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in age, as I understand it.”
    “Twenty years,” Finn said flatly. When her par-nets had met, her father had been in his early forties, her mother barely twenty-one. A May- December marriage, teacher and student. Ten years later it was her mother’s turn. She had been now thirty-one, the young student, Boegart, only twenty.
    Finn stared at the photograph on the desk in front of her. Her father had no red hair or freckles, but her mother’s hair had been a deep auburn, and in the summer, there was always a delicate sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. It was possible, maybe even probable. There was a terrible irony to it all. In a few moments she had learned more about her parents than she had ever wanted to know. Things no child
should
know. “Why are you telling me this?” Finn said angrily.
    “I’m sorry,” said Tulkinghorn. “I mean neither to offend nor to anger. Your blood relationship with Mr. Boegart is irrelevant with regard to his own will and your status as a beneficiary. Any claims to the rest of the Boegart holdings, most of which are in trust, will most likely require some form of confirmation. DNA analysis, that is. I felt that you should be forewarned. News of this will inevitably reach the press. There will be consequences.”
    “I’m not making any claims to anything,” said Finn.
    “Quite so,” Tulkinghorn said with a nod. “Be that as it may, Mr. Boegart’s instructions to you both are quite clear.”
    “Instructions to us both?” Billy prompted.
    “The bequests are cojoint. They involve three items.”
    “Which are?” Finn asked.
    “A painting, which is in the next room, a house, which is in Amsterdam, and the SS
Batavia Queen
, which at last report was somewhere off the western coast of Sarawak.”
     
     
     

Chapter

4

     
    Conrad “Briney” Hanson, captain of the breakbulk freighter
Batavia Queen
, dragged on his Djarum Filter, inhaling the clove-spiced smoke deeply before expelling it with an exasperated sigh, squinting in the harsh tropical sun. He stood on the flying bridge of the old rust bucket, leaning with his elbows on the salt-corroded rail, looking forward.
    The bow had swung around on the anchor in the ebbing tide, and three-quarters of a mile away he could see the thick virgin jungle of Tandjung Api. In the distance he could see the white flush of the low waves breaking on the curving sandy beach. It looked deceptively calm but he knew it was an illusion. At low tide this was foul ground with barely six feet of clearance over a long shoal ridge.
    If the old fool of an engineer didn’t get the enginesrunning soon they’d be trapped here for hours if not actually grounded. He could hear McSeveney belowdecks hammering away with something heavy and cursing in a mixture of Malay pidgin and foulmouthed Scots brogue that would confound even the most knowledgeable linguistic expert.
    The dark-haired, deep-tanned captain took another drag on his kerak native cigarette, then snuffed it out in the sand-filled tin can duct-taped to the pipe rail for just that purpose. He glanced down to the fo’c’sle deck, baking hot in the sun. Eli, the powerful-looking, bare-chested able seaman from Mozambique, was painting things while his skinny friend Armand scaled rust. Eli was as black as the inside of a piece of coal, and Armand, who hailed from somewhere in the Balkans, was pale as a vampire and always wore a strange vinyl Cossack hat with ear flaps to keep the sun off his shaved head. They were a strange pair: black Eli with his tattoos and the long wormlike scars across his back that he never talked about; Armand with his pale skin and his hat.
    Briney Hanson stared out toward the jungle. Who was he to call them strange? What was a good Danish boy from Thorsminde doing out here in the land of headhunters and China Sea pirates, hauling shipments of fluorescent lightbulbs and bicycles from Bangkok to Shanghai or cocoa powder, handbags, and car parts from