Free Eden Legacy by Will Adams Page A

by Madagascar’s coup was evidently biting hard. Knox outlined their plans, asked the price, sparking a Dutch auction in which the young men underbid each other to win the work. Two of them reached the same price, but only one spoke decent French, making their decision easy. The young man’s name was Thierry. He led them over to his pirogue, where hisbrother and partner, Alphonse, was mending nets. Knox gave the pirogue a once-over. Its thin, canoe-like hull had been chiselled from a single trunk, then fitted with slat seats and a weighty torpedo of an outrigger to make it more stable. It looked fine to him, as did the mast and sail lying on the sand alongside.
    ‘Any chance of making Eden tonight?’ he asked.
    Thierry gave the universal sailor’s shrug. ‘It depends on the wind,’ he said. ‘But it’s not a problem. My brother lives at Ambatomilo. Or we can make a tent and sleep upon the beach.’
    ‘Sounds perfect,’ smiled Lucia. ‘I love a night on the beach.’
    ‘Can you look after our bags?’ asked Knox. ‘We need to go into town.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Thierry. ‘We wait for you here.’
    ‘Great,’ said Knox. ‘See you later, then.’

III

    A black dog took a liking to Boris as he walked down Morombe high street, sniffing at his heels and looking hungrily up at him. He scowled at it and aimed a boot at its ribs, but still it kept following. It was an appropriate enough companion: he’d rarely ever visited a more depressing place. The road was so badly broken that thefew cars treated it like an obstacle course, weaving cautiously around islands of tarmac. There was litter everywhere, squashed packs of Boston cigarettes, lemonade bottles and the like. A young diabetic beggar with a swollen and ulcerated foot strummed a homemade mandolin, while a dispirited woman sold napkins and sweet potatoes from a tray, and children raced cars they’d made from sardine cans around her feet.
    He passed a camping store with cooking utensils and hunting knives in one window, foreign-language guidebooks and maps in the other. Hard to know how it made enough money to stay open, for he’d still seen no tourists. He bought a guidebook and a map of the coast from Morondava down to Tulear that he flapped open and studied as he walked. According to the press-cuttings Sandro had given him, the
Maritsa
was anchored on the far side of the reef, several miles offshore. Even getting close enough to this man Matthew Richardson to see if he was Knox or not would be hard, though the man in charge of the salvage certainly seemed to enjoy his publicity, so maybe Boris could claim to be a journalist or something, request an interview. But better by far if he could somehow coax Richardson ashore, away from the sanctuary of his friends.
    He was musing on ways to achieve this when he looked up to see the man himself strolling along the pavement towards him.

I

    A young man in baggy basketball shorts and a tattered Black Sabbath T-shirt was waiting for Rebecca at Tulear Airport, holding up the torn-off side of a cardboard box with her name crudely scrawled in black marker-pen upon it. He looked disconcertingly young, despite his affectations of maturity: the thin moustache, the soft-pack of cigarettes and lighter tucked into his upturned sleeve, the cheap mirror sunglasses pushed up over his long brown hair like an Alice band. Maybe he realised the impression he gave, because he’d barely introduced himself as Zanahary before launching into a manic explanation of what he was doing there: his elder brother had twistedhis ankle jumping from the roof of their house and had sent him in his place. He was a very experienced driver, he assured her; very safe. Too weary to make an issue of it, Rebecca retrieved her luggage then led the way out into the sunshine.
    The hire car, a gleaming dark-blue and silver Mitsubishi pickup with four spotlights on its roof, at least looked in good shape. It would need to be. She had some business in