I

Knox fixed himself something to eat then took another wander round the lodge. There were group photographs of all the previous Landseer Trust expeditions on the walls, volunteers glowing with youth and sunshine. He gave a little snort of amusement as he looked them over, for he and his fellow MGS divers were going to look shop-soiled by comparison. The wall behind the photographs caught his eye, its plaster studded with shells, quartz and other stones, decorative touches presumably harvested from the beach. In the gloom, it was hard to be sure, but there was an inch long, scimitarshaped fragment of what appeared to be pottery,remarkably similar to coarse-ware they’d found on the sea-bed off Morombe. He examined the surrounding walls for several minutes before he found a second shard, then a third; only this one was white with hints of blue. He touched it with his fingertip, wondering how a shard of Ming porcelain could possibly have found its way on to Eden’s beach. And then a startling thought occurred to him.

Emilia had told him that she and her father had found silver from the Winterton. She’d shown him photographs of dozens of pieces-of-eight recovered from their reef. It was certainly plausible, because of the legend of the Winterton’s lost silver. But what if they’d actually found something else? What if that was why the book on the Winterton was sitting so openly on the shelf yet there was no sign of the one on the Chinese treasure fleets? Those armadas had been huge, and the Mozambique Channel was notoriously prone to terrible cyclones. If such a storm could have swept one ship on to the reefs, then why not two?

He shook his head at himself. He was being absurd, extrapolating so much from such small shards. Why would Emilia have lied? If she and her father had found a Chinese ship here, surely she’d just have told him. But would she? Her overriding concern had always been secrecy, out of fear that treasure hunters would learn about the wreck and dynamite the coral to get at it. Emilia had known MGS was working with Ricky Cheung; in fact, she and her father had originally heard of them because of all the publicity he’d generated around his Morombe salvage. Maybe she’d feared that they’d let this new discovery slip to Ricky, and that he’d announce it to the world, effectively declaring open season on Eden’s reefs. So why hire MGS at all? Why not simply go to a rival? But marine salvage was hugely expensive. Adam and Emilia were planning on bankrolling this one themselves, in order to keep control. MGS would consequently have been far cheaper to hire than their rivals, partly because they priced themselves competitively anyway, partly because their divers and equipment would already be in Madagascar, saving a fortune on flights and freight, and also because a salvage like this demanded hundreds of man-hours studying the history of the target ship, its materials and cargo. That was work Knox and his colleagues had already done.

An owl hooted outside. Something rustled. He recalled Emilia sitting across the negotiating table from Miles and Frank, pleading poverty and pointing out how prestigious the salvage of the Winterton would be. Frank had shrugged that it wasn’t such a big deal, not after a treasure ship. And Knox had seen her smile at that, a private, knowing smile that he’d never quite understood.

Not until now.