eighteen months ago, her sister Emilia had called to let her know that she was thinking of attending a forestry fieldwork course in southern England. Though she’d said it casually enough, they’d both known it was a big deal. Rebecca had left home many years before after a rift with her father of such bitterness that she’d never been back since, hadn’t so much as set eyes on her father or sister. Emilia had been working diligently towards a reconciliation, and this had been her boldest effort yet. But the timing had been awful. Rebecca’s programmes had made her an overnight sensation, in great demand on the chat-show circuit. Her Madagascan upbringing was so exotic that she was constantly being asked about it. The truth had been too difficult for her to face, so she’d sidestepped these questions by fabricating a false idyll of her childhood. But should Emilia come to town, she was terrified the whole story would worm its way out, and she hadn’t been ready for that. ‘I’m not sure where I’ll be,’ she’d blurted out. ‘I may be away filming.’
‘Of course,’ Emilia had said woodenly. ‘Maybe some other time.’
But there’d never been another time. And now there never would be. She breathed in deep, then quashed that treacherous thought. She was going to get Emilia and her father back alive. That was all there was to it. She zipped up her bags, carried them downstairs, handed them to her taxi-driver to pack away in his boot. ‘We off, then?’ he asked.
‘Five minutes,’ she told him. ‘I need to lock up.’
‘You’re the boss.’
She went back inside, was about to record a new message for her answer-phone when she realised she didn’t know how long she’d be away. She had ten days at the most in Madagascar, for her first series was about to debut on American cable and she’d booked a gruelling promotional tour to give it its best shot. She left the message as it was, then she went through her house room by room, turning off appliances at the wall, looking for anything she might have forgotten. It seemed to take forever; all these rooms she never used. She’d bought the house from a City couple with four young children, another on the way. Her viewings had been chaotic, toys everywhere, broken furniture and crayon daubs upon the wall, yet the pervasive joy and life and companionship had intoxicated her. She’d somehow convinced herself that she’d be buying all that along with the house; but all she’d actually bought was more emptiness.
She turned on her conservatory lights, looked out over her small garden. Her first night here, she’d heard a baby crying. Her heart had stopped on her; she’d imagined for a moment that the previous owners must have left one of their brood behind. But when she’d hurried outside, it had only been a black cat. Its mewing had sounded so like an infant in distress that it had made her wonder whether it was deliberately taking advantage of maternal heartstrings. Nature was ingenious at finding such weaknesses to exploit. She’d made a documentary on the subject, featuring similar cases such as cuckoos, those brood parasites that laid their eggs in the nests of other birds to pass on the cost of child-rearing, taking advantage of a glitch in the mental software of some songbirds that made parents give most of their food to the biggest and most aggressive of their nestlings, so as not to waste resources on sickly offspring. They did this irrespective of what their nestlings actually looked like, so they’d end up feeding cuckoo chicks larger than themselves, while their true offspring starved.
Rebecca had always revelled in such uncomfortable truths. She loved to cause consternation, to jolt people into contemplation of their darker nature, hurry them past their mirrors. Exploring such behaviour wasn’t just her career, it was how she now understood the world. Whenever she saw people doing the most mundane things, queuing at the supermarket, holding a door open for somebody, walking their dog … she’d wonder why they were doing it, what the payoff was. And the deeper she’d dug into evolutionary psychology, the more uncompromising her view of the world had become. We were carbon-based breeding machines, that was all. Our consciousness was merely the hum and glow of organic computers at work. Reasoning and emotion were chemically induced. Virtue and vice were survival strategies; free will an illusion. Her work had had a subtle impact on her own life, as though a psychological uncertainty principle was at work, allowing her either to experience or to understand a particular emotion, but not both simultaneously. Whenever she felt any unusual emotion, she’d examine herself like a specimen. Is this envy? she’d wonder. Is this greed? Is this what other people feel? Am I a freak? And whenever any new man tried to get close to her, she’d scrutinise them with almost scientific zeal, examining their conversation and behaviour in minute detail, sometimes even deliberately provoking them with outrageous comments and actions simply to see their response, until invariably she’d drive them away. She did this even though she’d bought herself a house large enough for a family, and yet lived in it alone.
A bang upon her front door. ‘You okay in there, love?’ called out her driver. ‘Only if you want to catch your plane …’
‘Coming.’ She switched off her conservatory lights and turned to go.
I
‘We’ve leased the Maritsa for six weeks, right?’ asked Knox. ‘All the equipment too?’
Ricky knocked back his whisky, pulled a sour face. ‘So?’
‘So we won’t be saving your Chinese friends much of anything by calling the project off now.’
Miles shook his head. ‘You don’t know these people. If they find out that we knew this was a bust and didn’t tell them—’
‘But we don’t know it’s a bust,’ countered Knox. ‘Not for sure. We have a sea-bed studded with Chinese artefacts, remember, not to mention a very compelling sonar reading.’
‘Which has been refuted by a more recent one,’ pointed out Miles. ‘And by the magnetic imaging.’
‘Yes. And by the sediment samples too. But what if someone had tampered with those readings and those samples?’
‘What?’ asked Ricky. ‘Who?’
‘Don’t get ahead of me,’ said Knox. ‘I’m just asking: isn’t it possible? I mean, how hard would it have been for someone to have switched our samples with sediment from elsewhere?’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘To trick us into giving up the site, of course, so that they can come back later and plunder it at their leisure. I mean, if we’re right about there being a treasure ship here, its cargo could be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Wouldn’t that be worth switching some samples for?’
‘Holm!’ spat Ricky. ‘I never trusted that bastard.’
‘Calm down,’ said Knox. ‘I’m only suggesting it’s a possibility. And if so, shouldn’t we make certain, one way or the other, before we call off the expedition? Wouldn’t our most prudent and responsible course be to take new tests and samples, but this time make sure they can’t be interfered with, maybe even fly some duplicate samples back to Europe for checking. Who knows, maybe we’ll get different results. But, even if not, it’ll buy us another week in which to start managing the expectations of your friends back in China. And we’ve also got Miles and me and fourteen other professional divers on board, we’ve got a motor-boat and two inflatables and all the survey equipment we could wish for. Maybe the wreck isn’t where we thought, maybe it’s five hundred metres west, or a kilometre south. Let’s use our extra time to find it.’
‘You’re right,’ said Miles. ‘We’ll survey the whole damned sea-floor.’
Knox stood and went to the window. The sea was still too rough for the motorboat, and it was getting dark. No way would it be heading back to Morombe tonight. He turned to Ricky. ‘I’ll bet Holm’s still on board,’ he said. ‘He could really screw us if he wants to. Might be worth trying to smooth things out with him.’