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 the few 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.