Kidnappers weren’t stupid. They’d surely search the money before handing over Adam and Emilia. If they found the transmitter, it would be the end of them. If she kept the transmitter on her, however, she could plant it when opportunity presented, yet also use it as a safeguard should she be taken too. But that meant leaving the tracker with someone she trusted, with instructions to take it to the police should she vanish. She could leave a note for Therese in the clinic, for she was due here to change her bandages the day after tomorrow. Or she could leave it for Daniel instead. Alternatively, she could just tell him everything right now, explain why she’d been acting so distantly. And she realised that was what she wanted. She wanted him by her side.
She went outside, but there was no sign of him. She climbed the steps on to the lodge’s roof. It afforded a wonderful view over a low fringe of forest down to the lagoon. Her father had set up a spotting scope here, partly for watching the night sky, but mostly to monitor Eden’s reefs and make sure no one was fishing in the protected waters. She removed the dust cover and lens cap, looked out along the shore. The resolution was extraordinarily good. She could see young boys gleaning shellfish from the rocks on the beach far away to the south, while their mothers gossiped and washed clothes in the shallows. Three shore fishermen dragged in their nets then brained their catch against the rocks. She turned the scope out to sea, searched the waters until finally she found the Yvette way out beyond the reef, her sail furled, seemingly at anchor.
She adjusted the focus as Daniel climbed up the stern ladder. He was wearing a wetsuit, but with a black-and-yellow pack upon his back rather than a scuba tank. She recognised it immediately-a closed-circuit re-breather, much like the one her underwater cameraman Anton used, because it let him stay underwater forever, and because there were no annoying exhalations of air bubbles to spoil his shot. But it stunned her that Daniel would have one. Re-breathers weren’t just hideously expensive to buy and operate, they also took hundreds of hours of training to master, which was why only elite professional and military divers used them. And they were a pig to fly abroad, because they used such volatile chemicals that airport security often refused point-blank to allow them on their planes. No way would some itinerant journalist just happen to have one in his bag. No way.
She stood up tall and replaced the lens cap, certain of one thing: Daniel had been lying to her. The knowledge was a gash in her heart. She hobbled down from the roof and back into the lodge, heaved his bag on to the campbed, unzipped and opened it. She caught a whiff of yesterday’s shirt as she took it out, pungent yet not unpleasant. At Oxford, years ago, investigating the nature of male sexiness, she and her colleagues had asked twenty men to wear identical white cotton shirts continuously for two days, then they’d passed the soiled shirts to a panel of women to judge for attractiveness, based only on their smell. Later, those women had also judged photographs of the same men for looks. The correlation between the scores had been remarkable. Handsome men smelled better. But why? Some of her colleagues had contended that there was a positive correlation between the perceived sexiness of smell and androsterone, a pheromone that indicated high immunocompetence. But when Rebecca had smelled the shirts herself, she’d been startled to discover that ugliness had an acrid sourness to it, disconcertingly like failure. Ugliness stank; or, at least, anxiety and low self-esteem did. They’d discussed this question with a celebrated theorist and philosopher, one of the ugliest men Rebecca had ever seen. She’d suggested mischievously that maybe self-assessment was an adaptation designed to let sexual failures appreciate and so address their shortcomings. Wasn’t it Socrates who’d remarked that the unexamined life was not worth living? Now he’d been famously ugly, a goblin of a man. Perhaps extreme ugliness was exactly what it took to be a successful philosopher, the ability to see one’s own blemishes and yet not flinch. She’d felt terribly pleased with herself for this until he’d met and held her eyes with such perfect equanimity that she’d had to look away in shame. It had been a humiliating, levelling experience, the first time she’d properly understood the ordinariness of her own intellect. And all of this came flooding back to her as she sat on Daniel’s bed holding his shirt.
She removed his other clothes, stacking them carefully so that she’d be able to replace them as she’d found them. Right at the bottom she found a heavy, mottled grey boxfolder. She pulled it out, undid the catch. It was packed so tight that the lid jumped slightly, like a broken jackin-the-box. She flipped through the papers inside: passenger lists, manifests and newspaper reports about the Winterton. She set the box back down. She knew the Winterton well; everyone around here did. The local fishermen still found the occasional piece-of-eight that they’d sell to her father for the going rate. She knew the wreck-site too; she’d sailed there often as a girl. The wood and other organic material had long since rotted away, but there were still several huge cannons, anchors, cannonballs and iron ingots lying just a few metres deep, along with some copper and iron sheets that had been too heavy to move, but which everyone had wondered about, imagining great stashes of silver beneath. A French salvage ship had arrived one day, had blasted through the sheets with dynamite. To everyone’s delight, they’d found nothing. But the rumours had persisted, and every year or so some foreigner would come to find and plunder it, thinking they alone knew the secret. Daniel, it seemed, was just the latest of them.
It galled Rebecca to remember how grateful she’d been when he’d offered to sail the Yvette up from Tulear. She’d thought he’d been trying to help her, but the blunt truth of it was that he’d just wanted a dive-boat for his search.
THIRTY-ONE
I
Boris decided to call it quits for the day while they were still some four miles north of Eden. They heaved the boat up above the tide-line, then found a clearing in the spiny forest in which to make camp. He had Davit bring up their baggage while Claudia went scouting for firewood, then he set up the laptop and IP terminal a little distance away, and called in to Georgia.
‘I have some distressing news,’ said Sandro, when he appeared. ‘About my father.’
‘He’s not…?’
‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘We have that to be thankful for. But he suffered renal failure last night. His medical team have put him into a controlled coma while they work on solutions.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Boris.
‘Thank you,’ said Sandro, who seemed to be dealing with the bad news commendably well. ‘But of course it has implications for our current project. You saw for yourself how eager he is to be part of it. I therefore think it best to put everything on hold until he is better.’
Boris had to fight not to show his dismay: people with terminal cancer didn’t just recover from renal failure. He said: ‘I imagine your father would want us to continue our preparations. After all, we don’t know how long his next remission will last. We should be ready to act swiftly.’
Sandro’s eyelids flickered. ‘That’s true,’ he acknowledged. ‘Yet I can’t see how to arrange things unless we know my father will-’
‘Leave that to me,’ said Boris. ‘That’s what you sent me here for.’
‘I’m not sure that that’s really the best-’
Boris looked around, as though he’d heard a noise. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he whispered. ‘I have to go.’ He cut the connection before Sandro could say anything more, then sat there brooding. He’d come to think of those half-million euros as already his. No way was he going to let Sandro weasel out of it now. No fucking way. He packed up the laptop and IP terminal, headed back to camp. Davit was setting up the tents while Claudia was preparing dinner. In need of a lift, Boris cracked open a bottle of cheap rum, splashed it liberally into a glass, sweetened it with a dash of coke. He knocked it back, poured himself another, then watched Claudia stirring some crushed garlic into a small bowl of oily sauce that she smeared on the silvery skins of three filleted fish and set upon a metal grill that she placed above the open flame to cook.