The Sand Men

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘I’m staying for the opening, then going home for a good long holiday at the end of the month,’ she said finally. ‘I know Colette was planning a break too, but she won’t be able to take it now. I was wondering if we wives couldn’t do something to help that poor family.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ Lea asked.

  ‘Well, they’ll have to get the house refitted with wheelchair ramps and special handles in the bathroom, things like that. If DWG isn’t taking care of it quickly enough we can hire someone to carry out the work. You know, to save Colette from having to worry about it. I heard the company has been very generous with compensation, but money’s not the answer really, is it?

  ‘I’m glad that DWG recognised they were in some way culpable.’

  ‘Did you hear about the results of the enquiry?’

  ‘I didn’t know there had been one.’

  ‘James told me, so I don’t suppose it’s a secret. There was an electrical fire and it burned through the cables holding the pipe in place. He explained the whole thing to me in great detail but how it happened hardly matters, does it? It can’t change anything. I just wondered—’ Lea waited for her to continue, but Madeline was struggling with her words. ‘You see, there’s been a lot of talk. About the accidents, I mean. It’s just that—there’s a rumour that Leo Hardy was with Ben that night—and I thought you might have heard about it.’ Madeline Davenport had always championed the company. Lea wondered if something had happened to mitigate her opinion.

  ‘I believe he was, yes.’

  ‘Because Mr Hardy was with my husband as well, just a short while before the accident happened.’ Madeline twisted her hands together in her lap. ‘James saw the pair of them talking just before Ben Larvin went down to the pipeworks. He says Leo Hardy summoned Ben to the resort and sent him in.’

  ‘You think Hardy knows more about what happened than he’s letting on, is that it?’

  ‘Lord, I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble, I just keep going over the sequence of events in my head. But if you do know anything, perhaps we should tell someone.’

  ‘Roy never mentioned it.’

  ‘I’ve just been trying to understand. People think the workmen are deliberately sabotaging the project, but that doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, it’s their livelihood, isn’t it? Why would they want to destroy their own jobs? They have so many dependents. It’s Mr Hardy I don’t trust. What if he had a reason for wanting to get rid of poor Ben Larvin? Don’t tell me, I know I’m being stupid. We’ve all become so—suspicious. And now here I am, virtually accusing a man of murder. It was never like this before. I must get back.’ She rose to leave. Lea stood watching her, unsure as to whether she had just been accused.

  Madeline paused on the doorstep and turned. ‘It never seems to upset the men, does it? They just get on with their work. I’ve hardly seen James since he got promoted.’

  ‘He was promoted as well?’

  ‘I think it incentivises them, being taken into the board’s confidence. It makes them feel powerful,’ said Madeleine. ‘They can do whatever they like. I sent Colette a note asking if she needed anything. That’s all any of us can do, isn’t it? After all, we’re only the wives.’

  The wives, she thought. You’re all living in a dream world.

  THE CURTAINS WERE drawn, making the house look like it had been closed up for the summer. Lea rang the bell and stepped back. She was about to give up when the door opened a few inches. Colette blinked out into the fierce light. She looked as if she had just been aroused from a troubled sleep.

  ‘I’m sorry, Colette, I wondered if I could have a word with you? It’s important.’

  The door opened a fraction further. Slipping inside, Lea found the Larvin household dark and icy. The maid kept everything so tidy that it seemed as if no-one lived there.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what—’ Colette stopped and corrected herself. ‘I was going to say I don’t know what you must think of me, but to be honest I don’t care what anyone thinks. This is how things are now.’

  ‘How are Abbi and Norah doing?’

  ‘You know Norah. She spends most of her time with her own friends, why would she want to be here? And Abbi’s on the other side of the world.’ She looked around, pushing her hair back in place. ‘What was it you wanted?’

  ‘I know it sounds odd, but if I wondered if I could have a look at Rachel’s room. I think it would be easier to explain afterwards.’

  The request clearly took Colette aback. ‘I tidied up her room after she died. It was a tip,’ she said, mystified. Her arms folded in suspicion. ‘Why do you want to see it?’

  Can I trust her? thought Lea. ‘It’s nothing, just a silly thing really, but I need to put my mind at rest.’

  ‘I don’t know what you hope to find there, but go ahead, knock yourself out.’ Colette threw her a mean stare. ‘Oh, and my husband, thanks for asking, is never going to fully recover from his accident.’

  ‘I went to the hospital to see him just two days ago, Colette. I just missed you. And Roy has been to see him regularly.’

  ‘I know, everyone’s been very kind.’ She made it sound like a bad thing. ‘Then you know he’s not responding very well. There have been other complications. His immune system—’ Her face suddenly crumpled. ‘Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening, Lea. I really don’t.’

  ‘It’s okay, Colette, nobody expects you to be superwoman…’

  ‘I can’t get any kind of a handle on it. The doctors say he’ll eventually walk with the aid of prosthetics, that he’ll be able to lead some semblance of a normal life if he wants to, but they can’t say what he’ll be like inside. And right now he doesn’t want to live. Who will he be? Not the man I knew and fell in love with. I know it sounds terrible, but I’m not strong enough for this. I think about it and feel sick.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll feel different given time.’

  ‘No, I know I won’t. Rachel’s death affected him so badly, and now this has torn him apart. How could everything have changed so fast? He so wanted to see the resort open. He was so proud to have been taken into the confidence of the board of directors. They told me to attend the opening, to make a show, but I can’t be there without him.’ She started crying again.

  Lea could not bear to see her so distraught. ‘The book you returned to me from Rachel,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t mine. I think you should have it back. I don’t know why she wanted me to have it.’

  Colette drew herself up, trying to listen. ‘Rachel was kind of weird toward the end. She drank too much and believed all kinds of stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Spirits, legends, conspiracy theories, I don’t know. She was difficult with the kids, filling their heads with crazy ideas. She wasn’t good with technology and had trouble loading apps on her phone, so she asked Ben to get her a paper map of the Dream World site.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘I honestly have no idea. Look, Lea, I know you’re searching for something too, but it isn’t here.’

  ‘I’m just trying to make sense—’

  Colette had not heard her. ‘In the early days Rachel and I used to go down to the site with Ben and he would point out where everything was going to be, and I just couldn’t imagine these great silver buildings rising up into the sky. But he could. He only had to look at the floor plans and he could see the finished resort.’

  ‘Maybe she was just trying to connect things too. I promise I’ll let you know if I do find anything.’

  ‘Her room is up there, first left. I don’t go in it.’

  The blinds were drawn upstairs as well. Lea made her way along the shadowed passage and tried the door. Rachel’s room was sparse and neat. There was a hint of lavender and patchouli oil in the dead air. Her fountain pen lay on a table beneath the window, but there was no accompanying stationery of any kind. A bookcase was filled with volumes of philosophy, biography, various social sciences.
There were a few trashy paperbacks—virtually the only physical reading material that could be purchased without a trip to the immense Kinokuniya bookstore. The wastepaper basket under the table had been emptied. In the drawer beneath the table she found a fold-out map of the coastline, and took it.

  How long had Rachel sensed that something was wrong? Lea opened her desk diary and flipped through the pages, hoping to find something of interest, but only the most mundane notes appeared.

  Buy conditioner

  Post sweater

  Birthday present—DW North

  Dream World North. The four towers that were set to house the resort’s signature restaurants, arranged at the four points of the compass. She vaguely recalled a conversation about the North tower. Roy had mentioned it some time back, but in what context? Why would Rachel be taking a birthday present there? If there was an answer here, it didn’t easily show itself. She returned downstairs.

  Colette looked as if she’d been crying. Rachel was tempted to put an arm around her, but as she stepped forward she saw Colette flinch. ‘Did Rachel buy a birthday present for someone the week before she died?’ she asked.

  Colette dried her eyes with the back of her sleeve. ‘I don’t know. She was very independent. She did all her own shopping, never came to the mall with us. She never quite turned her back on her hippy years. She drove out to California in a VW van in the sixties and met her first husband there. Smoked too much pot and burned her bra. She thought she was liberated. I thought she was ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ said Lea, turning to go. A thought struck her. ‘How much longer are they going to keep Ben in?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. Mostly he sleeps. If he doesn’t start his rehabilitation therapy soon the doctors are worried that his long-term prospects will be affected.’

  ‘When is his birthday?’

  ‘Not for another two months. Why do you want to know if Rachel was buying gifts?’

  Lea shook her head. ‘Sorry, it’s just something she mentioned, a crazy idea. It’s really nothing.’

  ‘She sent a hideous sweater to her brother John in Ohio, and it was Norah’s birthday the week she before died,’ Colette volunteered. ‘Rachel doted on her, always spent way too much money.’

  ‘What did she get her?’

  ‘A new laptop. Norah maxed out the memory on her old one. Rachel took it to the beach house to surprise her.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘Your husband had his carpenters come in and set everything up. You must know more about it than me.’

  ‘No—I don’t.’

  ‘Norah shouted at me because I unplugged the cables in her bedroom to clean behind the desk. So I suggested she went to hang out with your daughter at the beach house in the evenings, while Roy and Ben were finishing up.’

  ‘I knew Roy said that Cara could take friends there. The sweater for her brother—she posted it?

  ‘No. She hated waiting in line at the post office and she was near the resort. I think she took it to Ben to post. You know, using the internal system.’

  ‘Thanks, Colette. I’ll catch you later.’

  She stepped outside into the heat-bath, and darted back to the lighter chill of her own house. In the hallway she stopped and caught sight of herself in the mirror.

  Colette thought her mother-in-law was crazy. But she hadn’t been crazy. She’d been frightened. She’d gone to the North Tower to give Ben the package containing the sweater. Then she had returned home and written an inscription to Lea in the book of fantastical nonsense. What had happened in between those two events?

  Her skin prickled in the air-conditioned chill of the kitchen. Rachel couldn’t risk coming to talk to her. She feared she was going mad, or feared something else. Something within the resort’s maze of tailored lawns, flowerbeds and fountains. Something hidden in plain sight that she alone had spotted.

  The evening light was fading. Lea picked up Rachel’s book, searched for her car keys and headed to the garage.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Heart

  AT THE EXIT gate of the compound she was stopped while her departure details were laboriously logged by listless teenaged guards. Lea waited impatiently as the boy hunched over his notebook, writing longhand, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, finally stamping it and releasing her. Wiring hung from the guardhouse counter, awaiting to be attached to a barcode-reader.

  The sun had started to set as she drove toward the resort, passing in the opposite direction of traffic leaving the business district of the city. Streams of light swagged the hoods and roofs of the vehicles that pulsed along the highway, a golden river that passed through the financial canyons like the flow of passing money. The drivers were mostly men in dark suits or kanduras, their eyes hidden behind reflective aviator glasses. They were living the dream.

  Mist had smudged the horizon, removing the distinction between sea and sky. Slowly, the glass and steel towers of the DWG complex stretched themselves across her windscreen. She spun the wheel and turned away from the shining highway, onto the site, drawing up to the intimidating new steel security barriers set in a concrete platform on the road.

  An immense bank of steel bleachers ran beside the road for the entire length of the resort perimeter. Workmen were still bolting together hospitality marquees, bars and boxes for the invited VIPs.

  She showed her laminated ID card at the red and white security booths. After a lengthy period of examination, the guards punched buttons that lowered the wedge-shaped ramp and raised the barriers.

  ‘From midnight tonight the entire resort is off-limits to everyone,’ one of them told her.

  The resort was almost deserted. Perhaps inside the chilled control rooms and service corridors staff scurried back and forth, but the overall atmosphere was of orderly calm.

  The four observation towers marked the boundary lines of the resort like campaniles. Much of the area had been cordoned off in order to prevent the invited guests from wandering into other parts of the resort. Her path took her through a forest of purple bougainvillea and perfumed white night-flowers.

  She knew that Roy had been occupying an area on the seventh floor of the North tower, and that Ben most likely had an office on the same level, so it made sense to try there. The main plaza was deserted; it was still too hot to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary outside. She searched the windows of the surrounding buildings but saw no-one.

  Most of the exterior work had now been completed. Inside the buildings, trunking was being routed through floors and ceilings, marble had been polished and the last few chandeliers were wired in. Somewhere an angle-grinder yowled and scratched. When it ceased, the site fell completely silent, but there had to be men somewhere, burrowed deep below the gardens, in the delivery tunnels, in the maintenance rooms.

  She parked and walked to the sea-facing tower. Emerald lizards darted across her path like rush-hour pedestrians. The main doors were unguarded but the bank of silver elevators was taped off, so she searched around for another way up. The shining marble halls reminded her of a grand mausoleum, a monument to a forgotten race. In the centre of the hall stood the immense figure, a leaping athlete carved in indigo glass, his musculature as sharply defined as the compressor blades of a jet engine. He rose from a sunburst of inlaid flooring to tower above visitors’ heads, like a shrine to a dead dictator.

  Passing beneath the statue, she found herself facing a glass observation elevator. The main security CCTV globes would have already noted her features by now and matched them to a list of personnel permitted to visit the site. Her ID card opened the doors.

  The gleaming curved pod rose smoothly to the seventh floor, the doors opening to reveal ice-blue walls. The hiss of air-conditioning was discernable through the partially exposed ceiling cavities.

  Apparently Roy was attending a meeting in the city’s garment district to talk about the tracking for the thirty-metre curtains that would eventually screen the Persia
na’s atrium. She tried his number but the call went directly to voicemail.

  His office was on the shore side of the great open floor. The architects’ cubicles were filled with building plans, meticulously constructed working models and half-eaten meals in cardboard boxes. She found his briefcase and papers scattered around his computer. Picking up his favourite work-shirt, she carefully folded it on a chair. It smelled of sweat and Dior aftershave.

  In one drawer she found a set of swipe cards in a plastic wallet with his ID on the back, along with a photograph of the three of them, taken when Cara was a baby in the garden in Chiswick, in happier times.

  She went to the window and looked down into the settling darkness. The view of the vast brown land was extraordinary. From here you could be forgiven for believing that you were the king, living far above your subjects, surveying all that you owned. As she removed her hands from the glass, her palm-prints evaporated like ghosts.

  On the other side was an immense quadrangle bordered with clipped trees, steel walkways, newly planted date palms, arabesques of copper fountain jets. Mosaic murals were arranged in low geometries. The final plants had gone in, the auto-watering system installed.

  I’m missing something, she thought. I have to see it through Rachel’s eyes. She hadn’t come here looking for anything—it had jumped out and caught her attention.

  She took out the map and unfolded the single sheet. It felt like years since she had opened an old-fashioned paper map, and orienting herself on it proved difficult. Rachel had ringed a building in blue biro. She turned slowly around, examining the resort’s perfectly symmetrical ground plan, but could see nothing that matched it.

  Her iPhone rang, startling her. She checked the name on the screen: Leo Hardy.

  She froze. It seemed to her that Hardy appeared whenever anything bad was about to happen. She caught the call just before it went to voicemail.

  ‘Mr Hardy.’

  ‘Mrs Brook, I need to find your husband quickly, but he’s not answering his phone. Do you know where he is?’