The Eden Legacy

IV

Rebecca hurried back through the drawing room to the atrium. Upstairs, she could hear Ahdaf wailing like a two-year-old while the guard shouted into his walkie-talkie. Mustafa’s office was locked, but maybe there’d be something in his bedroom. She took the steps two at a time, slipped through a half-open door into a large bedroom with a basketball hoop screwed high on its wall, a pool table with a unblemished cloth. One of the son’s rooms. Not what she was after. The passage was empty; she slipped back out and tried another door. The second boy’s bedroom, a geek rather than a jock, his desk stacked with sophisticated-looking computer equipment. She was about to go out again when she heard guards arriving on the landing outside, opening doors, beginning a search.

Rebecca cast around for somewhere to hide. The only other door opened on to another walk-in closet, suits to her left, shirts to her right. She pulled it softly closed behind her, though leaving it a fraction ajar to give herself some light. Two guards ran into the bedroom a moment later, shouting at each other where to search. She slipped between two suits, grabbed the rail and lifted up her legs. The rail bowed beneath her weight, but held. The door banged open a moment later and a guard rushed in. She could hear him panting for breath as he flipped through the suits then got down on to hands and knees, yet somehow didn’t see her. He ran back out, leaving the closet door open. She let her legs back down, her left shoulder aching from the strain. The voices grew fainter as the guards ran off to search other rooms. She got out her mobile and tried Andriama again, was again transferred to voicemail. As loudly as she dared, she told him where she was and why, recasting her suspicion as certainty. The signal cut off before she could finish her message, however. Someone had turned off the mast.

She knew she wouldn’t have long before the guards came back for a more diligent search, so she looked around for salvation. There were caps and scarves hanging from hooks behind the closet door, but she’d scarcely be able to disguise her way out of here. She risked a peek out. The bedroom was still empty. She went to the window just as Mustafa pulled up in his blue Mercedes immediately behind her Toyota, pinning it in. The driver door flew open; he stepped out and strode purposefully into the house. A moment later she heard him shouting abuse at some hapless guard.

She edged back towards the closet. Something about the baseball caps and scarves was calling out to her. Those two intruders her first night at Eden had been wearing caps and scarves. Could they have been Mustafa’s sons? But that made no sense. Why bother to break in if they already had Emilia and Adam? She felt a little nauseous as she recalled Mustafa bursting in on her meeting with Andriama, how she’d patted her heart and insisted that Adam and Emilia were still alive. Now that she thought back on it, she recalled raising the possibility of a kidnap herself, and had even told them that she’d be staying at Pierre’s that night, so that Mustafa would have expected Eden to be deserted. And he’d likely have had keys for the lodge, too; he’d have been the most likely supplier of the new steel door.

It was with a tremendous feeling of relief, then, that she remembered her father on the phone. ‘Rebecca,’ he’d said. ‘Rebecca, my darling.’ Her skin began to tingle, but not in a good way. Her mother had been Adam’s one and only ever darling, then, now and forever. Even if it had been her father’s voice, so what? It was stored on dozens of CDs and cassettes in his office. And that was all the intruders had been after: the raw material with which to fake a convincing kidnap, and so take cruel advantage of Rebecca’s own conviction that she’d get Adam and Emilia back alive.

Outside, she heard the wail of approaching sirens. Andriama must have got her messages. She walked out on to the landing, looked down into the atrium, Mustafa and his guards staring anxiously out the front doors as three police cars swept up the drive. None of them even noticed Rebecca as she strode down the stairs. She was almost upon Mustafa before one of his guards shouted out a warning. He whirled around, saw the knowledge in her eyes, and the way he blanched was full confirmation of her fears. Even as Andriama and his men ran up the front steps and inside, the fury and grief welled up within her. ‘You gave me hope,’ she yelled at Mustafa. ‘You gave me hope.’ She made claws of her fingers and went for his eyes.