The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  A police car and an ambulance had stopped in the middle of the empty road. Two young Indian medics were carrying a stretcher covered in a yellow blanket. The absence of sound was odd. In London, such an event would have been accompanied by sirens and the crackle of two-way radios. Presently, the police car silently followed the ambulance and the street was still once more. Frowning, Lea went back to bed.

  Mrs Busabi rang the doorbell just as Roy was leaving for work. Bizarrely, she was covered in flour again. ‘I remembered that I promised to bring you some cupcakes,’ she said, but Lea could remember no such promise.

  ‘Thank you, that’s kind,’ she said, accepting a box of lurid, deformed sponges. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  ‘I won’t stop, if you don’t mind.’ She hovered on the doorstep, bursting with contained information. ‘I suppose you heard about last night.’

  ‘No,’ Lea admitted. ‘But I saw an ambulance.’

  ‘Poor Milo,’ said Mrs Busabi, tutting. ‘We’ve never had something like this happen before.’

  ‘What do you mean? What happened?’

  ‘Why, he was knocked down by a car! They think he was putting out his garbage and walked into the road. You know they turn the streetlights off at night as part of the ecological thing? Well, it was after twelve, I know that.’

  Lea had seen the overhead lamps switch to low intensity solar-powered kerb lights at midnight. ‘Yes,’ she said impatiently, ‘I didn’t see a car outside.’

  ‘That’s just it, they didn’t stop.’

  ‘You mean it was a hit and run?’

  ‘Can you imagine? Knocking over an old man and just driving off like that? However did they get into the compound?’

  ‘How do you know it wasn’t someone who was already inside?’ asked Lea.

  ‘Well, it couldn’t have been, could it? I mean, it stands to reason. It must have been someone from outside. Nobody here would leave a defenceless old man lying in the road.’

  Maybe they were drunk, she thought. ‘How is he? Where have they taken him?’

  ‘I think he went to one of the small private hospitals like the Jebel Ali. No, wait, it was the Omar. I heard he was unconscious.’

  ‘We should go and see him.’

  Mrs Busabi shook her head violently. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t want to interfere,’ she said, backing off the porch. She was happy to divulge information but felt contaminated by involvement. ‘I’m sure he’ll have family visiting.’

  ‘But that’s just it, he doesn’t have any family here,’ said Lea.

  ‘I only stopped by to give you those, I have to be going,’ said Mrs Busabi, seizing the opportunity to flee.

  Lea dumped the cakes, grabbed her jacket and her car keys.

  THE OMAR TURNED out to be a low, almost invisible building of antiseptic-white concrete, set back from the glass cathedrals of the commerce district. Its elegant, spacious halls were designed to calm and reassure. Nursing was a profession frowned upon by hard-line Muslim families because it required long hours and overnight stays, which contradicted a woman’s devotion to home and husband. Lea found a large number of uniformed Indian women passing in distant corridors, and seemingly few patients. The majority of locals did not need to take jobs in the public sector. They remained only partially visible in public life, following a tradition that had marked them as patient, supine, prone to inanition. The Indian workforce was an expedience that posed little threat to them.

  She searched for someone to help her. The wide arctic corridors were sparsely populated and disconcertingly silent except for the squeaking of rubber-soled shoes. It was the opposite of an NHS unit; there were no mismatched posters affixed to the walls with globs of Blu-Tack, just dual-language signs hanging discreetly from the ceilings. She felt as if she had wandered into an Edward Hopper painting.

  The duty nurse sat motionless behind a long white reception counter, her hands folded together, almost as if she had been waiting for her. The sense of placidity was supernatural. Lea explained who she was looking for, and how Milo had come to be admitted.

  The nurse checked her screen with deliberate, careful movements, then looked back up at Lea. ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No, a neighbour.’

  ‘I cannot give out any further information.’

  ‘I just need to know if he’s okay.’

  The nurse discreetly tapped at her phone and spoke very softly into the receiver. She looked back up, her face unreadable. ‘Someone will be with you in a minute.’

  Lea sat and waited. Five minutes later, an absurdly young Asian doctor made his way over and introduced himself.

  ‘I understand you’re a friend of Mr Melnik,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. I’m his neighbour. How is he?’

  ‘You’re aware that he was hit by a car?’

  ‘I didn’t see what happened, but I saw the ambulance driving away last night.’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Melnik suffered internal injuries and died this morning at’—he checked his mobile—‘7:09am. I’m sorry.’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘His injuries were severe. He underwent a series of cerebrovascular incidents and was not strong enough to take them. He could not be revived.’

  ‘Do you know if the police arrested the driver of the vehicle?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have no information on that. You would have to check with the police. They’ll inform the family directly when the need arises.’

  ‘He had no family living here. Surely you could you give me a contact number?’

  ‘Well, somebody will need to take care of the body.’ The doctor took a slip of paper from the counter and wrote on it. ‘If you can think of any relations who should be notified, they can discuss the matter with me. Insurance, and so forth.’

  Lea stepped back into the heat of the hospital car park in a daze. She had spent no more than a few hours with the old man, but felt a connection with him that had been prematurely severed. His death made no sense to her. Why would he have chosen to put out his garbage after midnight? Why hadn’t the vehicle stopped? Where had it gone? These were questions that would not have concerned her in London, but here, where life unfolded at a calibrated pace, they took on greater significance.

  Like Tom Chalmers, she thought.

  Milo had been afraid of something. He had fitted locks on the inside of his doors. He had kept an email intended for someone else and had asked her to be his spy. He had suspected something and had a big mouth, and that made him a risk. On the drive home she fought down the temptation to start looking for a conspiracy.

  Back at the house, seated before her laptop, she tried to write but nothing materialised. Finally she called the number of the police officer the doctor had jotted down for her. After ten rings a voicemail message in Arabic cut in. She severed the call without leaving her name.

  Fidgety and unnerved, she decided to take a drive around the neighbourhood. On the opposite side of the road, a street cleaner was dipping the end of a broom into a bucket of bleach and scuffing at the stones. Lea watched as he meticulously scrubbed away at the kerb, eradicating any trace of disorder. There was no police cordon, no incident board, nothing to suggest that anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

  Frowning against the sun, she walked out to the carport and crossed the road to Milo’s front lawn, trying to imagine the sequence of events.

  She checked the bin at the end of his drive and found a black plastic sack inside. The collectors had come the previous afternoon at five, so presumably this was the bag Milo had brought out.

  He had appeared soon after midnight, had walked down the path, placed the bag in the bin and—what?

  Something must have caught his attention, otherwise why would he have walked further toward the kerb? If a driver had failed to see him, his vehicle must have come from the left, because if he had rounded the corner from the other direction he’d have been travelling on the far side of the road. Unless Milo had decided to step from the k
erb into the unlit street, an approaching vehicle would have had to mount the pavement in order to hit him. Surely the police had taken note of that?

  Okay, a different scenario. He put out the garbage and walked to the kerb. Why? Because there was a car where it should not have been. Perhaps he thought its driver was watching him.

  This is crazy, she decided, you’re doing this because you’re looking too hard at things you would normally take for granted. Hell, an old man was mugged and killed just five doors down from you in London and you barely bothered to take any notice. But she could take nothing for granted in this place, where Christian women emulated good Muslim wives and stayed hidden at home while their husbands lived separate lives.

  Shaking sinister thoughts from her head, she got into the Renault and drove off around the compound. But not before she took the binbag out and placed it in the boot of her car.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Barracks

  THE CCTV CAMERAS were designed to be seen.

  Lea looked at the tops of the wrought-iron lamp-posts and checked the surrounding buildings. On each of them, red LEDs winked from a series of wall-mounted plastic domes. She wondered where the surveillance system had its headquarters.

  The police presence on the compound was extremely discreet. There was no way of telling if anyone would bother to find out what had happened to Milo. Would they check the CCTV hard drives? The solar-powered kerb lights that came on after midnight wouldn’t reveal much about the vehicle. Perhaps the system was infra-red, and would display green ghost-figures drifting past the fallen old man.

  Presumably the investigating officers had at least managed to question the compound guards, to find out if a car had left the grounds? If no-one had passed through the entry gates it meant that the vehicle was still inside, or that it had left via the unguarded underpass that linked to the workers’ barracks. It might have been driven by one of the men who lived in the dormitory blocks on the other side of the wall.

  You’d better not get any further involved in this, she thought. But you could just take a quick look.

  She turned the Renault right, toward the underpass. It drew her like a moment in a film she knew she couldn’t watch. She felt herself being slowly dragged toward the wrong choices, doing the exact opposite of what was expected.

  At this time of the morning, the shadowed depression of the road that passed beneath Highway A6 was deserted. Decelerating, she coasted the car into the unlit tunnel and emerged in an alien world. The route took her between the vast concrete dormitories, aligned at right angles to the road. Dozens of workers sat on their haunches smoking or eating with their fingers from aluminium trays. They regarded her with little hostility and less curiosity. They were inert and exhausted.

  Piles of rubbish and crates of rotting vegetables littered the open areas. A few fur-bald dogs snuffled through the trash. A single tap and an iron trough stood at the end of each block for washing.

  Being here could only lead to trouble, but she was already inside the unauthorized zone, so why not take a look in one of the buildings? She pulled the Renault over and entered the nearest open doorway unhindered.

  There was no lighting inside, just a stairway that stank of sweat and urine. Each floor had entrances leading to open dormitories. The walls were banked with mattresses, half of which were occupied by shapeless grey bundles. The men had pulled blankets over their heads to keep the light out of their eyes; there were no shades on the windows. In the corners of the room were hundreds of fluted aluminium containers, flyblown noodle boxes that had been discarded by exhausted workers.

  She was careful not to enter the rooms. It was enough just to glimpse the sleeping shift-workers, lined in rows like wartime sleepers in the underground. Most appeared to be beyond the usual retirement age, or perhaps a combination of punishing sunlight, poor diet and manual labour had prematurely aged them. She counted 120 beds on one floor. A group of men crouching beneath an unfinished window glared sullenly at her as she passed, and she was overcome with shame. She should not have invaded their privacy. This isn’t right, she thought, I have no right to be here, I shouldn’t see them like this.

  As she walked back out to the light, a broad-chested figure cut off her exit.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked. She recognised the Afrikaans accent immediately, and heard anger in his voice. Don’t let him scare you, don’t apologise. You’re new, nobody gave you rules to follow.

  She pushed past him, out into the light. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hardy—the road is open from the compound, and I didn’t see any signs forbidding me from entering the place.’

  ‘The road isn’t supposed to be like that. We’re waiting for permission to seal it off, and if we don’t get it I’ll do it myself, as soon as a highway maintenance crew becomes available. This is company land, ya? You have no business here.’

  ‘I was curious, that’s all. I don’t wish to sound ungrateful for your interest in my welfare, but I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.’

  Hardy’s jaw muscles worked as he tried to keep his temper. ‘Do I need to spell it out for you, Mrs Brook? Many of these men have been away from their wives for three years.’

  ‘They look too tired to assault anyone. Besides, I thought you imported prostitutes to take care of their needs. Adultery isn’t an imprisonable offence for your workers, is it, because their wives aren’t here.’

  ‘You’ve got quite a mouth on you, Mrs Brook. If I was your husband, I’d take you in hand.’ He looked as if he could hit a woman without feeling remorse.

  ‘Well, luckily you’re not. Let’s just regard this as a friendly conversation between a pair of economic migrants, shall we? We’re both in the same boat, Mr Hardy, we should be able to get along.’ She turned to go, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

  ‘Mrs Brook.’

  She turned back to face him, glad that her sunglasses prevented him from seeing her eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t want to see you anywhere near here again. For your own safety. Or I will take action against you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, Mr Hardy. Good day.’

  As she slid into the driver’s seat, she realised her back was wet with sweat. Her hands were shaking slightly. If I’m going to survive in this place for two years, she thought, I have to learn to keep my mouth shut.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Loss

  ‘HEY, I JUST heard you in the driveway,’ said Rachel, leaning over the connecting fence between the villas. The crimson silk handkerchief she had tied around her head lent her a raffish, hippyish appearance. ‘Are you going to the mall today?’

  ‘I was planning to,’ Lea called back. ‘I love the headscarf.’

  ‘Why, thank you. I was going for a kind of Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! mode, but Colette pulled a face and told me I look like a South Bronx gang member. How did my son ever marry such a prude? So many looks get harder to pull off as you age. I saw Mrs Busabi wearing a headscarf instead of her wig the other day and she looked like a chemotherapy patient. God, listen to me, I’m making jokes and a nice old man just died. I heard you were at the hospital.’

  ‘How did you know? I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.’

  ‘You underestimate the efficiency of the jungle grapevine, my dear. A nurse told a friend of Betty’s, and she called me. If there’s anything you want to keep secret around here, it’s best to do it off-site.’

  ‘Do you need a lift?’

  ‘Colette has taken the wagon into town. Norah has a dental appointment. I’d really appreciate it.’

  ‘Sure, no problem.’

  ‘Let me grab my jacket. The air conditioning in the mall kills my back.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Lea once they were on the road, ‘I hardly ever drove in London. Now I seem to see the whole world from behind glass, either on TV or through a car windscreen.’

  ‘In that respect it’s not much different to Ohio,’ s
aid Rachel. ‘For us, I mean. We lived in the suburbs, never saw a living soul from Monday to Friday except at the mall, and even that wasn’t very busy. And the winters were awful. But I feel kind of trapped here. There’s really nowhere to go, with the sea on one side and the desert on the other. It’s like being inside some kind of weird videogame, where there are only a certain number of routes you can take. There’s none of the rebel spontaneity you have in London.’

  ‘Organised chaos, you mean.’

  ‘But that’s what I love about your city, the freedom of expression. Even an element of lunacy seems to be encouraged. Everything is so carefully engineered here. DWG knows that the eyes of the world are on them. It’s a grand experiment.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lea searched for her turning.

  ‘Darling, everyone’s waiting to see if they’ll screw up.’

  ‘The Arabs?’

  ‘No, the consortium, the board of directors and the big money from Guangzhou. We’re in the middle of an economic warzone. If Dream World fails, there’ll be a mighty big case of I told you so. And I hope he does fail. It’s one big power-fucking male conspiracy.’

  Lea turned to look at her. ‘You have some fire in your belly, Rachel.’

  ‘Honey, I lived through Nixon and Kissinger. I remember abuse of power.’

  ‘Well, I can’t afford to start asking questions.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if I did, I wouldn’t stop until I’d wrecked everything.’ Shocked by her own honesty, she fell silent. They pulled into the car park and made a dash from the air-conditioned Renault to the icy mall. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go and make a mess of some carefully folded cardigans.’

  They made their way along an avenue of gleaming empty shops where the sales staff were as listless as children trapped in classrooms, their chiselled cheekbones shining beneath tungsten spotlights like the faces of mannequins. The frozen tableaux they formed at their work stations made Lea feel like a character in a science fiction film.