The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘I watched that sun begin to fall behind the sea and I sat there looking outward waiting for Saffie to come home. Calling her in my head like we used to, in the private language we had, that only she could understand.

  ‘I saw two fishermen across the beach. They had nets and torches. They got into a boat and I couldn’t really see them properly as the light went. Then they poled across the last curve of the sun and they were silhouetted, black, like stick figures across the sky and I…I froze with fear.’

  My heart hammered as I remembered.

  ‘The fishermen frightened you?’

  ‘No! No. It was the sound…the sound coming nearer and nearer…but I couldn’t leave my chair until Saffie came…I couldn’t run inside.’

  ‘What sound, Nikki? What did you hear?’

  I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to go back. Mohktar took my hands and held them, firmly, facing me. ‘Tell me what you heard that night, Nikki.’

  ‘Someone running…coming towards me in the dark…moaning, gasping under their breath or hurt…crying as they ran…Then a man ran past the front of the house but he didn’t see me in the dark and he began to climb, stumbling up the cliff steps still making odd whimpering sounds as if he couldn’t help it. Then I heard a bamboo door in the dark behind me squeak and slam as he went inside one of the houses. The night was quiet again, but the noises he made went on and on in my head…like a hurt animal. I couldn’t move. I saw a light go on somewhere and the sound of a shower. Then I ran inside to my room because I knew Saffie wouldn’t be coming home. Her voice was silent in my head…I knew she would never come home.’

  Mohktar led me out of the water and I sat down leaning against the rocks because my legs wouldn’t hold me up. Mohktar crouched in front of me, his face concerned.

  ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘What is the point of remembering now? It’s too late. It can only hurt us. Why couldn’t I remember at the time?’

  ‘The mind has a way of protecting us.’ Mohktar’s voice was gentle. Nikki, did you think this man might come for you too?’

  It was such a relief to say it. ‘Yes! Oh yes.’ How sure I had been that he would come for me in the heavy dark of some night.

  ‘Can you remember if this man seemed tall or average height?’

  ‘Tall,’ I said, without hesitation. ‘He was tall.’

  Mohktar said, almost to himself. ‘I wonder if that was why those ladies remembered the slamming of the door. It was not the door that woke them, but the odd panic noises they heard in the dark.’

  We stared at each other. ‘Have I always known who, and buried it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Mohktar said and his face was sad. He knelt in the sand and took my hand and held it between both his own as if it was something precious. I was so glad of his warmth.

  ‘I am not sure my mother can bear it.’

  ‘I am not sure she should have to.’

  I looked at him in surprise. He let go of my hand gently.

  ‘To believe a man is guilty is one thing, but to prove it after twenty-eight years is another, Nikki. It will now be Inspector Blythe’s job and that of the English police.’

  I smiled bleakly. ‘You can go home to Singapore?’

  ‘Yes.’ He said. ‘And you, Nikki, can also go home. The body of your sister is being released. I heard today. Will you and your mother be able to bury her and move on, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I feel confused. I should want justice and vengeance, but all I see is more hurt for Fleur. A part of my mother and a part of me died twenty-eight years ago and maybe something in this man died too. Maybe he has lived his whole life remembering each morning what he did and he has died a little death every day.’

  ‘It is what I believe too.’ Mohktar said.

  ‘What is your Christian name…your first name? Why have I forgotten?’

  Mohktar smiled. ‘It is James.’

  I smiled back. ‘Has it always been James?’

  ‘No, but it was cool to have an English name at school. My mother was a James Bond fan, lah?’

  I laughed. I like you, James Mohktar. Perhaps the thought registered in my eyes for something passed between us, then we both looked away.

  He helped me up, smiling at my awkwardness. I said, as we walked back to the house, ‘I want to look forward, to be happy or at least aspire to happiness. To have the possibility of joy and to give it, for once. I want to wake without the shadow and jerk of remembrance. I want to wonder about all the things a new day might bring.’

  I stopped in the sand. ‘Is it selfish and wicked to want happiness when Saffie is dead?’ I touched my stomach. ‘I want a happy baby, James. I want a new life. I want to forget and begin again, as if all this…’ I waved my hand to where all the colonial rest houses had once stood. ‘…and my childhood was a life I once had but can leave behind me. I’ve spent so long mourning Saffie, blaming my mother. Is it shocking of me to want to move on and away? Is it?’

  I couldn’t stop the tears. They just flowed out of me and James Mohktar stood looking at me, his beautiful face distressed. He placed his hands on my arms gently.

  ‘Of course it is not wrong. It is time, Nikki. You must bury your sister with your Christian burial service. She is safe now and your love goes with her. There is no more to be done. A man may be brought to punishment or his God may punish him. It is over now. You carry new life. You do not look backwards, you go forward. It is for you to share your life now with those who love you. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘How did you get to be so wise?’

  He smiled. ‘If I am wise, Nikki, it is through sorrow I learnt. I loved my brothers and I watched the light go from my mother, never to return in the same way; never to light up her face to make her look young again. She lost the smile all people have, that is ageless and comes from the inside; the smile that is the soul and comes from the pleasure of being alive.’

  We stood facing each other. I saw that certain people are sent to us. Maybe we have known and loved them in another life. It would have been difficult to feel what I am feeling at this moment with a westerner. We all carry so much baggage and have forgotten the simple, honest emotions and the fact that strangers can connect and touch one another with absolute understanding.

  I feel such closeness with James Mohktar and the moment will be etched always on my memory; like a photograph I take out and examine all through my life.

  I stood on white sand with an aquamarine sea rolling in behind me. The heat bore down on the houses and hotels in front of me and shimmered above the ground like a mirage. From the backdrop of jungle I could hear birds and the noisy cackle of monkeys. I could hear our hearts beating and the silence stretching into something neither of us wanted to break.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

  ‘There is nothing for which to thank me, Nikki.’

  ‘I thank you for being here and for being you. I will never forget you.’

  James Mohktar’s face was sad. As sad as mine. ‘It is hard to say goodbye to someone you have only just found, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s very hard.’

  We did not touch. We looked for a long time to engrave the other’s face upon our memory and then we turned and walked again in silence. Before we reached the house, I spoke, because I needed him to know what was on my mind.

  ‘I would like to bury Saffie in my garden in New Zealand. I don’t want to be parted from her again. We live in a place called the Bay Of Islands. My garden slopes down towards the sea and we have this beautiful flower meadow. I want to bury her there and plant trees all round and then build a little summer house over the grave. I want to let the trees and flowers grow through the house and Saffie will become part of…’

  ‘The cycle of birth and death?’ Mohktar finished softly.

  I smiled. ‘Mum is studying this painter…he was an architect too, called…’

  ‘Hundertwasser?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Not so cl
ever of me, Nikki. You mentioned him in Singapore. At university there were many of us who became fascinated by him.’

  ‘Do you remember a painting called The Garden of The Happy Dead?’

  ‘I do. And in other paintings too, he has trees and plants growing out of his houses…’

  ‘Do you think I’m weird?’

  James Mohktar laughed out loud. ‘No, I do not. And I do not think your mother will either if she is studying him. In our culture, also, we take many things to the graves of our loved ones. A favourite pair of slippers, sweetmeats, chimes to keep the evil spirits away. Toys. Many of the things the person we loved enjoyed when they were alive. I think it is a…God given idea, Nikki.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  We were almost at the house. James Mohktar stopped and turned to me. ‘Did you know there is another of Hundertwasser’s paintings called Painting I Made Secretly in the Garden of the Beautiful Girl?

  I smiled. ‘No.’

  ‘I think it is all exactly right. Your sister will lie for ever in the Garden of the Beautiful girl…’ He leant towards me. ‘Happiness will come to you, Nikki. I know this, because it lies in your heart.’

  Touched, I could not speak.

  He smiled. ‘I think we say our private goodbye now, for the chance may not come again.’

  I did not want to say goodbye. He held out his hand and I took it. His face was the most extraordinary face, beautiful and familiar, and I could read it because it mirrored my own. I shivered.

  ‘In a different time? In a different place?’ I asked him.

  James Mohktar tried to smile, but this time the smile did not reach his eyes.

  ‘It may be that we have already been there, Miss Montrose.’

  ‘Goodbye, Detective Sergeant James Mohktar.’

  ‘Goodbye, my dear Miss Montrose.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Fleur said apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, Inspector, I think Nikki finds it easier to talk to DS Mohktar without me in the room.’

  Blythe cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Campbell, I really don’t like having to put you through it over and over, but you do see the importance of doing so? You do see how fickle memory is?’

  ‘In my case, Inspector, it is not fickle enough,’ Fleur said quietly.

  Blythe felt at a bit of a loss; he was a blunt northerner and he did not have Mohktar’s gift of empathy, nor his ability to look at a situation sideways on, from everyone’s point of view. Yet he was canny enough to realise that a gift for getting near people could play against you and get in the way of objectivity. He was pretty sure that his Malay sergeant was edging along the borderline; getting too involved.

  Fleur seemed to be reading him. ‘I think it helps, Inspector, that your sergeant is a gentle man and also an exceedingly beautiful one, and that he is nearer Nikki’s age than…either of us.’ She watched his rather pleasant face. He looked a family man. ‘The need for children to protect their parents is amazing, isn’t it? You must have seen it often. Even a bad parent is better than no parent at all. I’m not a stupid woman. If Saffie had gone out alone without permission, Nikki would have tried to wake me, instinctively.

  ‘Inspector, don’t you think I’ve asked myself every single day of my life why I drank that lunchtime? How I could have taken painkillers on top of drink and slept the sleep of the dead and put my children in danger?’

  Suddenly, from nowhere a great protective anger took hold of Blythe. He stared at this small woman who had carried her guilt like a stranglehold round her neck for twenty-eight years.

  ‘Mrs Campbell, you are not a bad mother. Nor are you responsible for the death of your child, although I doubt anyone can make you believe it. You did not go to sleep in a dangerous place where harm could come to children. You were staying in a sleepy little Malaysian rest house, surrounded by other Europeans and locals who would not harm a fly.

  ‘You had watched your husband die in a horrific accident. You were still grieving and exhausted. You wanted to sleep, you craved oblivion, you had a drink and you took painkillers, but you also took your children into your own room so that they were near you and asked the amah to stay in the house knowing you needed to sleep. These are not the actions of a bad mother, but of someone nearing the end of their endurance.

  ‘It was unfortunate your parents had to leave you. You might ask them if they have blamed themselves for the rest of their lives. It was unfortunate that the amah slept, but it is the man who killed your child, either by accident or design, that is responsible for the death of your daughter. Not you. Not your parents. Not Nikki who stayed behind with you. A person, as yet unknown, killed your child randomly and wantonly while you rested. That does not make you a bad mother…or culpable…’

  He took a deep breath. ‘This is the real world and parents aren’t perfect, just human. We make mistakes, but we do our best, Mrs Campbell, we do our best for our children and that’s all we can do. We can’t foresee what’s coming. We can’t protect them from a chain of events that together produce a tragedy. All we have is the knowledge of hindsight…’

  Blythe petered out, astounded at himself. His wife would have been even more astounded as he was a man not prone to vocalising his feelings.

  Surprised, Fleur could not trust herself to speak. Her emotions were so near the surface that she had to rein them in tight; unexpected kindness threatened to tip her over the edge. She was aware that Blythe was not a man given to outbursts and she was touched.

  She got up and went to the fridge and got out a beer for him. It was nearly lunchtime and she guessed he could do with one.

  ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ she said as she put the glass down beside him.

  He looked up, slightly embarrassed, and said, quickly, while he had the courage, ‘My eldest son was killed in a motorbike accident. My wife hadn’t wanted him to have one. I said he could. He tried to race a mate to Cornwall for a dare. He killed himself and a young girl in a car. For a while I blamed myself…my wife did too. If I’d said no, he would still be alive.’

  ‘But if you had said no, your son could have been on the back of someone else’s bike, couldn’t he.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Campbell, he could. Death can be swift and random and there is little we can do about that. We’re not God.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about your son. A parent never ever gets over losing a child. We carry the loss on with us as part of our everyday lives, don’t we? Always there, but unseen.’

  Blythe met her eyes briefly. How aptly she described the beginning of each and every day. They smiled at each other bleakly and then Blythe lifted his glass of beer. ‘To your future, Mrs Campbell.’

  Fleur lifted her juice. ‘And to yours, Inspector Blythe.’

  Blythe hesitated. ‘I heard this morning that your daughter’s body is ready for release. Sergeant Mohktar and I will accompany you to the mortuary when you are ready.’

  Fleur closed her eyes. ‘Oh, thank God. We can take her home. I also want to get Nikki safely back to New Zealand. She is over the deadline for flying.’

  ‘You will accompany her to New Zealand?’

  ‘Of course, Inspector. Is my daughter’s body still in Kuala Lumpur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would it be possible to choose a coffin here, in Malaysia, and take her on the flight with us?’

  ‘We will need to get clearance and the right forms, but of course…I am sure the authorities expect it…Will you bury her in New Zealand or England, Mrs Campbell?’

  ‘I need to talk to Nikki, but I have a feeling she will want to have her buried in New Zealand, somewhere close by. Twins, especially identical ones, are often symbiotic, Inspector Blythe. The strange bond between them can be alarming sometimes. In life, their need for each other is often greater than their need for anyone else. I am not at all sure this ends with the death of one of them.’

  Inspector Blythe looked out of his depth. She smiled at his face. He was afraid of places she might take him and he certainly did not want to g
o.

  ‘You will be going home too, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes. I will go on working on the case from London…’ His mobile phone made them both jump. ‘Excuse me.’ He got up to go to the window.

  ‘I don’t care what rank he is,’ Fleur heard him say. ‘Or whether he is entitled to anonymity under the Northern Ireland terrorism act. Go through the appropriate channels. When I get back I want to interview everyone living who stayed in Port Dickson at that time…no exceptions. Is that understood?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to Fleur as he put the phone back in his pocket. ‘Now, I must go and find my sergeant.’

  ‘I can see them walking back now,’ Fleur said.

  Blythe gathered up his papers and put them in his cardboard file. He stopped and mopped his brow. Fleur, watching, thought how hot and out of place he looked; an English bear of a man. He bore little resemblance to the young, eager military policeman whose life of solving crimes lay ahead of him in 1976.

  She wanted to ask him if he had been happy, apart from the death of his son, but knew he would hate such a personal question.

  ‘I am grateful for all the help you have given us, Mrs Campbell. I won’t say goodbye, because we will see each other again before I leave…but the best of luck to you, you deserve it, and happiness.’

  He cleared his throat, embarrassed, and held out his hand. Fleur took it.

  ‘Thank you for your kindness and sensitivity, Inspector. I do appreciate it and all you’ve done.’

  Blythe smiled wryly. ‘Never been called sensitive before. I might get it in writing to show the wife.’

  Fleur watched him walk towards Nikki and Mohktar. Mohktar held up his hand in salute and Fleur waved back. The two men turned and walked away across the beach and Nikki came on towards her slowly, looking very young, one hand holding her back which was obviously aching. The heat was making her blonde hair stick to her head.