The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  Nature had been brought to heel. The benign Gulf waters looked like sheet steel, bordered on one side by the promenade and on the other by passing container ships. Dream World was almost ready to open, but she could see dead flowerbeds, dried-out fountains, cracking cement walkways. It was possible to imagine that one day it might exist only as a distant memory as the rocky coastline reasserted itself.

  There was a building out of place. She backed up and frowned into the light. Right at the far edge of the resort stood an unadorned hexagon, low and unassuming, like a chapel for religious workers. Everything else was so obviously for a commercial purpose that it stuck out. What was the point of it? She was sure she had seen it before somewhere, but could not remember where.

  Then it came to her. In photographs. Milo’s torn-up pictures, taken inside and out.

  Davenport would be watching her. There was no time to investigate further, and it was probably nothing special. But as she left she couldn’t help glancing back. It was a decidedly odd structure.

  Her Renault was no longer in the shade. The sun had moved, and as she opened the car door the interior proved so unbearably hot that she suddenly felt ill. As she waited for the dizziness to pass, a gang of workmen in blue headscarves and heavy brown overalls trudged past like transferring prisoners. They seemed oblivious to the luxurious hostility of their surroundings, as if they existed in a parallel dimension.

  She wished she hadn’t decided to come here. Roy was obviously annoyed with her. Perhaps she had caught him doing something he shouldn’t. There was something wrong, and she couldn’t understand—the heat made it so hard to think. Her head swam as she tried to concentrate.

  Roy was wearing different clothes. That was it. He had left the house in tan cargo pants and a blue shirt, and now he was wearing a white shirt and navy trousers. It made no sense. He used the gym on the compound, he didn’t carry extra clothes with him to work. Why would he have changed?

  As she left the resort and the car’s air-conditioning unit restored the interior temperature, she began to focus once more. She came off the highway and passed the line where the sprinklers ended. The blossoming dragon-green land returned to ochre moon-rock.

  As the turnoff for the compound approached there was an odd noise from the Renault’s engine, and she realised she had forgotten to fill the gas tank. The gauge sometimes gave false readings in the heat. The vehicle coasted the next curve and slowed, its engine knocking. The road had just enough camber to allow her to coast it onto the hard shoulder.

  There was a gas station a few hundred metres off the highway, just inside the compound, but to reach it she saw that she would have to go through the underpass that connected the workers’ barracks to the compound. The only alternative was to walk for ages in the pounding heat.

  You can do this, she told herself, it’s no big deal. If there’s anyone down there, they’re liable to be as nervous of you as you are of them. They threw earth at the car, they didn’t intend to hurt you.

  But beyond the sunlight, at the edge of the bridge’s precipitous shadow, her heart started beating a little faster.

  A rectangle of fire at the far end told her that the passageway was no more than a hundred metres, but her eyes had not adjusted to the gloom, and she could not tell if anyone was standing against the walls.

  She removed her dark glasses and kept up her pace. As she walked, she heard a shuffle and cough in the shadows. The tip of a cigarette glowed. Another, then a third. There was a muttered phrase in Hindustani. A harder cough. They can’t see me against the light, she thought, they can’t tell who I am. Then she was out of the other side, heading toward the garage.

  As she filled her gas canister she looked for someone who might give her a lift back, but the cars all had their windows tightly sealed, the drivers remaining in shadow as the pump attendants ran around their vehicles. She no longer saw into people’s eyes; the high summer sun meant that everyone remained impassively shielded behind mirrored aviator lenses or rhinestone-encrusted designer eyewear.

  After filling the can she looked for a way back that would avoid the underpass, but the grassy slopes that led up to the highway were too steep to climb, and typically, there were no verges to walk along. She could have been in Brazil or California, an insignificant figure casting a long black shadow across the featureless road in late afternoon sunlight. Steeling herself, she headed back to the mouth of the tunnel.

  She tried to think about the men in the underpass, to humanise them, to understand why they needed to gather in communal solitude. She wondered whether they had dreams of something better, only to find that an accident of geography had reduced them to this hidden world. They were building a paradise they would never be allowed inside, for people of unimaginable wealth. They were here for one purpose only, to send money back to loved ones they might not see for years, to receive training in skills they might never use again. They were tolerated, controlled, ignored. And if they failed, more would silently appear to take their place.

  She thought they might try to rape her.

  Checking her rising nervousness, she remembered EM Forster’s A Passage To India and decided she would never behave like Adela in the Marabar Caves. Giving your fear a human face, she decided, was the best way to defuse it. She walked on into the dark with a surer step. The men were intent on something. An atmosphere of order and concentration seemed to fill the tunnel. Nobody was watching her, even though she could tell there were many others hidden in the dark recesses.

  They were waiting. The cigarette stubs glowed orange in an unwavering row, forming a patient line against the tunnel wall. From the far end she could hear a muffled sound, somewhere between a sob and a sigh.

  There was something pale and rectangular on the floor, lying among the discarded boxes and litter of the tunnel’s deepest point. She realised now that it was a mattress. As her eyes adjusted further, she saw a frail Chinese girl, her thin brown arms splayed at her sides. It was hard to tell, but in the penumbral gloom she looked extremely young, little more than a child. Her head was turned to one side, almost as if she was asleep. She wore a dirty white T-shirt, and was naked from the waist down.

  One of the workers was lowering himself into the crevice between her legs. He began shoving himself at her, bucking and ramming with such determination that he pushed her away in the process. Another men knelt down behind her, holding her shoulders still until his friend had finished.

  Lea tried to turn her attention away, but she could hear the fold and brush of loosened clothing, smell the vivid spice of sweat and sex. The girl did not look perturbed, merely dulled with acceptance. There was nothing especially repellent about the process. Its mechanics had been blunted with necessity and repetition.

  Lea looked straight ahead and kept moving toward the sunlit slope at the far end of the underpass, praying that she could slip past unnoticed. She wondered if they had got together to pay for her, or if the girl was being kept there against her will.

  Despite herself, she looked back.

  The man who had been holding her shoulders released her now, and the girl raised herself on one elbow, staring blankly at the wall as the next one came forward and unbuttoned his overalls. Some dirham notes fell beside her. She quickly gathered them up and dropped back onto the mattress, and the man behind her resumed his duties once more, preparing to grip her shoulders. The others crowded around, mercifully blocking Lea’s view.

  And then she was at the tunnel exit. The sun on her neck felt like a torch of absolution. Having been repeatedly warned away from the area, she knew she dared not interfere with what went on there. It would be easy to believe that sin could only breed in darkness.

  Glancing back down the slope, she saw two figures caught in the edge of the light. One was a Chinese workman, bony and ill-looking, dressed in company dungarees. The other was Betty’s son Dean. They both had their heads lowered, and were intent on something that occupied their attention. She glimpsed an exchange, some smal
l object passing from one set of hands to the other.

  This unnerved her more than the sight of the thin, impassive girl. Whatever transpired here had crossed over into the compound. She walked faster and did not look back until she reached the stalled car.

  Back inside the vehicle, thoughts swirled in her head.

  Mandhatri Sahonta, freezing to death on the beach.

  Deng Antonio with his arm torn off.

  Garcia Rodriguez, falling from the tower.

  Tom Chalmers suffering a heart attack.

  All of them mourning lost girls.

  And Milo, believing there were old gods living in the ancient rocks.

  They were pieces of an absurd idea and nothing made any sense, but once that the thought was planted it would not go away. Lea suddenly knew that she could not keep ignoring it anymore.

  When she reached home, she immediately went upstairs and dug out the family’s DWG induction pack. Sifting through the documents from Roy’s information folder, she found a slip of paper bearing a login code for the DWG website address, and accessed it. The Excel spreadsheet of accident statistics dated back to the ground-breaking ceremony on the site, four years earlier.

  A log had been kept of all mishaps that had occurred at the resort since the inception date. Calculating a norm by multiplying the total of workers involved, she saw that the number of deaths and injuries was only slightly higher than the national average. Dream World had issued regular press releases championing their safety record.

  How many accidents had befallen other fathers who had lost their daughters? Just the ones on Milo’s list, it transpired. One might as well count the number of accident victims with ginger beards.

  Googling related topics, she found an online interview with a construction safety trainer who admitted that over nine hundred workers had fallen to their deaths in 2008 throughout the UAE. He said that more than half the accidents happened in spite of them wearing safety harnesses. The workers were expendable. They came from villages where they had only been used to raising goats and growing rice. Many more died from kidney failure because they did not drink enough water while they were on the skyscrapers. The workers’ toilets were often situated on the ground floor, and those on the upper stories could not afford to lose time going down to the latrines.

  There was no discernable pattern. Bar graphs and cloud charts scrolled before her eyes until they were meaningless. Logging out of the site, she slipped Roy’s access details back in his document pack, none the wiser for what she had read.

  There was one last thing to do. Instead of running the names through search engines, she looked them up on local social networks, using translation tools. This time a trace appeared in the ether, a faintly luminous thread that led through the miasma of misinformation.

  Sahonta, Sakari

  Antonio, Maria

  Chalmers, Joia

  No mention of Rodriguez’s daughter because she had been found dead in the creek. The other three were mentioned on the website of a local parents’ group, OurMissingChildren.org, which covered Dubai and Abu Dabi.

  There were forty-six other missing girls listed on the Dubai page.

  She was sweating in the air-conditioned bedroom. When she clicked on the drop-down menu, it failed to open. It took her a while to realise that the site had been closed down. Only the holding page remained, and there were no contact details listed on it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Theft

  LEA SAT ON the patio and smelled smoke. She went to the end of the garden.

  ‘Rachel, I know you’re there.’

  ‘God, is it that obvious? I’m halfway inside a fucking hyacinth bush. I thought Colette wouldn’t be able to see me from in here. I’m always so careful to pick up my butts.’ Rachel’s false eyelashes fluttered up at her between the fence staves and the leaves. She jetted smoke into the still air and batted it away, stepping closer. ‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘No, I’m really not okay—I ran out of petrol near the underpass. The men were taking turns with a girl.’

  Rachel took a long drag at her Virginia Slim and exhaled. ‘Oh honey, I thought you knew. That was why everyone wants to close the road. It’s why they made such a fuss when you said they threw rocks at you.’

  ‘Do you know about the missing girls?’

  ‘Oh.’ The figure beyond the fence was still.

  ‘So you do?’

  ‘I’ve heard all kinds of things.’

  ‘Guess how many have disappeared since the construction started on Dream World? Forty-six. That includes Tom Chalmers’ daughter.’

  ‘Lea, they’re mostly migrants, and there are millions of those here. So many people come and go. Disappearances don’t make the news.’

  ‘What about the girl who was found in the creek?’

  ‘She was the only one I read about. But nobody notices, nobody cares.’

  ‘Some people care. They set up a website but it’s been shut down. It could be why the mishaps occur.’

  ‘I’m not following you.’

  ‘The parents who make a fuss, the ones who won’t go away. Some of the fathers who filed official complaints died in work-related accidents.’

  ‘Jesus, really? How did you find that out?’

  ‘The information’s publically available if you know where to look.’

  ‘You’re not going to mention this to anyone other than me, are you? You could really screw things up for us all.’

  ‘No. I love my husband too much to do that.’

  ‘You’re not the first person to go looking for big bad wolves. Even if you were right and found out that someone here had a taste for little girls, what could you do?’

  ‘I guess that’s what Tom Chalmers wondered.’

  The cigarette smoke drifted, slowly dissipating. ‘Did you stop to think it might be the workers?’

  ‘No, I’ve seen where they take their women. That’s how they cope with their sexual issues. Rachel, you have two granddaughters. I have a daughter. What if something was to happen to them? How would we ever find out the truth?’

  ‘I know one way.’ She looked up and saw Colette leaning from the bedroom window. ‘Shit, I’ve been busted. Are you around tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure, I’m not doing anything.’

  ‘I’ll be back late afternoon. Let’s grab a bite together. Promise?’ The leaves rustled and she was gone.

  Lea walked back into the lounge and saw that her phone’s voicemail light was blinking. Mr Qasim from the police station had left his number, asking her to call immediately. As she waited for the call to go through, she wondered if he had discovered any leads in his search for Milo’s killers.

  ‘Mrs Brook? Thank you for getting back to me. I’m afraid this is rather a delicate matter, and I wanted to contact you directly.’

  She waited for him to continue.

  ‘We have five young people from the Dream Ranches estate here with us. One of them is your daughter.’

  ‘Why are they there?’ Lea asked. ‘Have they done something wrong?’

  ‘They were caught on camera at a clothing store in the Mall Of The Emirates. Abercrombie & Fitch, I believe. They had been trying on clothes and left the shop without paying.’

  ‘You’re saying Cara stole something? Is she under arrest?’

  ‘It was a silver neck-chain. It triggered the store’s alarm. Your daughter told the security guard that it was a mistake, that she had put it on earlier and had forgotten she was still wearing it, and her friends backed her up. The store has a policy of reporting every suspicion of theft to the authorities, so we brought them all in to make statements.’

  ‘I can’t believe they meant to steal. Cara has an allowance, she can afford to buy what she likes, within reason. You’re not going to charge her, are you?’

  ‘Probably not. This time we’re going to let them off with a warning, but the store has insisted on barring them from the premises, and the mall
may no longer grant them entry.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me. I’ll drive over and collect her.’

  ‘No, you needn’t come here. They just have to sign releases and they’ll be free to go. However, we suspect one of the boys has been drinking and he’s underage, so we’ll be keeping him here for his father to collect.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A Korean boy, Kim Lo. He goes to your daughter’s school. We’re sending Cara home now. When things like this occur, we try to take an enlightened view and allow the parents discuss the problem directly with their children.’

  I won’t fly off the handle at her, she told herself. I have to treat this in exactly the same manner as if it had occurred in London with her school friends. But at the same time she was furious over the betrayal of her trust.

  Her final approach, she later realised, satisfied no-one. ‘Your father will be very disappointed in you,’ she warned, watching Cara as she focussed her concentration on unpacking her bag on the kitchen table.

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ Cara mumbled. ‘I forgot I still had mine on. I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. It was dumb.’

  ‘And what about Norah? She was with you. Had she forgotten too?’

  ‘We were all trying stuff on.’ The rest of Cara’s answer was lost below sound level.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said she isn’t responsible for me. I can look after myself. I made a mistake, that’s all.’

  ‘What about the boy they kept behind for drinking? Who was he?’

  ‘Kim’s just some kid who was hanging out with us. He’s in the year below. I hardly know him.’

  There was something different about her that Lea couldn’t put her finger on. Despite her shamefacedness, Cara seemed more sure of herself, more adult somehow.

  ‘Cara, I’m not going to go on about it after tonight, I just want this to be clear between us. You’re younger than most of the kids in your class. The girls have more experience than you. They’ve been here longer, they’re not like the ones you hung out with in London. I’m not sure that Norah and Dean are a good influence.’