The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Oh no, Colette, I’m so sorry,’ said Lea, placing an arm around her. ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘No, really—there’s nothing anyone could have done.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How could something like that have happened?’

  Colette shook her head violently. ‘We don’t know. She must have panicked. She was in her swimsuit—she always dries off in the car after she’s used the pool at the Desert Hideaway. She thinks we don’t know she goes out there, but Ben knows the manager and he always tells us when she’s been. She must have got out of the car, thought she was shut out and collapsed of heatstroke. I don’t understand it, because that car is impossible to lock yourself out of. The police said it looked as if she’d been trying to break one of the windows with a rock. But why would she try to do that when the door was open? The keys were still in the ignition. The police have taken it away for analysis. Poor Rachel, she hated the sun but loved to sit and look at the desert. We should never have brought her out here.’

  ‘Where’s Ben now?’

  ‘He had to go to work for a few hours. He couldn’t get out of it. We can’t do anything until they release the body.’

  ‘Do you want me to sit with you?’

  ‘No, Lea, it’s okay—I may call you later though. I’m looking after Abbi. I just thought you should know. You got on with her so well, and I had to talk to someone.’

  ‘If there’s anything either of us can do, will you promise to come over?’ said Lea. ‘Can Lastri at least fix you some breakfast?’

  ‘No, I’m not hungry. I have to get back. I guess there’ll be calls to make.’

  As she watched Colette trudge back down the path, exhausted, it felt as if she had somehow lost more than a friend. Rachel had possessed the kind of rambunctious spirit that turned the world.

  Lea sat at her desk trying to work on her notes, but it was hopeless. Dark conspiracies winged into her head. What if there was more to Rachel’s death than a stupid mistake? She’d been to the desert many times before, she knew her way around. How could she have locked herself out of the car if the keys were inside? Perhaps the air-conditioning had broken down and she had suffered heat-stroke. She seemed surprisingly youthful, but Colette said she got confused sometimes. What other explanation could there be?

  She found it impossible to concentrate; other people’s tragedies crowded in. Three deaths in the same street. Okay, over 90% of the workforce transient; some people were bound to fall. Perhaps their safety was an illusion. Despite two decades of westernisation it was still a harsh dry land, best suited to hardy Bedouin, camels and desert thistles. The verdant veneer that lay across the baking rocks could be removed at any moment with the twist of a water-valve, the entire country reverting to its primeval state within the space of a single summer, the old gods returning to reclaim their kingdom.

  The day crawled past, bogged down in a sinister molten heat. The setting sun brought amber skies, hot breezes and flurries of sand, and the street became a sepia photograph. She watched an old DVD, Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu. The underwater sequences failed to relax her as they usually did.

  She felt as if something more was expected of her, but really, what could she do? Talking to the authorities led nowhere and flagged her as a troublemaker.

  Toward the end of the film, she heard the front door open. Roy looked terrible. He threw his briefcase onto the couch and followed it down. ‘Want me to fix you a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe a whisky.’

  While she broke up ice, she told him about Rachel.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘she was a headstrong woman. Ben and Colette had been worried about her behaviour for some time.’

  ‘God, Roy, her lack of conformity didn’t exactly mark her out for death. It just sounds so unlikely.’

  ‘You have to be vigilant here. We have cases of heat-stroke every day at the resort.’

  ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. From Monday we’ll be working until eleven every night, until we can be sure that the resort will launch on time.’ He accepted the amber glass and took a slug.

  ‘When are you planning on seeing your daughter?’

  ‘After work I guess, when she’s finished at the beach house. She can come over to the Persiana.’

  ‘Then that just leaves me.’ Lea found it hard to keep the irritation from her voice.

  ‘Let’s not have this fight again, Lea. It’s not going to be forever and the potential rewards are enormous.’

  ‘You’re right.’ She went to touch him, but he looked dead on his feet.

  ‘S’okay. I’m really sorry about Rachel. It’s going to be tough on the Larvins. I guess they could get someone in to look after Abbi.’

  Now, as she lay in the master bedroom watching him sleep, she felt bad about giving him a hard time. Dream World was his big chance to make good. Perhaps it was her test, too.

  Even with the air-conditioning unit turned up high, she twisted and turned in bed until she was forced to throw off the sheets. She could not bring herself to touch Roy—lately his skin had become hot and tanned and hard, not at all like the flesh of the man she had married.

  It was easy to entertain fearful thoughts now. As Cara slept next door, it felt as if, for the first time, the beast of chaos could cross into the sanctity of her home.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Book

  11:00AM, FRIDAY MORNING. Hot enough to fry breakfast on a sheet of tin.

  Lea sat in the chill air, determined to write. So far, she had managed a few sections composed of her first faltering interviews with the compound’s wives. She wondered how Cara managed to generate content for her website, and looked for it online. Bubble Life turned out to be filled with mystifying band reviews and teenspeak manifestos as indecipherable as hieroglyphs, annoyingly condensed versions of sugar-rush conversation that she quickly gave up on.

  She found herself drawn back to the holding page of OurMissingChildren.org. The names of the children led nowhere. She imagined a fearless journalist making connections, bullying out answers, exposing wrongs, but the reality was completely different. Here she was nobody, and could do nothing.

  On the other side of the garden hedge, two Indian workmen were standing in the emptied pool, examining the cracked stonework. Kicking back in the chair, she went downstairs and stood at the window.

  Mid-morning, and the street was deserted. In mechanically chilled rooms, housewives baked and cleaned and tucked themselves from sight. How could they survive with so little human contact? Did they drink alone, invent online identities, create phantom liaisons, spend their days blissed out on pills? When the time came, would they flee to better pastures without taking anything from their past lives, like the Arabs did when they abandoned their date groves for oil?

  The computer screen showed a hopeless jumble of sentences. She was about to scrap the pages and start over when the doorbell rang. Lea looked at her watch. The traditional calling hour. She prayed it wasn’t Mrs Busabi.

  Colette stood on the doorstep, her eyes as pink and swollen as a rabbit’s. ‘Can I come in?’ she asked.

  Lea led her into the kitchen and sent Lastri off to change the bed linen. Colette seated herself at the breakfast bar and meekly accepted a mug of tea. ‘Ben went straight to the resort without any sleep,’ she said. ‘That’s the way he deals with problems. When his father died he stayed at the office for weeks. I feel really strange about all of this.’

  ‘That’s understandable, given the circumstances,’ said Lea. ‘I have some sleeping pills if you need them.’

  ‘Thanks, I have plenty. Dr Vance is very keen on supplying medication around here. I have to make sense of things. I’m just so angry.’

  ‘Angry? Why?’

  ‘That she could have done something so stupid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Rachel could be difficult, she was always the first person to admit th
at. Heaven knows we had our ups and downs.’ She took a gulp of coffee, gathering her thoughts. ‘She was so stubborn. This business of sneaking off into the dessert, a woman alone, at her age. To have made such a basic mistake, it’s just so typical of her. She knew the risks and she deliberately—’

  ‘I don’t think she did it deliberately, Colette. I mean, I didn’t know her for long but it seems to me she was street-smart, a real survivor.’

  ‘I told you, the doors were unlocked when they found her. She got out of the car, something she should never have done. I think I know why. She wanted to smoke. Did you know she smoked? She thought I didn’t know but I used to find her cigarette ends in the garbage.’

  ‘Where there any footprints near the car?’

  ‘No, the wind wiped away any tracks.’

  ‘What did the police say? Have they had a chance to examine the vehicle yet?’

  ‘They pulled it apart yesterday and said there was nothing mechanically wrong. They found some grit between the door and the floor, and think it could have got into the lock and temporarily jammed it. They’ve already said that the coroner will return a verdict of accidental death. Rachel was in a swimsuit, she’d even left her sandals inside. She knew how sensitive her skin was. She usually took a strong sunblock with her, but there was nothing in her bag.’

  ‘She had to have left the car for some reason.’

  ‘The way I see it is she got out, shut the door, it jammed and so she walked around to the other side and threw rocks at the glass. The trapped grit loosened and the door lock popped back open, but by that time she was either too confused or too panicked to notice, and collapsed from heat-stroke.’

  Lea shifted uncomfortably as she remembered the rocks that had been thrown at her by the workers in the underpass. ‘You’re right, maybe the air-con stopped working for a few minutes and the heat made her light-headed,’ she suggested. ‘I was coming home with the shopping the other day and honestly thought I was going to pass out.’

  ‘Not the air-con.’ Colette was resolute. ‘It never went wrong.’

  ‘Maybe something else happened, did you consider that? Maybe she saw something that encouraged her to leave the vehicle. You don’t think she was meeting someone, do you? Could someone else have been there?’

  ‘No, of course not. The police don’t think so, either. There were no tyre-marks, but the wind clears everything. Entire dunes have a habit of shifting and disappearing out there. Sometimes whole sections of that route simply vanish. Hardly anyone uses it, precisely for that reason.’

  Things get covered up, thought Lea. It’s as if the desert is intent on sealing away the truth.

  ‘She was a ridiculous, impossible woman,’ said Colette vehemently. ‘She never wanted me to marry her precious son. I wasn’t ‘creative’ enough for him. If she’d just stayed in town where I could have kept an eye on her—’

  ‘I don’t think it’s good for you to keep thinking about what might have happened,’ said Lea. ‘Perhaps it would be better to concentrate on the practicalities for now.’

  Colette worried at her knuckle, her head turned aside. ‘You didn’t know her like I did. This was just so damned typical of her.’

  ‘What’s going to happen about the funeral?’

  ‘We have to organise it as soon as the coroner has delivered his decision. That will probably be later today. They do things quickly here. We’ll cremate because it’ll be too expensive to ship the remains to the US.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, will you let me know?’ Lea asked. ‘I’m sure Ben has enough to worry about right now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Colette. ‘Ever since he got his promotion I hardly ever see him.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know he got promoted.’

  ‘Didn’t Roy tell you? I’m sorry, I’m just not dealing with this at all well. I’m glad you became friends with Rachel. Tom Chalmers was a sweet old stick, but she didn’t have much to say to him.’

  ‘They never found out what happened to his daughter?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  This was her moment to say that she thought there was a connection, but seeing the pain in Colette’s face she could not bring herself to make the claim. What would be the point of furthering her grief?

  ‘Oh, before I forget.’ Colette removed a hardback from her pocket and slid it across the counter. ‘Here’s your book back.’

  Lea looked at the green and cream cover, which featured a lion wearing spectacles. A very old edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum, with illustrations by WW Denslow, 1900. Surely not a first edition? She carefully opened the flyleaf and checked the receipt inside: Kinokuniya bookstore—Dubai Mall. She had been to the store but would never have been able to afford anything like this. The date on the receipt indicated that it had been purchased three months earlier.

  ‘I don’t think this is mine,’ Lea said warily.

  ‘Rachel asked me to return it to you,’ said Colette. ‘She was anxious that you should have it back.’

  ‘Are you sure she wasn’t just confused?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to be. I don’t know why she didn’t bring it over herself.’

  Because she was going to the desert first thing, thought Lea, but said nothing. She placed the book among the cookery volumes on her counter shelf. ‘If you want me to look after Abbi and Norah while you make Rachel’s arrangements it’s no problem.’

  ‘I think we’re covered,’ said Colette absently. ‘I can drop Abbi off at the daycare centre, and Norah—well, I don’t know where she is. On a study date, probably.’ She rose to leave. ‘You know, Rachel had a good life. I think Ben wants her funeral to be some kind of celebration, but none of her old friends will be here. Perhaps you’d come?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lea. ‘I’m sorry I only knew her a short time. I think we would have become good friends.’

  She watched as Colette headed back down the path once more, carefully avoiding the new-mown grass, as if she was afraid of leaving footprints that might mar the striped pattern. That’s the word, she thought, watching her neighbour leave, afraid.

  She went to her computer and checked on the book.

  Baum’s very first edition had been for friends. The main imprint ran to 10,000 copies. Prices for an original varied between $100,000 and less than $4,000, depending on quality. It turned out that the book largely owed its success to a musical version that opened two years after its publication. There were thirteen sequels. She flicked through the faded pages, and for the first time it crossed her mind that perhaps Rachel had been unbalanced after all. But then she remembered her very first sighting of the city’s towers, and the thought that they reminded her of the Emerald City of Oz. There were no bookmarks or letters slipped inside, so she placed the volume on top of all the others yet to be properly arranged.

  Cara returned from school, passed through the kitchen without speaking and carried a stack of toast off to her computer. Occasionally a car crept along the street in near silence. The sky remained so uniformly blue and cloudless that the house appeared to be in some kind of film set representing limbo.

  We are adrift and becalmed, she thought, floating far away from the everyday world, vanishing one by one. We have to leave here before it’s too late, or do something about it. Either way, it will be the end of everything.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Promotion

  LEA CALLED THE Deputy Police Commissioner to see if there had been any progress on the search for Milo’s attackers.

  Mr Qasim sounded harassed and in no mood to talk. ‘We found an old Toyota abandoned in the workers’ barracks,’ he explained briskly. ‘The owner said it was stolen from him. Unfortunately, he had lent the car to many of his fellow workers—they all paid a share to use it. Therefore we have no useful forensic information. Is there anything else I can help you with?’

  ‘I guess you know about Rachel Larvin. She’d been to the desert plenty of times before
, but somehow she got locked out of her car died. What do the police think?’

  Mr Qasim sounded surprised to hear that she had already been informed of the death. ‘I’m afraid I am not at liberty to give out that information,’ he said carefully. ‘How did you hear about this?’

  ‘I’m her next-door neighbour, Mr Qasim,’ she said. ‘We had started to become good friends.’

  ‘The police have no reason to presume that it was anything other than an unfortunate accident.’ Qasim was obviously anxious to halt any spread of disinformation. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘if any of your friends ask, tell them not to worry. The police will issue a statement soon.’

  ‘One other thing. What about the pipe bombs? Any further news on those?’

  ‘There is no danger. We believe them to be the work of a single angry individual, and will shortly be making an arrest.’

  ‘Single? I saw two people.’

  He ignored the point. ‘You understand that we are anxious to resolve this matter as quickly and quietly as possible.‘

  Lea had no more time to dwell on the subject. Roy had called to warn her that one of his supervisors, Alexei Petrovich, was coming to dinner, so she would be forced to marshal her meagre cooking skills and prepare something that would please him. She found a recipe of her mother’s, chicken with lemons, and reluctantly went to the mall.

  CARA SAT ON her favourite rock and looked out at the sea. Her conversion was now complete. Her skin had tanned a deep, rich caramel, her hair lightening and growing coarse. She looked more like a Californian wild-child than a Chiswick schoolgirl. She had abandoned her track suit top and black jeans, and now wore a faded blue Superdry tee, checked shorts and flip-flops. Her manner of speech was altering. Surrounded by the polyglot conversation of migrant children, she had shaved away the clip of her Britishness and had begun to soften and elongate her speech, so that she sounded American. She called Dean and waited for him to pick up.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’