‘Bit awkward for the chap when the real purchaser turned up for it then.’
‘Yes. Colter. I think it was Colter, and because Ben had paid cash, the shop guy couldn’t tell him who’d bought it. Oh, fuc—the very first thing he said to me when I met him. He was huntingemerald.He was trying to find out who Ben was. That’s how the guy probably described him!’
‘Did this Colter realise you and Ben were connected?’
Aleksey rolled his eyes. ‘The mor—Michael saw him in the chandlers when Ben was buying the diving gear—with his credit card. Once Colter got the name, he would obviously make the connection.’
Harry shook his head sceptically. ‘That’s a bit of an assumption, son, lots of Rider-Mikkelsens in the world, surely?’ Aleksey snorted. ‘So, he suspects the map is also in the scope.’
‘Billydidsee him in the house. He wasn’t searching for the treasure but themap.’ He rose swiftly, his chair tipping over. ‘Come. On… Please.’
Together they strode the paths back towards Guillemot. They thought they saw the dogs briefly, but they were little more than shadows slinking through the gloom under the canopy of the trees. Aleksey wondered if they’d go totally feral by the time they got back to Devon. It wasn’t wise to give dogs who named themselves free rein to do just anything they liked.
They strode into the house, Harry only pausing for a brief moment to steady himself beneath the lintel. He clutched his book tighter, a gesture of comfort so reminiscent of Miles and his rucksack that it made Aleksey’s heart ache. As they crossed the honey-coloured wooden floor, Harry pointed out,
‘If Frobisher had to hide his map in those circumstances—shipwrecked, starving, despairing—I think he would try to insert it beneath the leather casing. It would be very tricky to break the instrument apart and then reassemble it. Such damage would have been noted all those years later by the auctioneers.’ Aleksey went straight to the bookshelves where the telescope was kept, and Harry added, ‘And we’d have also discovered the damage. Many nights I’ve sat up with our young genius, listening to his theories and studying the stars through that device.’
Aleksey’s head turned in an almost slow-motion swivel at the words.
Miles:Can I be officially in charge of the telescope?
He yanked out his phone and dialled Sarah’s number. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever called the girl. She answered with a, ‘Yes?’ so wary and astonished that he’d have smiled in other circumstances.
‘Check Miles’s room for me. Look for the telescope.’
‘He’s got it with him. I helped him pack. I think it’s his most precious possession. What’s wrong? Is he okay?’
‘Yes, nothing to worry about.’ He clicked off.
Harry put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Get underway then. The wind will be at your back for that young lad.’
Aleksey wasted no more time. He spun on his heel once more and sprinted back towards the dock. Colter wantedthe telescope. It had surfaced in Scilly and he’d tried to buy it. Mullet guy had known Ben was local, but that was all, and so when Colter had arrived, furious at losing his prize, he’d seen Morwenna’s article about the expedition in the paper and had seized his chance to lurk around the islands, seeking the tall green-eyed man who’d stolen his treasure map from him. Now he’d used Enid’s death to lure them on board. As he spun the boat away from the dock and headed across the bay, Aleksey remembered the bags—no wonder Colter had offered to take them, to unpack them. He’d beensearchingthem.
But if Miles had the telescope, why had Colter not found it?
Had he been waiting for him to leave so he had the boy to himself? Had he expected him and Ben to leave together? Barthrop would be no challenge for him. But he would be able to do nothing with Ben Rider-Mikkelsen on guard. Ben would do more than rip his arm open if he tried to hurt Miles. But Orlando Frobisher had probably believed he could handle Colter too, and even the fastest, strongest, most superb physique in the world could be caught off guard…pushed from a roof. The Britannia book’s pages had been ripped out and the image of the Nelson Prize destroyed. And then the last of the Frobishers had met his doom, never putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
Fifty miles an hour had once seemed fast in the RIB but now it was travelling as if in slow motion, despite the wind buffeting him and the boat flying up and then slamming down over each wave. At each bounce, a conflicting truth tormented him: lured into the trap; Ben is there; lured into the trap; Ben is there… But on a particularly savage bang back down onto the hard ocean, the unbidden truth surfaced, just like that bubble of escaping air in the hydrosphere when he’d rocked it: Ben wouldgive his lifeto keep the boy safe. He had been granted the chance to be the Guardian of Genius, and maybe his gods of chaos and chance had deemed him unworthy of that great charge, and so sacrifices had to be made.
Gods demand obeisance.
They always do.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-ONE
As he approachedRogue Wave, he could not see the hydrosphere. It was beneath the water. He spun the boat towards the bow and saw that Colter’s RIB was still gone, his winch position empty. He got his boat close, fixed the cables and started them running, waiting only until he could leap for the rail, then he pulled himself up and vaulted over it, sprinting down towards the stern. He peered down into the sphere, saw Ben and Miles bending over the open floor, thumped on the hatch to get their attention and then heaved himself up the ladder and hit the controls to raise the contraption. As soon as it slotted seamlessly back into place, he was ready to open the hatch. Sticking his head in, he asked breathlessly,
‘Miles. Do you have the telescope with you?’
Miles, holding one of his thermometers, seemed too astonished at the abrupt odd question to reply at first but then blinked and confirmed, ‘Y-yes, in my rucksack.’
Despairingly, Aleksey saw that for once the boy didn’t have this bag with him. ‘Go get it, now.’ Miles put his precious instrument carefully down on the seat. Aleksey, thrumming with impatience to get offRogue Wave, stood and walked to the edge of the little sundeck, checking for a rigid raider heading their way. To his fury, he could see a tiny black speck in the distance. ‘Hurry!’
Miles wasn’t a child who did hurry, but he managed to get out of the sphere with a little help and went through the door in the superstructure and trotted obediently through the galley, heading for his cabin. Ben, still in the sphere, looked up at him enquiringly, and Aleksey just declared, ‘We’re leaving.’ Suddenly, he grinned, ‘We’ve got the map!’ On Ben’s immediate air punch of delight, all his worry and fear just washed away. There was nothing Colter could do now: he and Ben were together, and they had won the game.
Ben, laughing quietly, hopped off the stairs to gather their equipment. Impatient, Aleksey swung in to help him. He grabbed his face and kissed him. ‘Harry recognised the telescope, Ben. It’s the thing Robert Frobisher had with him on Henderson Island—the Nelson Prize. We think the map’s hidden inside.’
