The Hour Before Dawn

Sometimes, Jack thought, this passivity could be mistaken for a lack of hope. He wanted Nikki to believe in their future together; in the life they were building here. You had to have faith that sometimes things did come right despite the odds. He saw this as his job, to keep faith for the woman he loved.

Secretly, he thought karma was a cop-out, an excuse for not acting. Sometimes you had to fight for the life you wanted. He got to his feet and bent across the table to kiss her nose.

‘I’ll go and see how soon we can get a flight to Singapore tonight.’

‘I’ll go and find our rucksacks.’

They smiled at each other. Below them, a motor boat full of tourists wrapped up in wet weather gear shot out of the harbour across the bay to The Hole at speed. Their screams of mock terror and excitement were drowned by the sudden burst of the engine and did not rise up from the water to reach them. The speed in the lazy stillness of yachts at anchor seemed out of place, the long white wake disturbing the acres of blue. Then the sound faded and was gone. Peace. The sea straightened out again into glassy stillness.

Nikki moved around the house touching things uneasily like a cat marking a territory she was afraid she might never return to.

Detective Sergeant James Mohktar, a Chinese-Malay, met them at the airport. Nikki stared: he had the most extraordinary and beautiful face.

He drove them straight to the police station. ‘It is just for the paperwork, Miss Montrose. Also, we have not quite finished with the hotel room. You see we must explore every avenue…’

Nikki went white with shock. They must think Fleur is dead; they are treating the hotel room as a crime scene. James Mohktar, watching her face, said quickly, ‘We have no reason to think the worst, Miss Montrose, this is just normal procedure. The hotel will need the room back and before your mother’s belongings are removed we have to make sure there is no clue there to her disappearance. At this stage do not get too alarmed, lah? Sometimes people on long journeys get disorientated and lost. Let us hope we find your mother safe and well very soon.’ He glanced at Nikki’s protruding stomach. ‘Now, there are some questions you can help us with and then we will drive you to the Singapore Hilton to rest. I believe you have booked into the same hotel as your mother?’

‘Yes,’ Jack said. ‘We thought it would be practical.’

He wanted to say, Look, my wife is pregnant. Can’t she rest before you bombard her with questions? But he couldn’t, and he did not like to say girlfriend or partner because he was unsure how this Asian policeman felt about Nikki being pregnant and unmarried.

D.S. Mohktar asked Nikki all over again about Fleur’s exact travelling plans. Was Mrs Campbell meeting anyone on her stopover here? Had she any worries? Was she a confident traveller? Was she in good health? Had Nikki got a recent photograph?

Nikki had only one recent photo of her mother, taken at Fergus’s funeral. She had brought it with her and she took it out of her bag and handed it to the Detective Sergeant. She had asked someone to take this particular photograph because her grandparents had flown over from their retirement in Cyprus for Fergus’s funeral and Sam had flown back from Australia. The family had all been captured together, a rare thing.

Fleur was dressed in black, her dark hair streaked elegantly with grey. Nikki had thought when she saw her mother again, God, she even goes grey elegantly. No aging pepper and salt for Fleur. Her mother had lost weight. She had shadows under her eyes and her cheekbones had become more prominent, yet there was something ageless about her.

Mohktar stared down at the photograph. This woman was younger than he had expected and she was still attractive. It made his job easier because she would not have gone entirely unnoticed, but it also increased the chances that something had indeed happened to her.

‘We will need to keep this photograph and have copies made, Miss Montrose.’

Nikki nodded. He asked her when Fleur had lived in Singapore. He asked her about the army connection and if she had kept up with any expatriates still living out here. Nikki told him she couldn’t be sure because she had been living in New Zealand for the last four years, but she had never heard her mother mention still knowing anyone in Singapore.

Was her mother depressed after the death of her husband?

Sad, yes; depressed, no. She had taken up painting. She was studying art as a mature student. She was travelling again.

Was the object of her journey to see Nikki?

Partly, but she was studying the painter and architect Hundertwasser who had lived in New Zealand. She had been keen to see some of his buildings…That was one of the reasons for her journey to New Zealand.

‘She was definitely travelling alone?’

‘Yes. But I think she was meeting up with a friend or fellow student in Auckland, later on…after she had stayed with us…but I’m not sure.’

‘You have the name of this friend?’

‘No. I have no idea who it might have been. I’ve lived abroad for a long time. I don’t know my mother’s friends.’

‘When was the last time you spoke to your mother?…How did she sound?…She did not ring you from her hotel in Singapore to say she had arrived? Was this unusual?…How close are you to your mother?…Do you have siblings?’

‘No,’ Nikki said. ‘There’s just me.’

But James Mohktar thought he caught a flicker of something in the woman’s eyes. He saw also that she was growing paler and paler with tiredness. He said, ‘OK, lah. Enough for now. We will go to your mother’s hotel room and then I will let you rest.’

‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked Nikki anxiously as they got into the police car.

Nikki tried to smile. ‘I’m OK, just tired. The police are only doing their job. Actually, I’m surprised they are spending so much time on this. I thought a missing western woman wouldn’t be high on their list of priorities. I’m impressed.’

Jack didn’t say what had crossed his mind. That the policeman was sure this would turn out to be a murder inquiry.

Nikki stood looking at Fleur’s belongings sitting in the impersonal hotel room, just as she had left them. Cosmetics and washing things in the bathroom, case open but fully packed. A dress and a pair of trousers hanging in the wardrobe; a pair of comfortable shoes beneath, obviously ones she wore on the flight. A paracetamol packet on her bedside table next to a half-finished bottle of mineral water. The small clock she carried everywhere.

Her book and the vague whiff of Fleur’s scent. Nikki moved closer to the bed. Mourning Ruby, by Helen Dunmore. On the cover, a small girl in a red dress was running through autumn leaves. She had plump brown legs, small feet encased in plimsolls.

Mourning Ruby.

The pain was like being hit suddenly with a cricket bat. Fleur, like Nikki, still mourned. Each and every day of her life.

Mum. Mum.

Nikki crumpled on the floor and wept.

ELEVEN

Fleur’s only instinct was flight. Blind flight towards a place that had lain in her mind all these years. Distraught, fighting panic and finding herself back on Orchard Road in the noise of the traffic, with the crowds jostling and banging into her, she lifted her hand for a taxi. ‘The railway station, please.’

As they sat in traffic she felt as if she had been thrown suddenly into a bad dream. She wanted to wake up. She wanted to wake up and find Fergus beside her, gently nudging her awake, saying gently, Fleur, Fleur, you’re dreaming.

She stumbled out of the taxi and into the station. Hardly coherent, she asked if there was a train to Port Dickson.

‘Only to Seremban. Then you take taxi or bus to P.D. You go now, left, to the other side of station. Quick, train coming.’ The Chinese man in the ticket kiosk flapped his hand vaguely to her right and an incoming train.

Fleur ran for the nearest platform and waited for people to pour off, then she climbed in. The carriages were old and people pressed and pushed behind her to get on. She found a window seat and sat down. Too late she realised she had no water. Maybe someone would come round with drinks. She tried not to think about her dry mouth. The carriage was rapidly filling up with Malays and Tamils; all talking and laughing, bowed down with shopping and going home to their kampongs.

The noise rose as the train departed and Fleur closed her eyes against the curious glances at her.

The train moved sluggishly through the outskirts of the city and across the causeway into Malaysia, and Fleur, exhausted, slept. When she opened her eyes again people had grown quieter, dozing in the sun which slid off the paddy fields and cast shadows across bent figures in a scene so timeless Fleur could have been a child or young wife again.

She remembered looking down from the plane carrying David’s body home and watching the rice fields disappearing as the plane rose upwards. She had sat on that long journey home in a catatonic and bemused disbelief that he was really dead.

It had been spring when she and the twins had flown back to England to bury David in the place he had grown up in, the place where his parents still lived. That little middle-class village had remained a microcosm of the past even then, with its tiny roads and steep banks littered with creamy primroses.

It had been spring in the tiny churchyard, and, as David’s coffin was lowered to the bugler’s lament, Fleur had looked round for a moment at the graves and the stunned mourners. She had clutched the hands of the twins and thought, how can this day be so extraordinarily beautiful? How can the trees and hedges burst with new life when David is dead? When I will never recover from the horror of his death? When his life ended after an argument, when I had no chance to tell him he had nothing to fear, nothing to be jealous of. I loved him. He was the father of my children and I would always love him. Always.

It was the dichotomy of a world so new and green and perfect and the bleak finality of David being lowered forever into the ground to the trembling notes of a military bugler that had struck her so starkly that day.

In his parents’ cottage a cherry tree was bursting into pink, and bluebells shone in a haze of blue and white in the orchard. David’s mother and Fleur’s were offering plates of tiny canapés round and gracefully making small talk as if it mattered. As if it mattered. It is what they did, her parents’ generation. They never showed their grief, it just wasn’t done. It was true of the army too. Other ranks could yell the place down when they had their babies, officers’ wives bit their lips.

That day of the funeral someone had thrown the French windows open and Fleur saw David’s father standing with his back to the house, whisky clasped between his hands, for a moment totally unable to exchange inanities. She had walked out to him and he had wrapped his arms around her and in all the beauty of his garden they had rocked and rocked together, mourning, mourning the loss of the centre of their universe. The waste of a young life.

Stuart Montrose had whispered. ‘It is the worst, the very worst thing of all to outlive your child. It is the thing that breaks your heart.’

Fleur turned again to the landscape outside the train window. In the distance where the rubber plantations had once stretched as far as the eye could see now lay palm oil trees. As a child and a young wife she had found them eerie. On the long, long, straight road to the coast her father would stop so that they could all pee behind a tree, and if Fleur had not been desperate she would never have entered the shade of the rubber trees. The rubber tappers, their faces hidden by scarves, moved silently, sliding from tree to tree, emptying the rubber from the small tap on the trunk and moving quickly on to the next tree, like shadows or ghosts.

Fleur knew her fear was due partly to the stories her father had told her about the communist insurgents of the 1950s when plantation owners and managers had been attacked and killed, but she always found the stillness of the rubber plantations sinister and in some way threatening; a place where people could hide and pounce. The palm oil trees, with their thick green fronds, softened the landscape, their shape curving like the tops of pineapples.

After David’s funeral, Fleur had lain motionless in the dark, one twin each side of her in the lumpy bed. Saffie placed her fingers on her mother’s ribcage to see if she was still breathing. Her fingers felt, under the cotton nightdress, the flutter and throb of Fleur’s heart. She wanted to whisper to Nikki over her mother’s still form. She wanted to feel her sister’s warmth seep into her. If Mum died there would be no one, only their grandparents. They would have to live in this horrid village and probably go to boarding school.

Saffie trembled with fear of the future. Would they have to stay in this cold house of long corridors and draughty rooms? Here in this rolling garden full of huge fir trees that shaded the lawns and made you shiver? Where the roses smelt in the middle of the day but there was no scent of frangipani wafting in on the morning wind; no white frangipani petals covering the lawns. There was no familiar sound of the kebun brushing the bruised petals up with his long, slow, indolent sweeps.

No bougainvillaea climbed the walls of this house in a great purple cloud. There were no sounds of cicadas in the night or Ah Heng’s high cackling voice coming from the kitchen. Saffie ached with homesickness: for the Chinese chimes moving imperceptibly in the draught of the shuttered windows; for Ah Heng just a shout away.

Home; where Daddy had been, his laughter filtering through the rise and fall of sleep, making you smile as if you were awake. His laugh mixed up with the sound of music, of people chatting and partying.

Saffie thought of his largeness, remembered his happiness just beyond the darkness of the room making you safe to turn and sleep again. She strained for the memory of his face. She could remember his smell: soap and tobacco. She could remember the feel of him, the strength of his brown arms…but she trembled in case she forgot his face…Singapore…the safe place where Daddy had been.

Her face, curled upwards towards her mother, was becoming wet. She touched her cheek. These were not her tears. She was not crying. She reached up to touch Fleur’s face. Her mother was weeping silently, motionless. Her chest was not heaving, her mouth was not open; she was crying without sound, tears cascading out of the sides of her eyes. The pillows and her nightdress and Saffie’s hair were becoming soaked. Saffie did not know anyone could cry this quietly. She heard Nikki whisper in the darkness,

‘Mummy, Mummy, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’

Saffie leant up on one elbow. ‘It’s all right…we’re here.’ She got out of bed and padded across in the dark to the dressing table to get a box of tissues. She handed Nikki a bundle and together they tried to blot Fleur’s eyes and cheeks and neck until she slowly became aware of them, came back from a long way away and registered their distress.

Saffie thought, Mummy doesn’t even know she’s crying.

Fleur sat up and wiped her face and blew her nose, looked down at them, one each side of her. ‘Cuddle up, darlings, cuddle in close, you’re both frozen. That’s it; pull the covers up to our chins…that’s right. Now we’re like dormice…’ She held the children to her tight, rubbed her chin over their smooth hair that smelt like hay, murmured to them to sleep, that it was all going to be all right.

‘Mummy, do we have to stay here?’ Saffie whispered. ‘In this house?’

‘No, darlings, we’re not going to stay here.’

‘Where are we going? Can we go home?’ Nikki asked.

‘We can’t go home, darling. All our things have to be packed up and Ah Heng has to go and look after a new family. I have to go back to hand our house back to the army and Grandpa thought we might all go and have a last little holiday in Malaya…’

‘Where we used to go with Daddy?’

‘Yes, in one of the rest houses in Port Dickson.’

‘With the round baths, where the water comes out of a big plug and goes all over the floor?’

‘That’s right. Does that sound like a good idea?’

‘With Grandpa and Grandma, or just us?’ Saffie was unsure she wanted them to come. On the other hand, it might feel safer.

‘I like just us,’ Nikki said quietly. But she could not help wondering if her mother was going to be like she was now or like she had mostly been since they got back to England. Would she see and hear them like she did tonight? Or would she go back to a place where they could not reach her, when sometimes she looked as if she didn’t know them any more? As if she had gone somewhere else and forgotten all about them.

‘Of course they are coming with us, darlings. But after the holiday we’re going to find a little house together, just us three. OK?’

Saffie could feel her heart swelling with a strange sad happiness because Mummy was holding them and for the first time the dark felt safe again.

‘You will stay with us all the time? You won’t ever go away and leave us in this house on our own, will you? You won’t leave us even for a minute?’ Nikki asked breathlessly.

Fleur bent to her and kissed the top of her head with sudden passion and then did the same to Saffie. ‘My silly little peapods, of course I won’t leave you. There is just the three of us now and we’ll stick together always, won’t we?’

Nikki smiled and curled in for sleep. ‘Yes.’

Saffie could feel her mother’s body going slack as she fell asleep. After a moment she whispered, ‘Nikki?’ but no one answered. Nikki too was asleep.

Lying in the dark, Fleur’s breath moving her fingers like the quiver of leaves, Saffie heard a fox bark suddenly out in the garden. It was a primeval sound that made her heart jump. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, wanting to sleep too. She thought it was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.

The train slowed and stopped at a junction. Fleur smelt betel nut and curry powder and the musty smell of live chickens carried in cages. She felt a nudge and a fat smiling Malay woman with a child was holding out her bottle of water. Fleur took it gratefully, drank and then handed it back. The woman shook her head, showing her she had another bottle. ‘You keep. You keep.’

Fleur thanked her and leant back and closed her eyes.

After the funeral she had flown back to Singapore with the twins and Peter and Laura There was an army memorial service and a quarter to hand over…and then…And then I let it happen. I let my child die for one selfish craving for oblivion.

The train shunted forward again. It seemed to stop at every single station. Fleur sat up and looked out. The day was ending. The carriages were emptying. People were leaving the train in droves now.

The Malay woman and her child had gone. They were still travelling inland. Her heart jumped; she must be on the wrong train. Oh God, where was she going? She shook with jetlag and tiredness.

A large Indian with a purple turban was watching her with gentle eyes.

Fleur lent forward. ‘I think I’m on the wrong train.’

The Indian smiled. ‘I was wondering, Madam. You are on what we call the Jungle Railway all the way to Kota Bharu. Mostly workers travel this line. The journey from Singapore takes fourteen hours, no less! Where is it you are wanting to be?’

‘Seremban. I must get off there for Port Dickson.’ Fleur fought panic.

‘Well, Madam, the next stop is Mentakab. Here you must get off immediately for the next stop is Jerentut. There is nothing in between. I am afraid there will be no train back to Gemas tonight. This is where you must return to catch the train to Seremban.’

He watched Fleur’s face. ‘Madam, do not worry. Mentakab is where I alight. I will show you to the best place in Mentakab to stay and then in the morning you will catch a train back to Gemas and there change for Seremban. All will be well. Do not be afraid. I fear you are a little unwell.’

The Indian accompanied Fleur off the train and took her in a taxi to a small guest house belonging to his sister. Very good and very clean. It wasn’t, but Fleur was grateful. She lay on the hard bed, stiff with anxiety, beyond tiredness, unable to sleep or shut her mind to the image she had seen in the paper. She was hardly aware of where she was.

Early the next morning the Indian took her back to the station and made sure she got on the right train to Gemas. His sister had changed some of her Singapore dollars for her, and given her Malaysian ringgits.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I have so little money on me to thank you for your kindness.’

He drew himself up with dignity. ‘Madam, I do not wish for payment for helping a lady in a foreign land.’ He smiled, ‘I hope soon the thing that troubles you will disappear.’

‘Terima kasih. Thank you.’

‘Sama-sama.’ He smiled. ‘You speak a little Malay?’

‘A very little. Selamat tinggal. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Madam and Selamat jalan to you. Do not forget Gemas. Change at Gemas.’

The train drew out of the station taking Fleur backwards to Gemas, when all she wanted to do was travel forward to the sea. To reach the place where she could grieve silently and alone. Just for a moment to feel the warmth of a life lost. Just for a moment.

TWELVE

The name Montrose was niggling at James Mohktar as he drove home that night. It registered with him, seemed somehow familiar. It is an English name, he told himself, and you are bound to have heard it before. Yet as he lay beside his wife and listened to her even breathing in the dark, intuition told him it was important, this nebulous something he could not recall.

He said to his inspector the next day, ‘Have you heard the name Montrose before?’

Inspector Chan pursed his lips and thought about it. ‘No. Should I have done?’

‘I don’t know. Something I can’t remember. Annoying.’

The phone rang and Chan picked it up. The day had started. Mohktar walked down the corridor to his office. He opened up his computer and then thought, How long ago did this missing woman live here? Twenty-eight years? Long before we were computerised. He would need to get someone to check the archives, find out how far back files were transferred onto disc and then search through old cases concerning Europeans or service personnel to see if that name came up. He got up again and went to find constables Ahmed and Singh.

Detective Sergeant Mohktar had given the hotel permission to move Fleur’s belongings to our room. Her room was then cleaned and hoovered for the next guests; all trace of Fleur was extinguished.

I woke before Jack and got up quietly so I did not disturb him. I bent over the small pool of my mother’s belongings. Two Chinese blouses beautifully folded, one red and one green. A length of batik. Presents for me? I opened the small overnight case again. Just her book, washing things, nightdress and underclothes. A white shirt, summer skirt and sandals.

Fleur only had her handbag with her. No change of clothes and nothing to sleep in. Fear caught at me once more in the silent room. Fleur had so obviously meant to return to the hotel because she would never have gone anywhere without clean underclothes.

Jack woke and sat up, fighting to get his bearings. He saw me sitting on the floor among Fleur’s belongings.

‘Come here.’ He held his arms open. I went over to him and he wrapped his arms around me. ‘Don’t think the worst. Don’t give up hope. I was thinking: do you think your mother might have had a sudden reaction to being back in Singapore? Do you think coming back triggered something unresolved? Could she be wandering about the city not knowing what she is doing?’