The Sand Men (21 page)

Arising from an uneasy sleep, Lea found the other half of the bed rumpled but empty. She was vaguely aware that Roy had come upstairs late, but there was no sign of him now. She slipped on her dressing gown and opened the door to her office. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘ you
are
here.’

‘Sorry, I thought it was best to let you sleep. I’ll just be a few minutes.’ He returned his attention to the computer printer.

‘Do you want breakfast?’

‘No, I raided the fridge before I came to bed, I’ll get something later.’

Lastri arrived and insisted on cooking breakfast for Cara, even though she only ate Cheerios in the mornings. Lea looked in on her daughter but found her bad-tempered and unresponsive. She had made the mistake of asking her about a rumoured boyfriend just before she went to bed, and had been accused of denying her a private life. Realising that she had violated some unwritten law and would now be punished with a complex series of sulky silences, she walked around the lake to clear her head of bad dreams.

The sun was rising behind the hedges, dispelling lavender mist from the lush parkland. Slats of gold striated the sculpted hedges. No-one was allowed to walk on the lawns that sloped to the water’s edge; baroque railings fenced off the grass. A phalanx of gardeners was busy trimming any sign of untidiness from the acacias, hyacinths and black willows. No desert plants were allowed to flourish in the painted landscape; wildflowers were regarded as parasites.

She passed the back gardens of the villas where the maids were setting breakfast tables. A flock of plovers rose and settled repeatedly at the far end, like a videogame resetting itself. A few matronly ladies were walking tiny inbred dogs. By mid-morning an army of strangers would be minding pets and toddlers in the shaded areas of the park. The nurses and maids of Dream Ranches were respectful and distant, careful to avoid the comfortable intimacy of mothers and owners. The scene felt oddly Victorian, as if she had been stationed in some doomed and distant fort owned by the East India Company.

Lea removed her sunglasses and studied the sky, a deep topaz that made the earth’s oxygen layer appear dangerously thin. When she reached the communal swimming pool, she found the gate closed with a red and white plastic chain. She leaned over the railings and saw that the pool was half empty. Something flopped and rolled in the shallow end, a large shiny brown insect she had never seen before. Unable to escape, it seemed likely to die. Disconcerted, she headed home.

‘Roy?’ she called to the other room, ‘why are they draining the pool?’

He appeared at her side, tightening the knot of a grey silk tie. ‘What do you think?’

She touched the tie, straightening it. ‘Kind of sexy. Do you remember when Cara was little and we hired that horrible French villa?’

Ray chuckled. ‘God, we managed to pick the only unpicturesque village in the whole of Provence. No towels and a wasps’ nest on the patio. Why?’

‘Cara was asleep and we sat watching the shooting stars. And you said nothing bad could ever happen to us, so long as we stayed together. Remember?’

‘Sure. What is this?’

‘I don’t know, I miss you.’ She reached up and gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘Why are you all dressed up?’

‘I have to sit in on a presentation tonight. I’ll be late.’

‘There’s breakfast ready on the patio. Try and eat some, you’ll make Lastri’s day.’

Roy checked his tie in the mirror. ‘What did you ask me?’

‘The pool—it’s half empty.’

‘I don’t know, honey. You know who to ask, go over and see if they’re around. I need to use your computer for a few minutes.’

There was no sign of the maintenance man, so she collected the spare key to the pump room, a small breezeblock building accessed from the rear of the garden.

She’d been shown how to do this. Checking that the long red handles of the pool valves were pointing in the right direction, she made sure that the tank was filling, At first she thought there wasn’t enough water coming back into the header tank, which would mean a leak in the recirculation system, but then she decided to check the concrete pool itself. In the corner of the deep end was a faintly visible crack, a deep blue line that ran for a little over a metre.

She returned to find Roy draining his coffee. ‘Looks like a fissure has opened along a join,’ she explained. ‘I’ll give maintenance a call.’

‘I’m sure somebody over there is already figuring out what the problem is,’ said Roy. ‘I have to go. Lastri brought in the paper.’

She looked down at her copy of
Gulf News
. ‘Reading that will take up thirty seconds of my day.’ A movement caught her eye. Colette was coming up the drive. She looked as if she had been crying. Lea went to the front door and opened it.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s Rachel.’ She pulled out a wet tissue and rubbed at her eyes, making them redder.

‘You’d better come in.’

‘She’s always been so damned headstrong, she refuses to admit she’s getting any older, acting like she’s still a teenager, for God’s sake.’

‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘She went out to the desert yesterday morning—she’s done it before, we can’t stop her—and somehow managed to lock herself out of the car. She was found by a passing motorist. She’d been in the sun for six hours without any protection. We’ve been at the hospital all night.’

‘My God, is she all right?’

‘The doctors tried to bring her temperature down but her arteries weren’t flexible enough—they’d narrowed, and they just couldn’t do it. She died a little after six this morning.’

‘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

11:00
AM,
F
RIDAY 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 that. 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.’