he might as well look for the wreck-site too, if only to ease his conscience about Miles.
Emilia had been secretive about its precise location, but she’d let slip a few clues all the same. He knew, for example, that it lay a little over thirty metres deep. That cut out all of Eden’s lagoon, which was twenty-five metres at its deepest, as well as everything beyond the pelagic boundary. She’d also told him that she and her father had found it during a routine coral check. This involved visiting particular sections of the reef month after month, year after year, to examine them for bleaching and other symptoms of ill health. While their secrecy about the wreck would surely have precluded them from marking its location, this chart appeared several years old, so it seemed probable that the coral they’d gone to check that day would have been marked upon it. But which mark? There were three or four hundred of them on the chart, and he didn’t even know which ones represented corals.
He unpinned the chart, looked at its reverse for a key.
Nothing. He turned to the map-stand instead, pulled out and checked the other charts in turn, again without success. He did, however, find another old chart rolled up at the bottom. He hadn’t noticed it before because it was shorter than the others, and shorter than the top of the stand. It was a vaguely familiar reproduction of an ancient world map, but of very poor quality, blurred black-and-white printouts cut into a collage and glued to a backing sheet. He took it out into the sunshine for a better look, which was when he realised why he was having trouble recognising it. He was holding it upside down.
It was a commonplace, these days, to blame Western arrogance for the orientation of maps with north on top and Europe at the heart. But Knox had little truck with that view. Apart from anything else, it would be perverse to expect a map-maker to place their home anywhere but at the centre. As for putting north on top, that was less to do with arrogance than with rivers. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had based their lives around the Nile. The Nile had flowed from south to north; water flows downhill; it had followed that the south had been Upper Egypt, and the north Lower. Claudius Ptolemy, on whose great work
Geography
modern maps are indirectly based, had lived in Alexandria, and so he might easily have adopted the Egyptian style. But he was also Greek, and the Greeks put north on top. For many centuries after the schism that split Rome from Constantinople, however, Ptolemy fell into
obscurity in Europe. And when medieval Christians started making maps of their own, they put
east
at the top, not north, for they had seen the world as a cosmic metaphor for Christ, in which the rising sun represented his haloed head. The Arabs, meanwhile, put
south
at the top of their maps; and, because they were the great seafarers of the age, the many cartographers who borrowed from them did likewise. One of these was a Venetian monk called Fra Mauro, and it was a copy of his 1459 map that Knox was holding now.
The map wasn’t just notable for being upside down, however. Fra Mauro had written notes to accompany his creation, even crediting his sources, though often leaving them unnamed. According to one of these, a huge ship had arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the east in around 1420, then had sailed off westwards for two thousand miles or so before giving up and coming back. It was hard to be sure from the terse description, but it certainly could have been a treasure ship, especially as the dates tallied so perfectly with Zheng He’s sixth voyage. If so, it was the only recorded sighting of a treasure ship that far south, that far east. And it had been on its own.
Knox’s working assumption had been that, if Adam and Emilia had really found a Chinese ship on these reefs, then it had been a second ship from the same fleet as the one Cheung had found further north. But the presence of the Fra Mauro map suggested that the Kirkpatricks, at least,
had considered a simpler explanation: that there was only one ship, the very same one that had been seen twice at the Cape of Good Hope.
Ricky Cheung had been dismissive of Fra Mauro and his source. A single treasure ship hadn’t fitted his preferred narrative of a vast Chinese fleet making it to the New World, mapping it and establishing settlements before sailing back home. Besides, Fra Mauro’s source had been emphatic that the ship’s crew had found nothing at all on their two thousand mile voyage west. Nothing but sea. Yet Knox had always wondered about that.
After all, they would have said that, wouldn’t they?
Rebecca finished looking through her father’s desk, turned on the generator and started up his computer instead. His document manager was testament to his extraordinary range of interests, with folders on zoology, geology, geography, astronomy, medicine, anthropology, anatomy and linguistics. Each contained many dozens of academic articles downloaded from his favourite journals once a month or so at an Internet café in Tulear, where he’d also catch up on email and post new photos, podcasts and text to Eden’s website.
She ran a search for files he’d been working on recently, came across a draft of his most recent letter to her mother.
Yvette, my darling, another year gone, I can’t believe it.
I start with the big news, of course. We have our first grandchild, Michel, named for your father. He is beautiful; he looks like you. Both he and Emilia are flourishing. Emilia will fill you in on the details and say Hello for herself when I am finished, and update you on all our projects, which progress well. A word about her, though: motherhood suits her, as we always knew it would. She is fulfilled, she is confident, she is prepared to fight her corner. She reminds me how becoming a parent for the first time fixes your place in the world and gives you a full explanation for your life. And she is so strong. She was walking within twelve hours of delivery. And already she insists on taking Michel sailing with us, can you believe! I tell her he’s just an infant; the sea can wait. Your namesake is a fine boat, my love, but I’m not sure about trusting our first grandson to her! Emilia wins her argument, of course, as she always does, though I cannot help but sermonise a little when she trips on the top rung as she is carrying him aboard and both of them go tumbling on the deck; and, ow, poor Michel is bawling still!
You used to watch me hammering and sawing at the cabins with a look of profound disapproval, as though manual labour were beneath the dignity of an Oxford Professor of Biology. Michel gives me this same look; he gives everyone this look, it’s how he views the world. Every time he looks at me this way, my heart lurches, I think of you, I can’t help it. I miss you so much, more than before even, more than I can ever say. It’s not healthy. I know this. People come and go like tides. Scientists, zoologists, do-gooders, tourists. Some of the women are very forward. They offer themselves openly. They feel sorry for me, perhaps, or maybe they’re just lonely; maybe that’s why they travel. Yet I have no appetite for them at all. At least, it’s like visiting a library in a country whose script you cannot read. The books remind you of the joy of reading, but in themselves are nothing.
Our beloved Rebecca continues her triumph. She has grown beautiful. She has your sumptuous dark hair that she mostly ties up in a bun when she is on her treks, but sometimes she lets it loose and then she runs her fingers like combs through it, the way you used to do, and it takes me back to the moment I first saw you and I knew instantly what I wanted from my life. Everyone should have such a moment; our stay here is meaningless without it. Sometimes
she sends me recordings of her programmes. It frightens me to watch her. She approaches crocodiles and snakes and tigers as if they were pets, then turns her back on them to talk to the camera. She is quite fearless. No, that is not quite right. Fear adds a glow to her, like the candle inside the pumpkin. She stands among those savage creatures and burns the screen with intensity. She writes her own scripts, I understand. They make me so proud: clear, insightful, witty and delivered with perfect timing. My only worry is how bleak her view of human nature has become. Behaviourism is a most dangerous discipline. It puts a window between you and the world. You observe, you diagnose, you put other people into your little boxes and then think yourself superior to them. It’s a miserable way to live. I know this because it was me before I met you. Sometimes when I’m in Tulear, I browse the Internet for stories about her. She seems to be out on the town with some new man every few weeks, but none of them last. I can’t help but fear she’s been too badly scorched by my terrible anger ever to put down her guard completely. It grieves me more than I can say that this might be so, but still I hope that maybe one day she’ll lose her heart before she even realises it’s in danger.She was kind enough to track down and send some
copies of my own old programmes. At least, she didn’t exactly send them herself. She had one of her people send them. They put in a compliments slip and signed it in her absence, or pp’ed it, as they say—a most telling acronym. I cringed when I watched them. I’d forgotten how wooden I was, how patronising. I used to believe that knowledge was enough, that wonderful ideas were in themselves contagious.
Rebecca raised her head and stared at the far wall. Adam was right about his programmes. They’d been academic, patrician, stilted, hideously dated. And yet, when she’d watched them, she’d been aware of an elusive quality missing from her own work, and which she’d envied deeply; something like integrity, or even love. Watching him, listening to him, she’d been reminded that the study of animals in their environment was a demanding discipline in which new knowledge was gained only by years of patient fieldwork that rarely produced headline results. Her father had put in those years of graft and grind. The BBC had commissioned his radio broadcasts and then his television series not for his looks or screen presence but because he’d been one of Britain’s leading biologists. Thankfully for her own career, TV had since realised it didn’t need substance. But Rebecca herself had been quite capable of telling the difference.