II

Knox was lugging his and Rebecca’s bags from the Yvette back to the beach when he heard the car engine and saw headlights. It could only be Rebecca, though it was hard to believe that she was in any state to drive. He swore and ran up towards the track in an effort to intercept her, but he got snagged on spiny branches as she drove past. He glimpsed her face, however, her expression a strange mix of exaltation and panic, making him think she’d had news of Adam and Emilia.

He picked thorns from his clothes as he walked along the beach to the path to Eden. The lodge’s front door was wide open and an oil lamp was flickering inside. He smelled and saw the vomit on the reception floor; more evidence that something extraordinary had happened. He stepped carefully over it, found a mop and bucket to clean it up. Afterwards, however, he felt at something of a loss. The place seemed empty without Rebecca. Hollow. However absurd and reckless her swim had been, he couldn’t help but admire the courage and determination that underlay it, her stoicism under pain. She was a fighter; there was no disputing that. He thought suddenly and guiltily of Gaille. The suddenness of the thought was common enough—little things were always reminding him of her—but the guilt was rarer. He’d gone on several dates this past year, cajoled into them by solicitous colleagues, and he hadn’t once felt a twinge of guilt, only boredom. Yet something about Rebecca gave him a twinge. He didn’t like to think too hard about why that might be.

He wandered out the front door. He felt bad doing nothing, as if he wasn’t just letting the Kirkpatricks down but Miles and his MGS colleagues too. He turned on the generator, took a proper tour of the lodge. The computer in Adam’s study beckoned, but he couldn’t risk Rebecca catching him snooping. He looked along the shelves instead. Most of the books were academic texts, though there were several on carpentry, plumbing and other DIY topics. He glimpsed the spine of a familiar book, a history of the Winterton he’d given to Emilia himself, because she’d complained about how difficult it was to get the books they needed out here. It amused him to see it sitting here so openly on the shelves, despite Emilia’s insistence on secrecy. A case of hiding it in plain view, no doubt, for the Winterton was a celebrated local wreck. He looked around for the other books he’d given her, the copy of the Nautical Archaeology Society’s guide, a history of the Chinese treasure fleet. Neither of them were there. There were more shelves in the lounge. They weren’t there either. And, now that Knox thought about things that were absent, the Kirkpatricks had shown him photos of piecesof-eight Emilia had recovered from the reef. Where were they? And where was everything else they’d need for the project?

When Emilia had come to England, she and her father had already concocted a plan to keep the salvage secret. A group called the Landseer Trust organised two or three expeditions out here every year, with volunteers paying serious money to spend a month or six weeks surveying the local reef and forests. No one would suspect a thing if MGS Salvage used one of these expeditions as cover, with all the ‘volunteers’ actually being their own staff and divers, sleeping at Eden and using the Yvette as their dive-boat. Not ideal, but certainly workable and cheap. Yet there was a limit to how far one could pare down an underwater excavation. The Yvette was too small to do much more than ferry the divers and their gear to and from the site, so they’d need a land-base to store surplus equipment like the caesium magnetometer and side-scan sonar, the water-dredges, grids and mapping frames, their drawing boards and pens, their markers and artefact tags, their trowels, rulers, cameras and laptops. And what about their finds? Where would they be stored? Emilia had pestered him with questions about strong rooms and atmospheric controls. She’d assured him that everything would be in place on time, and he’d believed her.

He found nothing in the lodge or cabins, so he took keys from behind reception and checked out the boathouse too. It was an ugly building, newly built from cemented breezeblocks, very different from the local materials used for the lodge. It smelled pungently of brine inside, and looked unremarkable enough. A wooden table stood against the wall near the door, with chairs for divers to write up their notes. There was a small rowboat next to it, presumably for getting to and from the Yvette’s fixed mooring at high tide, and a couple of long-handled paddles plus some boxes of lead diving weights. Two disassembled sea-fishing rods leaned against the wall, along with a box of hooks and reels of different strength line. A motley assortment of life-jackets, wetsuits, buoyancycontrol devices and other pieces of dive-gear hung from wooden racks, though most of the pegs were empty, presumably for volunteers who brought their own equipment.

A powerful generator was sitting on the bare concrete against the left-hand wall, next to an air-compressor covered by a sheet of brown sacking to keep the damp off, and fitted with beach-buggy wheels so that it could be trundled across the sand. Fifteen or so well-used scuba tanks stood next to it, along with a big red barrel of water to stop them overheating while they were being filled with air. A second barrel was three-quarters full of fuel for the generator and the Yvette. And there were more hooks against the far wall, for flippers, masks and snorkels, though most of them were empty. And there were various other bits and pieces: underwater pens and boards, metal grids for laying out the dive-site and the like. But he saw nothing to help answer his questions, so he returned dispirited to the lodge.