The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘I was studying philosophy and religion.’

  I smiled. So, he was very nearly a priest.

  ‘An English university taught me much, Nikki. I learnt how good the English are at dissembling. How polite and clever they can be at deflecting interest away from themselves. How hard it is for them to give away their privacy. To grieve openly. To speak of what is in their heart.’

  I looked down at my hands. I played with the white linen sheet and the silence I would have to break stretched into a silence I could hear around me. It made me dizzy with the weight of it.

  Mohktar waited and I knew he would sit there all day until I was ready. I leant against the pillows and closed my eyes and I was immediately back on the beach running after Saffie towards the lighthouse. I opened them with a jerk, shivering, and stared at Mohktar. He saw the fear in my eyes.

  He leant forward. ‘Nikki, if you do not know how to begin to talk to me, or you are afraid, just say whatever comes into your head? Your mother told me you could not speak about your dream. Can you still remember it?’

  ‘Oh yes. I remember it.’

  ‘Will you try and tell it to me?’

  I reached out my hand towards him. I felt as if I was pleading. ‘It felt real, so real. As if it really happened and wasn’t a dream. I’m afraid that if I talk about it I will hurtle back to the terror of it. I don’t want to go back there…’

  Mohktar took my hand for a moment. It felt hot and dry like a stone that has absorbed too much sun.

  ‘Nikki, it matters not whether it was a dream or your subconscious, lah? Dreams serve a purpose. They alert us to something our conscious mind has recorded but banished or forgotten.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. It is Saffie who alerted me. Saffie who took me back.’

  ‘For a reason?’

  ‘Yes. For a reason.’

  ‘Then, my dear Nikki, do not try and work it out, just take me where your dream took you. Nothing bad can happen, it is daylight and I am here beside you.’

  I turned slightly away from him. It is daylight and I am here beside you. He sounded soothing, like Fergus. Have I stopped still in my childhood? Am I emotionally arrested, a part of me forever wandering as a child, like Saffie?

  I lay trying to be calm. I had to stay very still for a while and Mohktar must have wondered if I had fallen asleep. Then I began to tell him of my dream and he leant forward to catch my words.

  ‘Saffie was here. She came to my bed. She wanted me to follow her. I followed her out onto the beach into the afternoon. It was hot. We ran chasing the crabs towards the rocks and there was a man sitting there on his own smoking a cigarette. He had a panama hat on and sunglasses and had very long legs, like a spider. Saffie said hello but he was not pleased to see us, he wanted to be left alone. Saffie said she was bored and could he play with her. He said he did not know how to play with girls and she should go back to her mother and sister. He could not see me.

  ‘He walked away towards the lighthouse path and Saffie followed him, calling out that she wanted to walk with him to see the monkeys. He told her that her mother would be worried and she should go home. Saffie said Mum was sleeping and then she ran up the steps quickly in front of him and I ran after her, but she had disappeared and I could not see her in the shade of the trees after the brightness. I kept calling but she took no notice.

  ‘The man called out for her too. He was getting cross and suddenly Saffie appeared again in front of him. She was being annoying and dancing round him saying she could walk with him because he knew her dad, she knew he did, because she remembered…

  ‘He grabbed her and asked her what she meant and began shaking her, and I tried to pull her away and I kept shouting at her to say she didn’t remember him. But she was scared now, very scared, and she went still and silent. I wrapped my arms around her to pull her away and then she started kicking and screaming to get away from him.

  ‘Then his hand was over my mouth and he held it there and I couldn’t breathe, and I wriggled and kicked but he would not let me go. He was hurting my neck…he hurt me…he made me scream with pain…he pressed my neck so hard I heard it crack and then there was darkness…but no more pain.

  ‘He…looked down at me. He was whimpering. He picked me up and I saw myself dangling over his arms and he carried me into the jungle and he…he…made a hole in the undergrowth. He pushed me down into the darkness between two stones…He used his feet to push me down into the ground…I was being buried…I was going to be under the ground forever…I screamed and…screamed…and Saffie came running and pulled me out of the earth and we ran, we both ran back together over the beach to the house…’

  ‘Nikki. OK. Enough! Enough! Open your eyes. Open your eyes.’

  My eyes flew open. I realised it was me making those small, terrified noises. The horror lived on in me. I could not stop my whole body shaking. I kept my eyes on Mohktar’s face as if he could save me. He shivered and the hairs stood out cold on his arms. He leant towards me and lifted me upwards and stared into my face and I do not think he liked what he saw there.

  He hesitated for a second and then he sat on the bed and held me up against him, as if the heat of his body could warm me back to this room and to this place. I leant in towards him and he held me, rocking me in silence. I was very conscious of him in the still room. I knew he was carefully going over my words. I knew he was troubled at his own distress as well as mine.

  After a while, I whispered, ‘That is what happened to Saffie. What I felt, she felt. She was placed under the ground…small and alone. It is what happened…’

  ‘Yes,’ Mohktar said. ‘It is what happened.’ He rubbed my arms as if to warm them. Then he held me away to look at me.

  ‘Nikki? Why did you keep shouting at Saffie, “Say, you don’t remember him. Say you don’t remember him.” What did you mean? That you did remember him? That you had seen him somewhere before?’

  I clutched his arms. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’

  Mohktar laid me gently back on the pillow and took my hands firmly between his own. ‘Nikki, you do know. You do know. Why do you think Saffie took you on her last journey? Not to punish you for not being with her, but to show you something. There is something she wants you to remember.’

  I stared past him, willing myself somewhere a long way away. I lay without moving for what seemed a long time. I heard Mohktar swallow. I thought he too was conscious of the silent house and of Fleur somewhere beyond us, stilled and breathless, waiting.

  ‘The dress,’ I whispered. ‘It was the dress. I always wore the dress with pink roses and Saffie always wore the one with blue. She was wearing my dress, you see…’

  I felt Mohktar freeze. The very air around us was alive with tension.

  He didn’t want to rush me. He was trying to give me time to say the words that stuck in my throat. He was so still, James Mohktar, waiting. When I was silent, he said gently but firmly, ‘Nikki? You must tell me.’

  ‘She was wearing my dress that afternoon. It had a torn pocket. When he saw her he thought it was me…’

  ‘Who? Why did it matter which one of you it was? Where had you seen him before?’

  How could a fleeting image lie etched forever on my heart when I did not even understand until now the implications of what I had seen?

  I closed my eyes. ‘It was one afternoon…I was ill. Mum and Saffie had gone off somewhere in the car…I think to the dentist…I can’t remember. I was left with Ah Heng, although it was supposed to be her day off.

  ‘She always slept in the afternoons so she took me to her room, although Mum didn’t allow it when she was at home. I had a temperature and I was hot and Ah Heng’s small room was claustrophobic. She always closed her shutters and door when she was sleeping. I picked up the dress she had put on the chair for me, the one with the pink rosebuds, and I left her sleeping and I walked across the garden and up the steps which led to the kitchen.

  ‘I was going to my own bed when I heard a
noise from Mum and Dad’s bedroom. I was so happy…I thought, Mummy’s back!

  ‘I went into the bedroom and the mosquito net was down and I could hear talking and Dad’s voice, so I called out and there was this rustling then a funny silence and I was afraid and called out again and Dad lifted the mosquito net and erupted from the bed…’

  My chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe. I could hear little noises of fear escaping from my mouth.

  ‘Nikki!’ Mohktar’s voice brought me back.

  I turned then and looked at him. ‘He wasn’t alone…there was someone else there…I couldn’t tell Mum, I couldn’t. It wasn’t a woman, it was a man in bed with my dad…it was a man…’

  Mohktar stared at me.

  ‘Dad’s face was frightened, like he was shocked to see me, and he lifted me quickly and carried me out of the room. I turned, clutching my dress, to look back. I caught a glimpse of the man’s face before the mosquito net fell. Then all I could see was the man’s long, long legs under the sheet…right to the end of the bed…like a spider. Mum must never know, Detective Sergeant Mohktar…she must never know that Dad was…’

  There was a small movement by the door. It was Fleur. She looked tiny and ashen.

  Oh, Mum!

  She walked towards us and there was a dignity and grace in her movements that tore at me. She still walked like a dancer.

  ‘Oh, my darling Nik,’ she said. ‘I knew that David was a homosexual. How could I not know?’

  I began to cry. Saffie died because of something I had seen. Because she had been wearing my dress.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Inspector Blythe was not happy. Mohktar saw that as soon as he got out of the car.

  ‘What the hell are you playing at, Detective Sergeant? Why has your mobile phone been switched off?’

  Blythe turned and stalked back into the small hot office. Sweat lined his back and under his armpits. Mohktar thought quickly.

  ‘Sir, may I take you to a very good place to eat lunch? I have not eaten today. There I will tell you all I have learnt today, lah.’

  Blythe relented, fractionally. ‘Yes…very well. Let’s go. I could certainly do with a Tiger beer.’

  As they walked past fruit stalls lined with artistic rows of oranges, lychee, melons and bunches of small sweet bananas, they avoided the bicycles wobbling and overloaded making their way along the road to the nearest kampong.

  A butcher’s shop lay open to the flies, strange thin carcases hung on hooks. Outside, stray dogs hovered and Blythe couldn’t help thinking, as they passed, how like dog those carcases looked.

  Mohktar wondered how Blythe would accept Nikki’s dream version of how her sister died. Would he believe the link Nikki had made about this nameless, but certainly identifiable, army pilot who she believed killed a small child, the wrong child, because of what she had seen one hot Singapore afternoon in a supposedly empty house?

  ‘Well?’ Blythe said, as soon as their drinks came. ‘Are you going to keep me in the dark or tell me what you have been up to?

  Blythe had got through his second beer by the time Mohktar had finished Nikki’s story. Mohktar waited. Blythe was thinking, rubbing his fingers up and down his glass, making patterns in the condensation.

  ‘I must check the files, but do you think there is any chance that both twins went out together that afternoon. That Nikki ran back because she was afraid and blocked it out?’

  ‘I am unsure. Mrs Campbell also is wondering how long Nikki was out on the beach that afternoon. Undoubtedly she was frightened, but I do not think she understood why she felt afraid. Now we know why she was confused. But you are not thinking she saw the murder, Inspector?’

  ‘No. I don’t think that. If Nikki Montrose had witnessed her sister being murdered she would have been far more traumatised…hysterical. But what if she had gone after her sister, followed her a little way, seen the man in question and returned to her mother’s bed?’

  ‘Inspector, you were one of the officers who questioned her. She was only five years old but the report at that time says she never wavered or changed what she said about that afternoon to you or anyone.’

  Blythe sighed again. ‘That’s true. But I don’t know how proficient we were at questioning children in those days. She was a very distressed little girl. I don’t think we pushed it.’

  ‘If she had recognised the man on the beach with her sister, she would have picked him out at the time. Children are honest, Inspector. I think she has lived with the guilt of knowing that if they had gone out together her twin would not have been killed.’

  ‘Possibly, but not necessarily. I certainly think the murder was opportunist, not planned. But Mohktar, I find it difficult to believe a man would kill a child because of what she might have seen. How could he possibly be convinced it was the right twin?’

  ‘Because, apparently, it was of common knowledge that one twin always wore a dress with blue roses and one with pink, it was how their parents told them apart. Nikki says she was carrying her dress with the pink roses the afternoon she saw the man with her father.’

  ‘So he knew the family, but not well it seems. If he had mixed with them socially both twins would have remembered him.’

  ‘I suppose the husband must have made a point of not inviting him to the house.’

  ‘What a damn nuisance you didn’t have the photographs of the officers staying at the rest houses at the time with you this morning.’

  ‘Nikki Montrose is not going to forget, Sir, by the morning.’

  ‘Mohktar! We’ll go round tonight, get this cleared up…’

  ‘Sir. I believe it important for them and for us too that mother and daughter talk tonight. They have much to say to one another. When secrets come out, it is very hard…’

  ‘Well, perhaps. Maybe something else will come out of it too. You do understand that all this doesn’t prove anything. Nikki Montrose saw the officer in her father’s bed but she did not see the face of her sister’s killer. It doesn’t make him the same person.’

  Mohktar was silent. It was true. A dream, so real to Nikki, was not evidence. He was about to speak when Blythe added, ‘On the other hand it’s the nearest to a motive we’ve had. It would have been a terrible scandal in the Seventies. If you had been an ambitious career officer who thought a child was taunting you about where she had seen you before, it might be tempting to grab her on the spur of the moment, in temper…’

  ‘And kill her by mistake?’

  ‘Yes. Literally ring her neck. Let’s go back to the office and go through the files and check who the high-flyers were. I wonder if it is possible to jiggle Miss Montrose’s memory some more.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Nikki slept for six hours. Fleur too slept for a long time that afternoon. The nice Doctor Janus had seemed more worried about her than Nikki. When Fleur woke it was to a sense of unreality and to the feeling that this moment, as Fergus had warned her, had been inevitable. She had never wavered in her conviction that no one needed to know about David; not her parents, not Sam, certainly not David’s parents.

  She wanted the twins to keep the memory of the wonderful father David had been. She did not want their time with him spoilt by any shadows. It was no one’s business. Both she and Fergus wanted him to remain David, not a whispered scandal.

  They paid a price for their silence but they expected to. The only thing they disagreed on was explaining to Nikki when she was grown-up. Fergus thought she had a right to know and he felt Nikki and Fleur’s relationship might improve if she did know, but Fleur had been adamant.

  Frangipani and the faraway cries of children on the edge of the sea came in on the wind. The overhead fan made the leaves of her book flutter gently inside the mosquito net. Fleur felt torpid, her body heavy and lifeless, the heat pressing her down on the bed with the weight of her memories.

  That faraway day in a military hospital when she didn’t want to know what David was trying to tell her. Refused to listen; did not w
ant to hear any words that might burst her safe little bubble. Then, years later, the moment it became clear, the moment he had told her. The night the sky fell in. When the world stopped for one clear beat of time and was never the same again.

  Tidworth Military Hospital, 1971

  Fleur was lying in the maternity ward, her feet raised, trying to keep as still as she could, terrified of dislodging the tiny lives inside her. Please, God, she kept saying in her head over and over. Please, God, don’t let me miscarry; please let me keep my babies…please…please.

  The gynaecologist, a colonel, had sat by her bed. ‘Fleur,’ he said. ‘Nature has a way of taking care of things. It’s wretched, I know, but if you miscarry it will be because a full term pregnancy is not viable.’

  Fleur had closed her ears. She was not going to miscarry. She was not going to lose her twins.

  David had been flown back from exercise in Norway to see her. She had watched him walk up the ward, his face pale and anxious. She had put out her hand and smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s OK, darling. I’m doing everything I’m told. I’m not going to lose our babies. Really, it’s going to be all right.’

  He had taken her hand and held it to his lips, then turned his cheek, keeping her fingers pressed against his face. He had dark rings under his eyes and looked unwell.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered, alarmed by the feel of his hand in hers trembling.

  He could not meet her eyes. Fleur suddenly became still. Her body felt as if it was crouched…waiting.

  ‘I don’t deserve you, Fleury,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you…’

  ‘No!’ she interrupted quickly, withdrawing her hand in fury. ‘I won’t hear it! Whatever it is! I’m trying to keep my babies and I don’t care if you’ve been unfaithful. I don’t care what you’ve done. Go away, don’t upset me. Why now? Why try and tell me something now, David?’

  He got to his feet, wretched. ‘Because I’m a selfish bastard. Fleur, I love you to death…Of course I haven’t been unfaithful…I’ll come back later.’ He had turned and almost run out of the ward.