The Sand Men (13 page)

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 kerb 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

T
HE
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

‘H
EY,
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,’ said 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.

‘My daughter-in-law comes here so often that the store detectives probably keep an eye on her,’ Rachel confided. ‘Me, I can’t stay interested in clothes for more than a few minutes at a time. Let’s get something cold to drink.’ As they passed a homewares shop she let her hand glide over a smokily elegant vase designed to hold a single aurum lily. ‘There’s too much stuff to look at. I’m getting nauseous.’

They seated themselves in a slightly scruffy canteen with an outside smoking deck that had been provided for the sales staff. In the background, fountains piddled feebly.

‘Poor Milo,’ said Lea. ‘I keep thinking about him. It seems so weird, the whole hit-and-run thing.’

‘Trust him to take his leave so dramatically. He really was one of the good ones. Although he could be a real pain in the ass. His death is pretty convenient.’

‘How come?’

‘He’d been upsetting people for quite a while. He was campaigning to get the old underpass closed.’ She unwound her scarf and set it aside. ‘A few months ago some of the workers started coming through into the compound and hanging out around the back of the community centre, getting high.’

‘Was he against them?’ A waitress appeared and they ordered.

‘No, not at all,’ said Rachel once they were alone again. ‘He didn’t want to see them get arrested. He lodged complaint after complaint, but nothing happened. Finally he decided to take matters into his own hands.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He confronted a gang of workers down by the highway and tried to explain what was likely to happen if they didn’t stay on their own side. He nearly got himself beaten up. Your basic failure to communicate.’

‘You don’t think they had anything to do with his death?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘They’d have to be pretty dumb to run him over outside his own house.’

‘Maybe he had a fight with them.’

‘Wouldn’t somebody have heard it?’

‘I keep thinking he came outside for another reason, and just happened to grab the garbage sack to give himself some cover.’

‘What kind of reason?’

‘Suppose there was a car outside and he thought the driver was watching his house, so he went out to check.’

‘You mean watching him because he’d become a liability.’

Lea accepted her peach smoothie from the waitress. ‘That was kind of what happened to Tom Chalmers, wasn’t it?’

‘I always wondered about that. Nobody was there when he died except Milo.’

‘Milo told me he didn’t see anyone else but I got the feeling he did.’

‘Nobody sees anything.’ Rachel tapped out a cigarette. ‘They all sleep with the windows shut and the air-con up. I was woken by the ambulance light.’