Eden Legacy (36 page)

‘They couldn’t have avoided it. Not for this.’

‘They could have if they’d sent Pierre instead.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘He was always doing stuff up there on my father’s behalf. Giving lectures, attending meetings, making sure the right people got their “commissions”.’ She rubbed her fingers and thumb together in the universal symbol of corruption. ‘My father
loathed
that side of Madagascar. Emilia, too.’

‘Would your father have trusted Pierre?’

‘Not enough to have told him where the wreck was.
But that he’d found something, and needed licences … Yes, I can certainly believe that. And I know he’s been struggling to pay his bills recently. Imagine if you’d never done a day’s work in your life, and then you found yourself running out of money.’

‘And your best friend found a fortune on the sea-bed, but wouldn’t tell you where. Worse, he was intending to turn it all over to the government.’

‘Pierre was at a conference in Antananarivo all last week,’ said Rebecca. ‘If there were any details to finalise about the salvage, that would have been the perfect opportunity. He sent my father an email asking for new photographs of the white sifaka. But you don’t find sifakas here. You only get them south and east of Tulear.’

‘You think it was a code?’ frowned Knox. ‘You think he sent your father out to photograph the wreck?’

‘It’s possible, isn’t it? And my father certainly saw the email. It was one of the last he read.’

‘Why would Pierre ask for more photos?’

‘To trick my father into giving away the wreck’s location, of course. So that he could plant a GPS on board, plunder it himself before the salvage started.’

Knox shook his head. ‘You saw how baffled he was when you showed him your father’s GPS. That wasn’t faked. Besides, you said yourself that your father was murdered. He couldn’t have done that from Antananarivo.’

‘Then maybe he came back. Listen, his lecture would
have taken him one morning or afternoon, but he stayed there the whole week, then met me at the airport. But what if all that was just to establish his alibi?’

‘You think he came back here midweek? It’s a hell of a drive.’

‘Yes, but he could have flown. I mean, let’s go back a few days. He’s desperate to find out where the wreck is, but Adam won’t tell him. He’s got this conference in Antananarivo, and he makes up some story about going to see the Culture Ministry about the licences. Or maybe he really does have a meeting. Whatever, he tells my father to check his email on a certain day, in case he needs anything, then he sets off in his pickup. But instead of driving up to Antananarivo, he goes to a local airport instead. Not Tulear: he’s too well known there. But Manjo or Morombe, somewhere like that. He flies up to Antananarivo, checks into his hotel, gives his talk, shows his face around. He emails my father for new photos of the wreck, then he flies back down, gets his pickup and …’ She broke off, shook her head in frustration. ‘No. He’d still need a way to get out to the Yvette.’

‘He could have stowed away in the hold.’

‘That wouldn’t explain how he got back to shore afterwards. The
Yvette
was found way out at sea, remember?’

‘What about his zodiac?’ suggested Knox. ‘He could have taken it with him in the back of his pickup.’

‘Yes,’ said Rebecca. ‘Of course. He flies back down,
drives as close to here as he dares, then gets in his zodiac and motors down here and waits outside the reef for the
Yvette.
Maybe he approaches them; maybe they spot him. There’s a confrontation; it gets out of hand. He kills them, dumps them overboard. He lets the
Yvette
drift off, then gets back in his zodiac, races back to his pickup, drives up to Antananarivo before anyone even realises he’s been away.’

‘It’s a hell of an ask,’ said Knox.

‘But it works, right?’ asked Rebecca. ‘I mean, in theory.’

‘Yes. It works in theory.’

Their eyes turned to Pierre, sitting at the stern. Maybe he sensed something, because he glanced up at that moment. He gave one of his ghastly smiles, pushed himself to his feet, came to the bridge, his nervousness only made the more obvious by his efforts to conceal it. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’

‘It was you,’ blurted out Rebecca, unable to stop herself. ‘You murdered my father and my sister.’

Pierre looked aghast at Rebecca’s accusation, but Knox couldn’t tell whether it was guilt or shock. ‘Me?’ he protested. ‘How could you say such a thing?’

‘You set them up,’ insisted Rebecca. ‘You sent them out here.’

‘No! This is crazy!’

‘Then you murdered them.’

‘No!’ Pierre pointed a trembling finger at Knox. ‘It’s him. He’s been poisoning your mind.’

‘White sifaka,’ said Rebecca.

A look of unmistakeable guilt appeared on Pierre’s face. He must have realised it too. His eyes watered, he
tried to say something, but it stuck in his throat. The boat plunged into the trough of a wave at that moment, his left leg gave a little. He lurched out of the doorway, stumbled away along the deck. They ran out after him. Pierre picked up the boat-hook, turned and waved it at them. ‘Stay back,’ he warned. ‘Stay away.’

‘Or what?’ asked Knox.

‘I did nothing,’ insisted Pierre. ‘I swear. I’d never lie to you, Becca. Not to
you.
You’re a daughter to me.’

‘Like Emilia was?’ asked Rebecca. ‘Get her pregnant and then murder her so that your son could inherit Eden?’

Pierre’s face crumpled. ‘How could you even think that of me?’

Knox motioned to Rebecca to edge to her left, to make it harder for Pierre to watch them both. She nodded and did so. ‘Then tell me what happened,’ she said to Pierre.

‘Nothing happened,’ insisted Pierre.

‘You sent my father an email. You wanted him to lead you to the wreck.’

‘No!’

‘Then you came out here and murdered him and Emilia and dumped their bodies overboard.’

‘Stay back! Stay back!’

‘But my father’s body drifted back to shore.’

‘I was in Antananarivo all week, I swear it.’ And he gestured towards the land behind him. It wasn’t much of an opening, but Knox went for it anyway, launching
himself at Pierre, trying to get the boat-hook from him before he could do any damage with it. But Pierre swung it backhanded and caught Knox a glancing blow on his crown. His momentum still took him into Pierre, sent them tumbling together into the starboard lockers, the wood splintering. Knox tried to press his advantage, but the blow had left him groggy. Pierre threw him off, raised the boat-hook above his head, swung it down. Knox rolled aside; the boat-hook thunked into the deck. Behind his back, Rebecca pulled a scuba tank from the broken locker, crashed it down on Pierre’s skull. He collapsed instantly, fell sideways on to the deck, saliva leaking from his mouth. Rebecca knelt beside him, searched his throat for a pulse, nodded in relief at Knox when she found one.

Knox was still a little dazed as he got to his feet, but he found a coil of rope in the locker, hog-tied Pierre wrist and ankle. He was just finishing up when Pierre groaned and opened his eyes. He strained impotently at his knots, then glared furiously up at Knox, spat at his face. Knox took a hand-towel from the locker, wiped himself off with it, then twisted it into a rope and, with Rebecca’s help, used it to gag him. ‘Try spitting now,’ he said. He opened the main hatch above the engine hold, dragged Pierre over to it, dropped him feet first down into it, shot the bolts. ‘That’ll hold him until we get back,’ he told Rebecca.

‘Are you certain?’

‘I know my knots,’ he assured her. He put his hand on her arm. ‘But enough, eh? Let’s take him in, come back out first thing.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘She’s my sister, Daniel. I have to look. I
owe
it to her.’

‘I know, but—’

‘You don’t have to do the dive. There’s plenty of gear aboard. Just stay on the boat while I go down.’

Knox sighed, exasperation matched only by admiration. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll make one dive. But only one. And then that’s it for the night. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ she nodded. ‘And thanks.’

They reached the GPS co-ordinates, dropped anchor. The sea was getting frisky, but it wasn’t quite rough enough for Knox to call it off. He unpacked and prepared his equipment, checked it thoroughly before putting it on. The deck was rolling enough that he had to sit down to pull on his wetsuit and booties. He consulted his watch, made a note of the time, calculated a rough dive plan. He strapped his diving lamp and knife to his wrist, then sat on the rail, pulled on his flippers, held his breath and toppled backwards into the dark water in an eruption of bubbles. He’d weighted himself enough that it was an effort to stay afloat as he breast-stroked around to the
stern. Then he let gravity go to work, the anchor chain running through his hand as he descended.

For all his experience, diving alone at night on such a macabre quest proved unnerving. There were shadows everywhere. At sea, as on land, predators were at their most dangerous in the darkness. A sudden memory of that bull shark looming up at him earlier: they were blessed with excellent eyesight, sharks, but they weren’t dependent upon it. They could track their prey instead through minute vibrations in the water, through their extraordinary sense of smell, through fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. His re-breather and other dive-gear would light up like fireworks in the electromagnetic field.

He sensed something behind him, spun round and lit up the darkness, but there was nothing there. The bottom came into view, ridged with canyons much like his earlier dive, though that had been a good distance away. His feet touched down, kicking up glowing emeralds of bioluminescence. The currents were strong, but the weights held him. He swam above gulches and canyons, looking for anything out of the ordinary. A shoal of shadows ahead scattered as he headed towards it, barracuda glinting like thin strips of silver foil. He swam down a canyon, overhangs of rock either side of him forming shallow grottoes. The floor was buried beneath white sand and dead coral, but also by vast quantities of pottery and porcelain shards. Ground Zero at last. He propelled
himself along, probing crevices with light. A boulder lay half buried in sand ahead, covered not just in algae and barnacles, but also by a lattice of fine white veins. He drew closer and saw they were the filaments of a gillnet. Knox hated these wretched things with a passion, partly for the perverse cunning of their design, in which the mesh was almost—but not quite—big enough for their target species of fish to wriggle through. By the time the fish had realised for themselves the mesh was too narrow for them, it was too late for them to back out, their gills trapping them there like the barbs on a hook. But he also hated them because trawlers so often cut them loose when they got snagged on anything, leaving them to drift on the currents, or to lie on the sea-bed in deadly ambush for anyone unlucky enough to get tangled up in them.

He shone his lamp around, could see nothing save for a thin cascade of fine white sand falling in a steady stream to his right. It shouldn’t be falling like that, not unless something had recently happened here. He swam upwards to find a black gash in the rock, a tunnel into darkness. He looked back down at the boulder. Though it was hard to be sure, it certainly looked an almost perfect fit. If it had once plugged this mouth, and if it had recently fallen away, it would explain how come all this sand was leaking out, slowly burying it.

The tunnel was just wide enough to take him. He pulled himself along it. It opened up abruptly and he
found himself in a vast underwater cavern. The water was exponentially stiller and clearer here, so his diving lamp just about illuminated the far wall and ceiling. It had, remarkably, the approximate shape and size of a great ship. And maybe that was more than coincidence: he could picture in his mind’s eye the great treasure ship sinking into one of these limestone canyons, or perhaps being nudged there by the tides and current. Sand and sediment and rock would soon have covered it, and coral would have grown atop it. And, as each generation of coral died, their husks would slowly have formed a great carapace above it, hermetically sealing everything inside, protecting the ship and its cargo from the surrounding currents. But the sea and its creatures would still have gone to work, decay inside a tooth, eating away all the wood and anything else organic, until there was nothing but minerals and metals left.

He swam into the cavern. Strange pillars protruded from the sand, reaching upwards like the buildings in a miniaturised city skyline. He drew closer and realised he was looking at stack after stack of dishes. With immense care, he picked up a bowl, tipped away the sand within. It was white with blue dragons around its rim, one of the most exquisite pieces of porcelain he’d ever seen; yet here it was, sitting on a tower of such pieces, surrounded by thousands of others, with who could guess how many more still buried in the sand. Presumably they’d once
been packed in wadding in wooden chests in the cargo hold; but the wadding and the wood had rotted away around them, leaving them in a cocoon of sand instead. But that too was now trickling away, released by the fallen boulder, exposing these treasures for the first time in six hundred years.

The stacks of porcelain swayed as he swam between them, moved by the small eddies he was himself creating, leafless trees in a winter wind. He came across the golden statue of a giraffe, only its head and neck protruding from the sand. The Chinese had believed giraffes to be unicorns of myth, bringers of great good fortune. Not this one. He swam on, reached down for a gold bracelet set with rubies. Part of the ship’s great cargo, perhaps, or the treasure of some favoured courtesan. A great golden sphere glinted ahead. He swam over to it. It took his breath away: a globe of the world as the Chinese had seen it, lands enamelled upon it: China itself, of course; the scattered archipelago of the Spice Islands and then Australia; the fat daggers of India and Africa. Europe and the Mediterranean. He rolled it a little way to expose the Atlantic and then further underneath, his excitement intense. And there was America. The new and old worlds all captured together for the very first time, and on a globe too.