She shook her head, too angry even to look at him. She had no time anyway. The waves were still pushing them inexorably towards the reef. The floor of the bridge was swilling with water. The engine had stalled. Her heart was in her mouth when she tried and failed to restart it, but thankfully it came alive at the third attempt. She swung the Yvette around and away. It was growing lighter all the time, and her anger made her decisive, which in turn made steering easier. She reached the pass, steered them back into the relative calm of the lagoon.
The eastern sky was pale with dawn. She felt a terrible weariness. Daniel must have been guilty after all. He must have been. She couldn’t bear to contemplate anything else. He’d been greedy for the treasure, he’d made his way down here and murdered her father and sister. He’d deserved everything he’d got. But each time she drew close to convincing herself, she remembered the feel of his hand around her ankle, the way he’d let her go, sacrificing himself so that she could live. Was that the action of a murderer? Of a psychopath? In a daze, she steered the Yvette back to Eden, until the hull scraped sand and she cut the engine. Her hands began trembling wildly, as though her body were demanding back-payment for everything she’d put it through.
Pierre was still bawling to be let free, but she couldn’t face him, not yet. She went down into the cabin instead, where Emilia had tumbled face-down in a couple of inches of water on the floor. She righted the bed, hauled her back up on to it, trying not to look at the trickles of sand that leaked from her nostrils and mouth. The Yvette lurched suddenly on its keel, sending a low wave of water washing across the cabin, carrying all kinds of flotsam with it, including Emilia’s camera, the very camera whose disappearance had set her worrying about Daniel. She felt hollowed as she picked it up, turned it over. A hook at the back had broken, allowing the strap to escape. She remembered how Daniel had stumbled when bringing Emilia down the companionway steps into the cabin. The camera must have snagged on something, snapping the hook. She turned it on. It was a digital camera, its display allowing you to view your most recent photographs. She went through them one by one. Adam outside the lodge, a scuba tank on his shoulder. Emilia with Michel, playing on the sand. Then one of Therese holding Michel and waving them off. Out on the boat now, sunlight on turquoise waters and the white sail of a distant pirogue. Adam grinning at the camera as he zipped up his wetsuit, then another with him in the full gear, about to make a dive. And not a sign of Daniel anywhere, or of Pierre, or of anyone but Adam and Emilia themselves.
She looked over at Emilia. Now that the sheet was off her, she noticed her pulped left leg and the fine-meshed gillnet around her ankle. It was dreadful stuff, all too easy to get tangled up in. She tried to think back to her father, whether there’d been any on him. She couldn’t remember seeing any, but his lower body had been covered by that altar cloth, and she couldn’t be sure.
She shivered, suddenly, as she remembered Andriama warning her not to take the seeming stab wounds at face value. A sudden mental image of how that day might have gone assailed her. Adam and Emilia had never deployed their anchor near the reefs if they could possibly avoid it, because they did the coral such unnecessary damage. Typically, therefore, one of them would stay aboard while the other dived solo. The photographs showed that Adam had been that day’s diver, Emilia staying on board the Yvette. But what if Adam had somehow got tangled in this wretched netting and hadn’t resurfaced on schedule? What if Emilia had got nervous? What if she’d seen a sudden eruption of bubbles in the water, say? What if she’d panicked and suited up in such a hurry that she hadn’t even taken the time to pull on a wet-suit? What if she’d gone down herself and found her father tangled up in this fucking netting, almost out of air? Without any time for subtlety, Emilia would have hacked and hacked at that damned netting until she’d cut him free, slashing his wet-suit in the process, leaving the marks Rebecca had misread as rage. But she’d got tangled up in it herself, or maybe her efforts had brought down the rock Daniel had told her about, pinning her against the sea-floor.
Bile rose in Rebecca’s throat; she swallowed it back down. It couldn’t have happened like that. It just couldn’t. What about Daniel’s blood being on board the Yvette? Yes! She seized gratefully upon it. He was the killer after all. He had to be. She looked up at that very moment, and a first shaft of dawn sunlight slanted through the open cabin door and fell upon the photograph of Michel that had somehow remained hanging upon the facing wall, despite everything the night had thrown at it. And she remembered, then, her father’s last letter to her mother, how Emilia had brought Michel aboard the boat, how she’d fallen and both their heads had banged the deck, and ow, how Michel had only just stopped bawling.
That was where the blood had come from, the male and female both.
Above her, footsteps, mutters, Pierre’s face appearing through the hatch. Evidently Daniel hadn’t been quite so good at knots as he’d believed himself. ‘There you are!’ he scowled, rubbing the back of his head. ‘What happened? Where’s your English friend? What did you-’ But then he saw Emilia lying on the bed; his face crumpled in grief and tears sprang from his eyes.
Rebecca turned to him. ‘Why did you lie to me?’ she asked.
His face assumed that self-pitying look again. ‘I told you. Your father was going to give everything away.’
‘Not about that,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about why you told everyone that Michel was your son.’
‘Oh,’ he said. For a moment, she thought he was going to deny it. But then he saw her expression and thought better of it. He nodded at Emilia. ‘She made me.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was after she went to England to meet her salvage people, you know. She liked one of them very much. She thinks, ah, yes, this man will make a good father for her child. You know how she is about men. Always she wants to be a mother, but never to share her child. Well, this one lives in England, he has good genes, he won’t be part of the salvage. Parfait! So she takes him to her bed and assures him not to worry, that she has taken every precaution. But of course she has taken no precaution at all. At first she refuses to tell anyone who the father is, but then our country goes to shit, and the salvage is delayed, and now the father is to be part of it and Emilia is scared he will find out about his son and insist on being part of his life. She does not want him to be a part of Michel’s life, so she begs me to pretend to be the father myself. “Why me?” I ask. “Because the father is a European,” she says, “and you’re the only European here.” I don’t like this, I tell her. A man is entitled to know his son.’ He gave an expressive shrug. ‘But you know Emilia. When she makes up her mind on something…’
Rebecca bowed her head. She began to weep.
EPILOGUE
Three months later
Rebecca held Michel against her hip as she waved farewell to Titch. Her former partner did not look at all happy. He’d come to have one last go at persuading her to return to London, but he was going home alone. He couldn’t understand it; he’d kept telling her how their company was on a roll. Their US run had been a triumph. Canada and Australia had both picked up options, and she’d won some kind of award in France. The money was flowing in again. Chat-show hosts were clamouring. She was hot.
She’d tried her best to explain to him. She really had. But after a while she’d realised that he’d never get it, it went so against everything he thought about the world. He couldn’t see that his kind of success meant nothing to her any more, or that she’d gained a new and sufficient vision of herself: as a strong, stern, selfless and formidable matriarch; handsome, erect and proud; feared and loved by her Malagasy friends; admired yet considered mildly eccentric for having had everything the West could offer, then choosing to give it up. She’d appointed an agent to sell her Notting Hill house, lawyers to settle all her debts. She sweetened the pill for Titch by telling him that she intended to divide her equity among their employees; and that he’d be getting the largest chunk himself. He’d have control of the company at last. Wasn’t that what he’d always wanted?