Читать книгу The Wild Girls - Phoebe Morgan - Страница 9

The police tape looks unnatural in the lush green surrounds of the safari lodge complex. The doors are all open, now, as the forensics team come in and out, their clinical white uniforms catching the light of the sun as it burns down on the empty, parched plains. Dotted on the wooden walkways and inside the five lodges are numbered yellow markers – that’s where they found the first body, that’s where they found the second. Over there is where one of the more junior officers uncovered the first victim’s shoe. On the edge of the Limpopo river, in amongst the sticky, thick mud and the shiny-backed insects, that’s where the blood spatter was, bright and viscous. They were lucky it didn’t get washed away.

Above, a helicopter circles, the drone of it loud and relentless, a harsh man-made noise disrupting the constant hum of the cicadas. From the cockpit, you’d be able to see the whole site, in all its glory – here, the main lodge, able to sleep twelve people. At each corner, a smaller lodge, set up for one guest, alone. The four glistening plunge pools, one of which contained the missing knife, the blade of it circling lazily around the drain. The wooden walkways that connect the lodges look like a maze from this height – or an elaborate board game, designed to catch you out.

In this game, though, half the players are dead.

The forensic officer thinks this place will be shut down, now, forever haunted by the events of one hot, dreadful weekend in March. He feels the loss; it seeps from the windows of the lodges, rises up from the river, rustles with the wind through the gum trees, whispering a warning to anyone who might come near Deception Valley. Briefly, a white butterfly lands on his arm, weightless against his uniform, but just as quickly, it is gone. He stares at the patch on which it landed, remembering the imprint of its tiny limbs.

How easily beauty can be destroyed.