The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  As they were eating, Fleur said, ‘I spoke to your grandfather earlier. I was worried he might read something by chance. He was very shocked, he wanted to come rushing over to us like the cavalry.’

  ‘Typical Grandpa. Sweet of him. Did you speak to Gran?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t there. Grandpa sent his love; he’s going to ring tomorrow.’

  Nikki looked up. ‘James Mohktar was going to come this evening, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Perhaps he has nothing to tell us, darling. I’m sure he’ll ring.’

  ‘Mum?’ Nikki said, suddenly putting her knife and fork down. ‘Do you want to know how Saffie died? Would it be better not to know?’

  Fleur’s heart did a painful flip. How direct Nikki was, she had almost forgotten. Fleur was groping around, trying not to think, unsure what she hoped the pathologist would tell them. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know, Nikki. If the pathologist has no idea, I think I’ll be relieved. But…I’ll go on being haunted by not knowing. If she can somehow tell…I have to then ask if it was quick…’ Her voice wavered. ‘How much Saffie would have known…and I don’t know if either of us could bear to hear it.’

  She looked up and met Nikki’s eyes. They seemed to fill her face.

  ‘I don’t want to know, Mum. I don’t want to know.’ Nikki’s hands on the table trembled and she clutched them to her, not wanting Fleur to see.

  ‘Nikki,’ Fleur said quietly. ‘You don’t need to know…Oh, darling…’ She longed to rush round the table and hold Nikki but something in her daughter’s face forbade it. ‘I wish this hadn’t happened now, when you are so pregnant and vulnerable.’

  ‘Just wish it had never happened, Fleur.’ The words burst out of Nikki.

  Shocked, Fleur’s hands flew up to her face. ‘Don’t you think I wish that every single day of my life?’ Oh, Nikki. Nikki.

  At that moment they both heard someone outside and there was a short knock on the open door and Inspector Blythe entered without waiting for an answer. Both women wondered how much of their conversation he had heard.

  ‘Good evening,’ the inspector said, smiling at the two women. ‘I’m sorry, am I disturbing your meal?’

  ‘No,’ Fleur said. ‘We’ve finished. Can I offer you anything?’

  ‘A beer would be great, if you have one.’

  ‘I think Jack left some in the fridge,’ Nikki said, going to get him one.

  ‘I’m having difficulty getting used to this humidity,’ Blythe said genially. ‘I suppose,’ he looked at the two women, ‘you’re both thoroughly used to it?’

  ‘Not really,’ Nikki said coolly. ‘I’m used to the heat but not humidity.’ She had the distinct impression the inspector was playing for time.

  The inspector took his beer gratefully. The question the women dreaded to ask him hung in the air.

  ‘Inspector Mohktar is on his way. How have you both been? Did your…Jack catch his flight safely?’

  ‘Yes. He rang me from the airport in KL.’ Nikki glanced at her watch; Jack would be in mid-flight. All at once she longed to be home and moved and sat by the window looking out at a large moon silhouetted above a black sea. Did the bloody man have something to tell them or was he going to make small talk all evening?

  Fleur too was beginning to wonder if Blythe’s visit was purely social. Perhaps he was bored in his hotel room.

  ‘Have you been interviewing local people, Inspector?’

  ‘We’ve been gathering all relative information from various sources and asking any local people living here at the time to contact us. Can I ask if either of you have thought of anything that is not in your original statements, that on reflection might help?’

  Fleur and Nikki shook their heads. He’s clutching at straws, Nikki thought, and he knows it.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ she asked. ‘I’d like to go out and get some air. I’ll walk along the beach for a while.’ She turned to Fleur. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Fleur opened her mouth to say, Be careful in the dark and mind the steps, but shut it again, knowing what effect her fussing would have. She saw the inspector had noted this and she felt irritated. She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of white wine. Then she took a deep breath.

  ‘Inspector Blythe, does the pathologist know how my daughter died?’

  Blythe met her eyes. ‘Mohktar drove up to the pathology lab this afternoon. He’s not back yet. The pathology report should have been ready this evening. He will be here any moment and then we will know more…’ He hesitated. ‘I came ahead to see how you and Miss Montrose were feeling…It is a long time ago, Mrs Campbell, and painful for both of you. I was unsure whether it was the right time for either of you to hear any stressful details of your small daughter’s death.’

  ‘My daughter being so obviously pregnant, you mean?’

  ‘James Mohktar told me she had been unwell on the way here.’

  ‘Yes, she was. It’s why I worry…’

  ‘Of course, it’s natural.’

  Fleur folded her fingers round the cold glass. ‘I think I need to know the truth about what happened to my daughter, Inspector. I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it, but I think I owe it to her…now we have found her again.’

  ‘I rather thought that was what you might feel,’ Blythe said gently.

  Fleur saw suddenly that he was a kind man who had come ahead to pave the way for unpleasant news. He had asked for a beer to dispel the obvious atmosphere in the room as he entered it; to try to put them both at ease.

  ‘I don’t think DS Mohktar will be long. I hope I’m not keeping you from anything.’

  Fleur smiled. ‘No, of course you’re not.’

  There was a little silence and then he asked, ‘So, you flew from London via Singapore to visit your daughter who is living in New Zealand?’

  ‘Yes. To see Nikki and also to look at some architecture; I’m doing an arts degree at an advanced age.’

  The inspector smiled. ‘So do many other people, a great deal older than you. Well done, I say.’ He paused. ‘When did your daughter settle in New Zealand?’

  ‘About four years ago.’

  ‘This is your first trip out to visit her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must miss her. Does she fly home to see you?’ Aware of where she was being led, Fleur said, ‘My husband died three years ago. Nikki came home for the funeral.’

  ‘She got on well with her stepfather?’

  Fleur’s eyes reflected a sudden rush of anger. Don’t even go there. ‘He was David’s best friend. He was the twins’ godfather, so he knew the twins even before my husband was killed. Fergus and Nikki adored each other. Fergus was closer than I am to my daughter.’

  ‘Why is that, Mrs Campbell?’

  ‘Nikki blamed me for Saffie’s death.’

  ‘Because you slept that afternoon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She made a judgement at five years old?’

  ‘No, not at five years old, Inspector. Not straight away. The blame and sorrow grew slowly over the years. She was totally adrift without her twin. Our difficulties with her began slowly, thirteen months later, after Fergus and I got married.’

  ‘But if she got on well with your husband, wouldn’t she have been happy?’

  Fleur met his eyes. ‘I can’t actually see how my private life is relevant to this inquiry, Inspector.’

  Blythe leant forward. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being prurient. You’d be surprised how building up a picture of people involved in a case is incredibly relevant sometimes.’

  ‘Except that Nikki was five years old and Fergus was in Singapore at the time of Saffie’s disappearance, so I can’t follow your line of reasoning.’

  The inspector sighed. ‘I guess I was asking if, although she liked her stepfather and knew him well, your daughter resented you actually marrying him and usurping her own dead father.’

  Fleur felt a growing respect for this man, he was like a terrier. ‘Yes, you’re
right, Inspector, she did resent me remarrying. It took Fergus years and endless patience for her to accept his love. When she did, they never looked back.’

  ‘And you, Mrs Campbell? Did she accept your love too?’ He watched her small brown hands that were never still.

  ‘No, she has never been able to forgive me. The twins lost their beloved father, and then you see, in her eyes, I let her sister, her twin, the other half of her, die by my neglect.’

  This was too much for Blythe. ‘But she is an adult woman now, Mrs Campbell. Someone came along and snatched your daughter while you slept. You did not kill her…’

  ‘Nikki knows that. So do I. Fergus used to tell me often enough. This trip was…full of hope. I was visiting her in New Zealand for the first time, hoping her happiness with Jack and her pregnancy would help us to start again…to become closer…’

  Fleur stopped, then said softly, ‘When I first saw her, so worried about me, so concerned, I thought for a while it was all going to be like I had imagined for so long. I felt so close to her on that awful morning in the pathology place…But life isn’t that simple, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Blythe said. ‘We all become entrenched in our assumptions. Tragedy sometimes brings people closer, for a while. But it is the everyday living and loving that’s so difficult to keep up, don’t you think?’ There was something wistful in his voice that surprised Fleur.

  ‘Yes,’ Fleur said. ‘I do.’ She looked down at her glass.

  ‘When you arrived this evening, Nikki was asking me if I could bear to know the truth about how Saffie died. I don’t think she can bear it and I’m not sure she should know in her present condition, Inspector, even if she finds out later on.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’ He met her eyes and smiled. ‘I think we’ve just about gone a full circle.’

  Fleur smiled back. ‘So it seems. Would you like another beer, Inspector?’

  Blythe shook his head. He could hear voices as Mohktar and the daughter came up from the beach. He said quietly, for it had to be said if he was going to make any headway on this inquiry, and he was secretly convinced the answer lay in the small, closed army community of that time, ‘Mrs Campbell, did you know that about eighty per cent of murders are committed by people known to their victims and their families?’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I sat on the rocks at the far corner of the beach. The sea was still and phosphorescent. I remembered the wonder of seeing those dancing silver lights sparkling on the surface of the sea as a child, my fingers in my father’s large hand.

  The water lapped gently in front of me and I listened to the night sounds, the constant blanket noise of cicadas, the faint screech of monkeys up in the trees on the promontory. The beach was almost deserted, people elsewhere eating and drinking. Some young Malays bent over a fishing boat, sorting a net. They had torches and their voices came to me over the air.

  From the nearest house came the sounds of pots and pans and high Chinese voices. The air was heavy and velvet, trapped in the heat that remained long after the sun had gone. The night was like being cocooned in a familiar soft, suffocating blanket. It seemed that if I closed my eyes I could be a child again, lulled to sleep by far-off jungle sounds, by Ah Heng’s music and the drone of insects directly below our window.

  I thought of Jack. The man I would not marry; whose child I was carrying. Where would he be now? In the clouds above Auckland? Nearly home. Home seemed at this moment like some remote planet I might never reach again. As if I had been plunged into the past and might be unable to return to what I once had.

  On my year out travelling I had deliberately avoided revisiting the Middle East, Singapore, and Malaysia. I had headed for the Antipodes. I was afraid of all this; these familiar and longed-for smells and sounds of my childhood; the essence of those first years of my life, sensations that stay with children forever.

  The feeling of loss caught at me, sharp and lonely, the memory of the blessed, endless golden days I had then, in the safety of army quarters with my happy, laughing dad. Real life as a family; two parents of your own, untouched by tragedy, not singled out forever because of a double sorrow that scarred your soul like a birthmark.

  Memories grow hazy with time and sometimes we fill them in with the pictures adults paint for us. I did not really remember the long journey back to England after Saffie disappeared but I do remember being back in that house of my grandparents. I hated it and I remember feeling constantly afraid of what was going to happen next.

  My mother seemed numb and silent and strange. I could not understand it as a child, but it was in the days when doctors handed out vast doses of tranquillisers and all my mother seemed to do was sleep.

  I would go and climb into my grandparents’ bed to feel the warmth from their bodies. Mum always seemed so cold. I would pretend in the dark that it was Saffie who lay beside me.

  Sometimes I would wake up and Gran and Grandpa would be holding and rocking me. I never knew I was crying. I cannot remember if it was then that I began to sleepwalk or on another visit to that house. I would wake in the dark on the stairs or downstairs and I always knew in those moments that Saffie was near.

  I would see her turn a corner ahead of me, a small, lonely shadow, and I began to believe that she was not really dead but somewhere I could not reach her; somewhere trapped where she could not get back to me. Her puzzlement and fear touched me with icy fingers and I would shake and shake my head over and over and whisper, ‘No. No. No. No.’ I had to banish the sensation of her frightened and alone. Banish the sickness that rose up in my throat for the dark unknown thing that had happened to her.

  I remember vividly the day Grandpa had to fly away from us to join his regiment in Northern Ireland. Someone else large and safe was leaving me. I would go and sit in his small dark study and stroke his sweater, smell his smell of tobacco and whisky which reminded me of my dad, too.

  I was too young to understand why, but the atmosphere in the house with Mum and Gran became stiff with resentment and I clung protectively to my mother as I felt Gran’s disapproval of her.

  Later, when I was older, I realised it was always this way between them; something unsaid that has always unnerved me in its intensity.

  One morning I heard them shouting at each other. Terrible words that I could not make sense of and made them both cry. Mum told Gran that she was taking me to stay in a chalet in Cornwall belonging to Fergus’s parents while she thought about what she was going to do.

  I remember Gran’s face as they shouted. She suddenly said.

  ‘David was a wonderful husband and father. He did not deserve to be betrayed by you and his best friend…’

  We left the house abruptly in a taxi. On the train Mum tried to pretend it was exciting but I’ve always remembered how long that journey was and how the tears slid down her face underneath the dark glasses she wore when she thought I was asleep.

  My grandmother’s words stayed with me, lodged just under the skin. I wasn’t able to comprehend the meaning fully then, but I saved those words, took them out and repeated them over and over to myself as I grew up.

  I looked betray up in the dictionary: Deceive, delude, dazzle, beguile, play false, double-cross, distort, falsify, break faith. Break faith.

  Then I looked up betrayed and one word jumped out: heartbroken.

  We listened to the whispers, Saffie and I, while Ah Heng tried to divert us. Adult conversations sotto voce in the stilled and shuttered army quarter when the inquiry into my dad’s death was going on.

  Was it the weather or had David made an error of judgement in flying home that night? Was pilot error contributory?

  Heartbroken. My little private wound grew a healthy scab that I scratched often in the coming months and years. When Fergus and Fleur first got together I made it bleed.

  My father was exonerated from any blame, but I remembered. I remembered creeping out of bed one night at one of my parents’ numerous parties and watching in the dark
and shuttered corridor Fleur dancing with Fergus. Their eyes were shut and their heads were close together as they held each other tight.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  James Mohktar walked along the beach path towards the house where the two women were staying. As he climbed the wooden steps to the bungalow he could see Inspector Blythe inside talking to Mrs Campbell. The girl was not in the room. Mohktar turned and looked towards the sea. Although he could not see her in the fading light, he retreated back down the steps and walked towards the rocks and the forest path which led up to the lighthouse.

  He had not passed her from the direction he had come but he thought she would most likely be at this end of the beach. As he drew near the rocks he saw her sitting very still looking out to sea. There was something alarming, a little unnatural in her stillness. In his experience few people managed to stay without fidgeting or moving their hands for long. This girl could.

  He moved warily closer, deliberately advertising his approach so that he would not startle her. ‘Miss Montrose,’ he said. ‘Selamat malam. Good evening.’

  She turned his way. In the dark he could not read her expression, but he felt sorrow emanating from her like something tangible he could reach out and touch.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked gently. ‘How are you?’

  Her hands dropped to her lap as if she was relinquishing something precious. ‘I guess I’ve been conjuring ghosts. It’s being here, in Malaysia again. Heat and smell are evocative. They don’t change, do they?’

  ‘You had happy times here?’

  ‘Before my father was killed we came here often, the four of us and sometimes Ah Heng, our amah…’

  The girl smiled suddenly, a sweet smile that changed her face. ‘I think when we were small sometimes we loved our amah almost more than our mother.’

  ‘Ah! Amahs spoil us, give in to our childish needs; give us their undivided attention.’

  Nikki looked at him, her face still alight. ‘Yes, I guess you’re right.’ She paused and then said, perhaps because it had been on her mind, ‘My mother was very beautiful when she was young. Forces wives had the most wonderful time in those days. More freedom, servants, swimming pools, wonderful places like this for holidays. Attention from the navy when the ships came in. Men, my grandmother told me, outnumbered women even with the single nurses and teachers who came out to work. It was all so different from cold army quarters in England…’