Ava McCarthy - The Courier

She homed in on the images. Most incorporated ordinary objects to lend the diamonds scale, and her eyes widened at the numbers. A gleaming, metallic stone, the size of a gobstopper: 100 carats. Another the colour of weak camomile tea and bigger than a jumbo marble: 175 carats. But most of them were as big as hen’s eggs and weighed in at over 200 carats. The last on the list was the largest of them all, a silvery crystal of 270 carats. It had been sold over a year ago to someone called Fischer for almost five million euros.

Harry let out a long breath. Was that what this was about? Was Garvin smuggling large stones, and trying to cover his tracks? She checked the file again. Whoever Fischer was, he’d only bought one stone. The rest had been sold exclusively to a buyer called Gray.

Harry’s brain hummed with questions, and she almost forgot about VW-Cargo.tmp, the second hidden file. She clicked it open, her mind preoccupied. Where did Beth fit into all of this? Another array of names flashed up on the screen. At the top was an obscure twelve-digit number: 881677273934. Harry doodled it down on her pad, her eyes travelling over the column of names: Excelsior, Artemis, Dawn Light.

Harry frowned. Dawn Light. The name seemed familiar. Dim memories floated like ghosts. Frosty mornings, bright colours. She shook her head. It wouldn’t come.

She checked the name again, and her whole body went still. Her breathing stopped, her fingers froze; the only part of her that moved was the pulse pounding in her jugular. She swallowed, and stared at the screen.

Recorded against the entry for Dawn Light, was the name HARRY MARTINEZ.

Mani stumbled into the x-ray room, sweat drenching his body. Outside, he could still hear Okker’s yells as he gloated over Alfredo’s butchered torso. The image burned into Mani’s brain, and he clenched his fists to stop his arms from trembling.

‘Over there!’

The guard called Janvier slammed Mani up against the wall. He jammed the butt of his gun against Mani’s cheek, forcing his head sideways, while the younger guard shone a torch in Mani’s ear. Then between them, they whipped Mani’s head around to check the other side. Janvier wrenched Mani’s mouth open and poked a spatula inside it until Mani gagged. Then he tore at Mani’s eye sockets and crushed his nostrils while the other guard kept him pinned to the wall.

The search wasn’t necessary. The x-ray machine performed a whole-body scan, and stones inside any part of him would be found. But Janvier and some of the other guards still indulged in their own spot checks. They liked the humiliation it caused.

When they were done, they hauled him out from the wall and shoved him to the floor. They patted him down, then turned and left. Mani stayed on his hands and knees, his elbows locked but his arms still trembling. Behind him, the door clunked shut, sucking all sound from the room.

He lifted his head. In front of him, the x-ray cubicle stood open, waiting for him like a giant, Perspex capsule. To his right was the conveyor belt that scanned outgoing luggage and to his left was another guard in a white coat, watching from behind a screened-off booth. His name was Volker, and he’d worked the x-ray unit for the last two years. He rapped on the reinforced glass.

‘Stand up!’

Mani struggled to his feet, the diamond slicing through his gut. Volker tapped the keyboard in front of him.

‘Name?’

‘Mani…’ His voice cracked. Then he cleared his throat and lifted his chin. ‘Mani Eduardo Tavares Villa dos Santos.’

Volker’s eyes narrowed at the full Portuguese name. Mani kept his chin raised. He’d spent most of his life trying to live up to that name. His parents had been Angolans, living half their lives under Portuguese rule, the rest under bloody civil war. His surname followed the Portuguese pattern of combining both their names. But his maternal grandmother had been Congolese, a strong, raucous woman who’d lived in the shadow of the Blue Mountains close to the Congo River. She’d asked that her first grandson be given a Congolese name, so he became Mani, meaning ‘from the mountain’. He could still hear his father’s scornful voice: The man from the mountain, he should be a warrior with a gun, not a mouse with a book.

Mani squared his shoulders, trying to ignore the fiery pain in his belly.

Volker stepped out from behind the screen, his redrimmed eyes fixed on Mani’s face. Mani gritted his teeth, then rolled up his left sleeve to show the bandage on his upper arm. Slowly, he unravelled the filthy dressing to expose the knife wound underneath. He sucked in air at the sight of it. Red, raw flesh bulged out through a gaping rent in his skin. The puckered edges were too far apart to knit together, but so far there was no sign of infection. No oozing pus, no bad smell. He knew what to look for because that was what had happened to Ezra.

He took a deep breath. Then he pressed the misshapen folds of flesh. Pain blazed a trail up his arm and he felt himself sway. Fighting the dizziness, he kneaded the wound until two silvery-white stones worked their way out, each the size of a large pea. He picked them up with trembling fingers and dropped them with a clatter into the metal dish that Volker was holding out.

Mani closed his eyes, the hot stabbing in his arm starting to recede. He could hear the whoosh of running water and the rattle of stones against metal. When he opened his eyes, Volker was back in his booth. Mani fumbled with his bandage, binding up his wound.

Volker flicked a switch on his console. ‘Into the cubicle.’

Mani shuffled into the x-ray capsule, positioning himself in the centre of the circular platform. The door slid shut with a whunk. A motor hummed as the C-arm of the x-ray machine enclosed the base of the cubicle and began inching its way up along the walls. Mani felt his limbs relax, the pain in his arm now a dull throb. He closed his eyes. Thank God tomorrow was his last day at the mine.

He had only come back because Ezra had begged him to, saying that he was ill. At first, Mani had refused. He had exams to sit, a scholarship to honour. He didn’t have time to return to his home village where children coughed in their sleep, and where Asha now lived as Ezra’s wife. So he sent money instead. But Ezra pleaded with him, saying that he might die. Blood poisoning from a knife wound, he’d said. He didn’t explain till later that the knife wound was self-inflicted.

So Mani had gone to see him, bracing himself for the crushing misery of the shantytown he’d managed to escape. His was a family of diamond diggers. His grandfather had crawled along the Angolan sand dunes, scrabbling for diamonds by hand, carrying them in the tin can that hung around his neck. The mine owners had stuffed a gag in his mouth to stop him from swallowing any stones. Mani’s father had washed gravel by the riverbeds, gripped by a gambler’s conviction that the next stone would change his life. When Mani was ten, his father moved them to the Northern Cape in South Africa, where he swapped riverbed mining for the underground pits. He’d been killed in a fight over a diamond the size of a sunflower seed.

‘You must take my place in the mine,’ Ezra had said when Mani went home. ‘Until I am well.’

Mani had looked away. The shack was dark, filled with the oily smell of the Primus stove. He shook his head.

‘I will send you more money, I will find another job in Cape Town.’ He already worked two jobs between his studies, sending most of his money home, but anything was better than the incarceration of the mines.

Ezra sighed. ‘Money, it will not be enough.’

Mani squinted at his brother’s face. Ezra’s eyes were feverish, his voice weak. What trouble had he got himself into now? Mani knelt beside the bed, the mud floor warm from the heat of the day.