He walked round to see what Pam was pointing at with her swatter. He got down low, finally dropping onto his stomach to get the best angle. He patted his ass and slid a credit-card flashlight out of his pocket. In the shade afforded by the barn roof, it made a big difference.
The fan disc had been split open by the forces exerted by the blades tearing free, leaving the metal twisted and jagged.
The face of the flange was smooth almost all the way round. Then it wasn’t. Here, in this one place, were the two shallow score marks, maybe half an inch long, that he’d seen in the emailed photos. They were almost parallel but connected at one point, running with the grain of the alloy. ‘Witness marks’, they called them. Imperfections that told a story. The story they told was still secret, and might never be known, but they teased him like a cinema preview of forthcoming attractions.
He shifted the flashlight and – just for an instant – saw something else. He played the sharp white beam over a shallow angle across the metal and saw it again. He got even closer and ran his thumb across the metal in case his eyes were playing tricks.
He frowned and Pam saw it.
‘What?’
‘Got a graze here too. Under the scores.’
Pam was flat on her belly in a second, her shoulder nudging his. He watched her manicured thumb run gently across the metal surface. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of the team, who leaned forward in anticipation. ‘Grazing,’ she said to Tom. ‘What made that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. She opened her mouth, then saw his closed look, and left it.
Tom noticed that the holes for the ring of bolts that had once held the disc to the shaft were all empty. ‘Find any flange bolts?’ He knew the answer would be no. If they’d found them, they’d be here.
‘Not yet,’ said Pam. ‘Small things like that …’ She trailed off.
Tom switched his attention to the curled and spiked surface of the once-perfect fan disc. Everywhere there was evidence of where the blades had torn free of the metal disc – jagged edges, virgin shards of metal exposed suddenly to the air for the first time since manufacture.
He examined what was left of the assembly, waiting for something to come to him.
The Karoo faded around him as he let his mind drift idly, like a child in a hayfield, wandering and meandering, brushing his hands through the high grass of information around him, plucking at seed-heads, then letting them fall and scatter.
He could feel himself coming close and let the idea take him there, following, not chasing.
The fan blades that were still attached to the disc were clustered together right over the place where the graze and the score marks were.
He rolled onto his side in the dust, away from the disc, and propped himself on his elbow. A fly buzzed close to his ear. Rian leaned down and casually flicked it away with a swatter.
Nobody spoke to him or asked him anything, and the silence of the Karoo fell softly over them all, like a shady veil.
Tom’s mind raced in short, tight circles. Scoring and grazing; scoring and grazing. It meant something but he couldn’t think what. He tried to let go and get back to the hayfield of discovery, but his mind felt more like a combine harvester, churning about noisily. There was too much to process right now: he couldn’t do it. Scoring and grazing were important. He just didn’t know why.
He looked up into five hopeful faces, got to his feet and brushed the desert from his jeans. He should’ve worn shorts – or chinos at least: jeans were like Bacofoil in this heat.
He owed them something. He felt it even as his more-cynical self scoffed and laughed: What? For a thirty-nine-cent fly-swatter and a can of Coke you owe them a probable cause?
He didn’t want to build it up – didn’t want to let them see how his instinct was screaming at him that this was it, this was the key.
He tried to keep his voice neutral: ‘This is important. I think. I don’t know how yet but I think the fan disc is the thing.’
‘The graze?’ Pam watched his face closely, as if it would give her as much information as she’d hear from his mouth.
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. And I don’t know what conclusions I’d be jumping to anyway.’ He opened his palms in a vague gesture of ignorance. ‘Maybe I should sleep on it.’
Pam nodded, but none of them pressed him further, for which he was grateful. He had no idea why the graze was more important than the scoring. But he had confidence that his brain would go on working on the problem without him, and inform him when it had come to a decision.
‘Any more Coke?’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Clint, but Tom was already halfway there. He grabbed six Cokes and a cream soda and lowered the lid, revealing a mirage-like figure floating towards the barn on watery legs across the mirrored sand.
Tom let the lid of the chest drop with a dull thud and, without taking his eyes off the figure, hissed open one of the Cokes and took a long swallow. He was aware of the others joining him and following his gaze.
‘It’s a boy,’ said Ness, as if announcing a birth.
It was a boy. A small, skinny boy with knobbly knees below bone-thin thighs that disappeared into over-large red soccer shorts.
Tom frowned. ‘Where the hell’s he come from?’ He felt Paul shrug beside him.
‘Kids out here. They walk a long way to school.’
They stood in the shade and watched the boy approach with an easy, loose-limbed gait, his round head rolling slightly backwards with each stride, his chin bobbing into the air in modest pride.
Finally he got close enough to smile a greeting, but he didn’t. He walked right up to them, and now Tom could see that, despite his lanky appearance, the boy was small, his extreme thinness making him appear much taller. His skin was dark and smooth and perfect, his ears tucked close and neat against the sides of his head, his hair shorn to mere circles on his skull. His eyes were everything in his face and, even though he hadn’t said hello yet, Tom felt the sad anxiety coming off the child in waves.
He raised a hand in a tired greeting. ‘Sanibonani.’
They all murmured their own versions of ‘hello’ and Pam held out a Coke to him. He almost stepped forward to take it, then saw September’s drink, and his eyes darted quickly between Tom and Rian – the two white males, Tom noted. ‘Can I have a cream soda, please, baas?’ he asked quietly.
They all took a step backwards so Tom could get another cream soda from the chest.
‘Thank you, baas.’
The boy didn’t open the can, just touched its iciness to his cheek and then his slender neck, which disappeared into a baggy blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt. ‘Have you seen my ostrich?’
