Eden Legacy (37 page)

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.

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 crime.

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.

Not AB negative,
she prayed silently.
Please God, not AB negative.
She took away her last finger.

It was AB negative.

Rebecca put back the medallion and was zipping up Daniel’s bag when she heard him coming out of the bridge. She stood up and turned, but not quickly enough to escape his notice.

‘Looking for something?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she told him.

He shrugged, let it go. ‘I’m taking us south-east,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back at the pass soon.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘And thanks.’

He gave her a slightly puzzled look. ‘You don’t have to keep thanking me, Rebecca,’ he said.

She nodded, aware she was behaving strangely and
was bound to arouse his suspicion; but it was hard to stop herself. ‘Maybe I should check on Pierre,’ she said.

‘He’ll be fine.’

‘He took a blow to the head,’ she said.

Daniel shrugged. ‘As you like,’ he said, returning inside the bridge.

The roll of the deck threw her a little. The breeze had grown strong, rousing the sea with it. She unbolted and opened the main hatch. It was dark inside, but the decklights were strong enough to see Pierre lying on his side, still securely trussed. She lowered herself into the hold. ‘Are you awake?’ she murmured. He gave a grunt of acknowledgement. She put a finger to her lips to ask for quiet. He nodded. She untied his gag.

‘Please, Rebecca,’ he begged. ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t do anything to Adam or Emilia. I swear I didn’t. They were my friends, my closest friends. I loved them both.’ He was weeping and snuffling piteously. She found his protestations unnervingly convincing. ‘Please, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘You can’t trust that man. He’s the one! He’s the one!’

He was hog-tied, his ankles and wrists separately bound, then knotted together behind his back. She examined the knots more closely. By undoing one knot, she could leave his wrists and ankles securely bound, just not to each other. It would make him more comfortable and enable her to release him quicker in an emergency. In the
half-light, with the wet rope, unpicking the knot was hard. She was so concentrated on it that she didn’t even hear Daniel approaching across the deck above until he appeared at the hatch. ‘What are you doing?’ he frowned.

‘I was just making sure his knots were secure,’ she told him.

‘And?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not very good at this kind of thing.’

‘Let me have a look.’

‘It’s okay. I can—’

‘Come on, Rebecca. If there’s something wrong with his knots, I need to see for myself.’

The hold was too small for them all. Daniel helped Rebecca out first, then lowered himself down. He knelt beside Pierre, looked up and around at her in surprise. ‘Did you untie this?’ he asked.

‘I told you it was getting loose.’

He shook his head. ‘I know knots, Rebecca. No way he did this himself.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Rebecca?’ asked Daniel. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

She moved as quickly as she could, slammed closed the hatch before he could reach it, shot the bolts. ‘Rebecca!’ he yelled, pounding the underside of the hatch. ‘Let me out!’

‘You’ve been on this boat before,’ she said.

The pounding stopped. ‘Of course I have. I sailed it up from Tulear with you.’

‘No. Before then.’

‘Rebecca, I was never on this boat before then. I swear it.’

‘The police have proof.’

‘They can’t. It’s not possible. What kind of proof?’

‘The incontrovertible kind.’

‘No! I swear to you. They’re lying. They must be.’

Rebecca thought of Andriama. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re not lying.’

There was silence. ‘Don’t do this, Rebecca. You’ve got to trust me. This is madness! Let me out!’ He began hammering again on the hatch. It was a sturdy piece of work, two planks of
cassave
held in place with steel hinges and bolts, but it wasn’t designed as a brig, it wouldn’t hold him forever. She needed to get back to Eden before he broke free. She’d be safe once back inside the lodge. She hurried to the bridge. The
Yvette
rose on a swell. She saw, to her left and right, the white lines of breakers on the reefs. The pass was directly ahead. Compass, sonar, GPS, charts. But they weren’t second nature to her, as to Daniel. She had no confidence in herself.