© Denise Mina 2003

Isabella had an unusual stare. He commented on it when they first met. Her eyes, he said, didn't flicker around a room like a nervous fly. They were still, focused on him, oblivious movement in her peripheral vision. She had a perfect stillness about her and he loved it.

Men had loved her lithe body and fire red hair before. They had fallen in loved with her elegant hands and eyes as green as an Irish hillside but never the stillness. They didn't realise that she had it and she credited him with noticing. What she loved about him was his money and his hypnotic gut. It was beautiful. It hung like a mournful chin over his Gucci belt and when he lay on his side it fell like a gravel landslide onto the bed. It symbolised everything she cherished in him: his prosperity, his taste for excess, the steep ratio of their relative attractiveness. But now he was missing.

It had been five entire days, long enough for a body to melt into the ground in wet heat like this, even a body as lush and full as Jurgen's. He had hired a car and they set off for a small settlement near a large waterfall. They stopped for gas in the middle of the jungle and Isabella went to use the facilities. When she returned to the car, moments later, Jurgen was gone.

The Mikumi police were very interested. A tourist missing on safari was bad for business. Any suggestion of a violent attack could endanger the future of the resort. They questioned every single person in the hotel, giving the staff from the petrol station a particularly hard time. The police chief smiled and told her proudly that one man lost a finger during questioning, as if the digit had simply dropped off and rolled under the table. He smiled when he told her. They would never find him, though, she felt sure. They were keen but incompetent. They didn't know how to question people, only beat them.

There were bad gangster men in the bush, they told her, men from Mozambique who came over the boarder at night and would kill a tourist for fun. She was very, very lucky she was out of the car, they said, or she would certainly have suffered the same sad fate. The only trace they found of Jurgen were the marks of a scuffle in the deep red soil nearby. It looked as if he had put up a struggle. The ravine nearby was too deep to climb into and was covered over with tall trees so that a helicopter could not search it.

The Tree Hotel staff wanted to know that she would be able to pay the bill if the fat man never came back: it was the most expensive hotel in the entire national park. She could pay, easily. Jurgen had given her four cards of her own, paid off at the end of every month by his estate. If he had lived he might have married her and she would have had everything. He was the kindest man she had ever been with. Isabella had been the trophy of a lot of men: bankers from Frankfurt, futures traders in London, once an art gallery owner in New York. In the late nineties she had done the Lebanese businessman circuit, working her way through three of them, all of them related, cousins or something, all based in Paris.

She had come from London originally. The first man found her walking along the street, on her way to school in Hammersmith. He stopped his Jaguar and asked the sixteen year old whether she would like to visit Texas. He took her to a dress shop she had never heard of and bought her clothes in colours that made her beautiful. She was tall already and he picked high heels for her, five pairs. They hurt her feet and cut her heels but she never had to walk very far.

She sent her mother and father a postcard from Austin. Don't worry, mum, I am here with a friend. They wouldn't have worried anyway. It was more for his benefit than theirs. He cared for her. Very soon he forgot that he had picked her up in the street and formed her. He fell in love with her, with her quietness. She wasn't like the others, he said, he couldn't figure her out. She smiled but felt nothing for him. His face was staring to irritate her. His earnestness was grating. He looked at her too much, when she was sleeping or watching TV, she would feel itchy little eyes on her and turn to find him staring.

She left him in Miami, in a perfect hotel on the sea front with a giant purple Bougainvillea slung like a feather boa across the white stucco wall.

Then there was another man. She met him in New York and they travelled to Brazil. She didn't remember leaving him but she knew that she did. She always left them. Two men later she hardly remembered their names.

She developed a wardrobe of her own, a taste of her own. She kept a flat in Rome and had developed a placeless pan-European accent. She met other women who like to meet the same kinds of men and supposed they were her friends. Friends of a kind. And the men came and went, came and went. She had never worked a day.

Some of the women friends worked. Some were models but mostly they were like her: beautiful enough to take the breath from a man's body but plain on camera. Tall enough to model was too tall in real life, thin enough to model was too thin. The men didn't like that, it made them feel predatory and, although they were, they didn't like to feel that they were. They used the women for pleasure and paid them with cars and houses and cards, until they grew bored or the women lost their looks or charm.

She could only remember her men fondly. Leaving them was never an act of spite or hate. It was always done in a burst of ennui. They were all kind to her in their way. But Jurgen, fat roly- poly baby, was kinder to her than any of them. Jurgen loved her but didn't stare at her, he didn't paw her when she was reading. He let her chose her own clothes. He allowed her the choice in whether she went to parties with him or not.

She stayed on at the Tree Hotel for an extra week, hoping somehow that he would come back but knowing in her heart that he wouldn't. The hotel was built on stilts in the National Park, high in the red trees with green leaves all around them and the red fired earth below. There were only four rooms. Each night's stay cost more than the average person made per year in the region. Or was it the country. She couldn't remember.

Everyone came to the breakfast room. It was open on three sides and the park wardens scattered meat and fruit on the ground in the morning. The approaching whoop and gobble of the mangabey monkeys would wake up anyone still asleep, luring them to the breakfast room for a vision of white-lidded eyes and long snouts peering through the undergrowth below. There were other animals too but she was only interested in the meat eaters and hunters. Jurgen had booked a night safari the night before he disappeared. They were supposed to go on it together.

The residents of the Tree Hotel had changed since he went missing. When he was with her there had been a small woman and her tall husband, both Finnish, an academic couple from Louisiana, a military man from Senegal who talked endlessly about the high price of everything, there with a young woman who never spoke. Since Jurgen there were new people, a bald man and his wife who was ill and smelled of medicine. A chatty retired woman academic from North Carolina who was so wizened from sun exposure that her face looked like a little walnut. A gay couple from Paris, men, who wanted to be friends with her because she was beautiful and sad and cried every night when she was alone. They could hear her. She would have to leave soon.

She planned to go back to Rome, alone again, but she would move soon. She would sell up and go without seeing her women friends. Perhaps Moscow for a while, there was a lot of money there and it would be easy to get lost. She wanted to be lost. She wanted to move fast enough to out-run memories of Jurgen and Miami and Brazil and all the departures and the mess and the nothing. The nothing upset her more than anything else, that in leaving these men she felt nothing but the urge to be away. But it was her nature. She had to accept it.

She was watching the mangabey over the balcony. The pack of matted grey pelts gathered around the trees, hiding, flashing white lids as they looked around for trouble, whooping to declare their territory, the sharp noise reverberating around the echoing forest. The new residents gasped and whispered to their neighbours while patient staff waited nearby with the hot breakfast and fresh local fruits, bored by the sight and the noise.

Isabella held the railings tight but she wasn't looking at the monkeys. She was looking straight down at the red soil. It came up at her, rushing to meet and swallow her. As she leaned over the railing a red hair fell from her head and floated softly down, absorbed by the land. She wanted to fall, melt into the soil, not to die but to stop existing. It was time to leave.

She informed the staff that she would depart the next day and gave them a forwarding address in Cape Town, in case the police had any news for her. They arranged her travel to Dodoma and she tipped everyone liberally, paying for the room with one of dear Jurgen's cards.

It was the night safari he had booked for her and there were four of them in the back of the Range Rover. A guide called Bobby, a cheerful man with yellow eyes and skin so black it had the blue sheen of a plum, the bald man without his sickly wife, Isabella and the withered American walnut woman, dressed like a man in shorts and a cheap T-shirt. She had recently retired from a teaching post in North Carolina and was fulfilling all her life-long dreams of travel. Her sister had died of a heart attack four years ago and she liked to eat meat but it disagreed with her stomach. It gave her constipation. She proffered information about herself as though she was interesting. Isabella nodded at each new morsel and felt very tired. The woman used the guide's name over and over and over again. In every sentence she repeated his name at least twice.

It was dark and cold, the musty dust whipped up by a dusky breeze caught in their throats and stung their eyes. When the Range Rover stopped, they stood up and Bobby pointed into a clump of trees. They were looking straight at them before they realised what they were: movement, and suddenly the outline of a tiny cub rolling over formed itself in the grainy light. Bobby turned the hand-held spot light to full beam and a sleepy lioness looked up from the pride to see what the disturbance was.

See, said Bobby, how still they were. Hunters don't look at things the way other animals do. Their gaze is still, focused on the subject, oblivious to movement in their peripheral vision. That is how they identify a victim and stay with them. That is how they hunt. We must be very careful, if threatened the lions will kill even if they aren't hungry.

But Bobby, why, Bobby? Why do they kill if they're not hungry, Bobby? Isabella looked straight into the bullet points of light reflected back from the tall grass.

Because it's their nature, she said softly, they kill because they can't do otherwise.