The letter ran on for three more pages, chronicling the activities of people she didn’t know or barely remembered. When Rebecca had finished, she read others in the folder, one for each anniversary of Yvette’s death. Fifteen years on, Adam’s adoration of his late wife was extraordinary and moving. As a specialist in behaviour, it was almost an accepted truth for Rebecca that love was merely an adaptation designed to bind together a male and female long enough for them to procreate and rear. As her father’s daughter, however, it was difficult to sustain such belief. There’s a species of anglerfish in which males physically embed themselves in the females, becoming entirely dependent upon them for nutrition, survival and procreation. Adam had sometimes seemed like that to her, so completely had he subsumed himself and his former career into his marriage.
As young girls, Rebecca and Emilia had pestered their parents endlessly for the story of how they met and fell in love. Adam had been a typical bachelor professor, scoffing at the idea of marriage; but then he’d come filming in Madagascar, and had found himself in need of a translator for his south-western leg. Yvette had been recommended; she’d taught languages in Tulear’s international school. The moment Adam had set eyes on her, he’d known. He’d found talking to her so difficult, she’d thought him mentally afflicted (she’d taken his producer aside to ask why an organisation as respected and wealthy as the BBC would employ an idiot as their presenter). He hadn’t been able to sleep or eat. He’d driven his crew crazy with his mistakes. Within four days he’d asked her to marry him. She’d had a fit of the giggles, had pointed out justly that he was a funny-looking man (they’d all laughed uproariously every time he’d come to this bit; it had become their catchphrase whenever some unfortunate had turned up at the camp) and anyway she’d never leave Madagascar. Adam had returned lovesick to England, where he’d waited to get over her, as all his knowledge of the world had assured him that he would. But time had passed and his condition had only worsened. Everything had drained of meaning. Success and fame had become irrelevant. He’d fallen seriously ill. In the end, he’d given in. He’d resigned his chair, chucked in his TV career, and flown back out.
They’d married one month later.
THIRTY
I
The seas outside the Eden reefs were blessed with extraordinary variety. On his second descent, Knox passed through fields of sea-grasses to reach a spectacular coral garden, a gaudy city of fish where vast shoals of wrasse, angels and butterflies billowed like iridescent sheets as he passed between them.
His third dive was completely different again. The seafloor here was a rocky labyrinth, as though the canyons and -gulches of a Wild West movie set had been swallowed whole beneath a lake. He swam through this maze for a while, reached the end of a ravine to find the seafloor falling away almost sheer beneath him: he’d reached the shelf. He swam north along it for a few minutes, until, away in the deep waters to his left, he glimpsed something the fluorescent orange of a life-jacket. His heart gave a little lurch; he feared the worst. But when he swam closer, it proved to be only a cluster of four buoys held down by a cable that vanished into the depths. A fish aggregating device, most likely. He’d read about these things, though he’d never seen one before. They were an occasional tool of marine biologists, who’d tie one end of a long cable to a job-lot of broken truck axles; the other to some kind of flotation device, then sail the whole rig out over deep water and dump it. The idea was that the axles would sink to the sea-bed while the buoys would stay near the surface, and the cable would stretch out between them. Algae would grow upon this cable, drawing shoals of algae-eaters that in turn drew bigger fish, and so gave marine biologists a fixed point to study changing pelagic fish populations, and local fishermen somewhere to ply their trade that wouldn’t damage the reef. This one was certainly doing its job. The cable beneath him was surrounded by a pointillist haze of small fish, and the larger shadows of their predators. A juvenile white-tip shark saw him and lazily headed his way, curiosity rather than menace. He retreated to the relative safety of shallower waters. Back through the canyons again, he reached a place like an underwater rubbish tip, where tides and currents had brought together a great mass of detritus over the centuries. He floated inches above it, careful not to stir up sediment, scoured it for artefacts. It didn’t take long for him to pick out several fragments of porcelain and coarse-ware, though he’d never have spotted them unless he’d been looking, for they lay in an almost perfect camouflage of old shells, dead coral, cartilage and bone. He didn’t find a wreck, however, or any sign of Adam or Emilia. And the day was getting on, and he’d still barely put a dent in the vast expanse of the Eden reefs.
The search area was too big for him alone, that much was clear. He needed help. There were fifteen other divers on board the Maritsa, searching urgently for the wreck, but surely in the wrong places. He needed to bring them down here. But before he could even broach that with Miles, he needed to speak to Rebecca.
He couldn’t lie to her any longer. It was time to tell her who he was.
II
Adam kept hundreds of personal photographs on his computer, with many more burned on to a set of CDs on his shelves. Rebecca started looking through them to see if any could have been used as the source shot for the ransom photo. There was nothing remotely like that, but she found herself getting hooked by all the family history she’d missed out on these past eleven years: sorrows and joys, friendships and partings.
When she’d finished the CDs, she turned to his old photograph albums. Her hand trembled a little when she pulled out the album for the year she’d left for England, and she soon came across the first photograph of herself, standing on the veranda with Emilia, arms around each others’ shoulders. There were abundant photographs of her after that: on her own, with Emilia, with her father; in the woods and on the beach. She couldn’t believe how happy she looked. Photograph albums suffered from publication bias, of course, in that you only kept the ones you liked. Even so, it was hard to reconcile these glowing portraits with her darker memories.
The afternoon drew on. She turned her mind to the following morning. She topped up the Jeep with oil and fuel, then wondered what else she might need. A bag for the money, though presumably Mustafa would have his own. The thought of simply handing it over made her feel sick. It wasn’t just the money in itself; she hated being cheated. If only there was some way to…
She frowned at a recollection, went back to her father’s desk. Yes, his income statement showed that he had been running field trials for a wildlife GPS system. She went through the lodge room by room, finally found two boxes in a cupboard in the clinic, one full, one empty. The transmitter was a thin white cylinder about two inches long, like a cigarette with its filter torn off. The tracker was bulkier and had an inset screen. Also in the box were a collar, a harness and some glue for attaching the transmitter to animals, and instructions written in such terrible English that she gave up on them, and instead turned everything on and figured it out by trial and error. The transmitter used lithium batteries to cut weight and space, sending off small bursts of data at adjustable intervals. She set it to one hour, regular enough to make tracking practical, yet without straining the batteries. Then she switched it all off again, and wondered how best to use it.