The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  The room was basic but clean. I took my dress off and lay on the bed thankfully. Jack went to find me bottled water. I lay there worrying, glad to let my guard down while he was gone. I was anxious for my baby. I was anxious for Fleur.

  I must have slept because I was woken by voices outside my door. Jack was talking to someone. I struggled up on one elbow in a befuddled state, wondering where I was or what time of day it was.

  Jack came in, sat on the bed and felt my forehead.

  ‘You’re cooler now. You had me worried. You were running a temperature and you’ve slept so heavily and for so long. Four hours! I phoned Mohktar to tell him where we were. He was a couple of hours behind us and he’s stopped off to see how you are. Nice guy. We’ve found a doctor to take a look at you.’

  I felt embarrassed. ‘Jack, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just hot, pregnant and anxious, that’s all. The doctor will think it’s a total waste of time.’

  ‘Just let him take a look at you, please.’

  I leant forward to kiss him. Sweet, protective Jack. ‘OK.’

  The doctor was Chinese and spoke poor English. He nodded at me and felt my forehead and pulse. Then he examined me thoroughly. His hands were small and gentle and I knew immediately they were safe and knowing.

  When he had finished he gave me a searching look and went outside. I heard him talking to James Mohktar who translated for Jack. Then he came back and looked down at me.

  ‘You sleep tonight. Travel tomollow. Short distance to Seremban. Baby OK. You must rest each day. Maybe baby come early. You small ploblem…you see doctor before fly home…’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  Something like a shadow of a smile flitted briefly across his face and he nodded to me and left.

  Jack came back and sat on the bed again. ‘He thinks you might have a slight problem with your placenta which might affect the birth. He said you must mention this to your own doctor on your next check-up…’ He grinned at me, looking relieved. ‘But we have a healthy baby and he has prescribed some Chinese medicine and ordered you not to strain yourself or overwork…’

  I stared at Jack and laughed. ‘I think he was probably being ironic, Jack! Have you seen some of the pregnant women here? I saw an Indian woman in Singapore on a building site carrying bricks! She looked as if she could give birth at any moment. Me, overwork!’

  I got out of bed and pulled my dress over my head and we both went out to talk to James Mohktar. We sat at a street café in this village that seemed to be a place people passed through rather than stayed. Jack ordered cold beer and Mohktar and I had icy fresh orange juice.

  Mohktar spoke rapidly to the waiter and delicious small eats arrived. He smiled at me and pointed. ‘Those are spicy, maybe too hot for you. These you like, I think…’

  ‘You grew up in this part of the world?’

  ‘A little further up the coast, near Kajang,’ Mohktar said.

  ‘Will you see your family tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Tonight I drive to Seremban and Port Dickson to talk to my colleagues. Your mother must have travelled by train, local or express, because we have been in contact with all taxis and car-hire firms in Singapore. She will have had to alight at Seremban and catch the local bus or taxi for Port Dickson. It may be that your mother will approach the police herself…’

  His eyes rested on my face for a moment. I thought I knew what he was thinking. If Fleur had managed to locate the site of the grave, she would not find the small body still there. She would have to contact the police…if she was thinking straight.

  Jack got up and walked away to pay the bill.

  ‘Try not to worry, Miss Montrose. We will find your mother very soon.’

  ‘The place where they found the grave, what will…?’

  ‘The site will be secured, Miss Montrose. There will be a policeman on duty while evidence is gathered and to prevent any access. The local police have been alerted to your mother’s plight and will contact us as soon as they have a sighting.’

  I met his eyes, suddenly realising that I was so sure that the body in the newspaper would be Saffie’s that I had not even given a thought to the fact that it could be some other missing child.

  ‘It is possible that it might not be my sister in that grave, isn’t it?’

  James Mohktar looked down at his hands for a moment. ‘Yes, it is possible,’ he said. ‘And you should bear this in mind, Miss Montrose…Local children also die or go missing…’ He paused. ‘But…’

  ‘Do you know something?’

  He looked at me. ‘I understand from my colleague in Kuala Lumpur that they are sending two men down with files from the Seventies. And they have been in contact with the British police, so…’

  ‘They must believe it is my sister?’

  I was suddenly cold and goose bumps sprang up on my arms as if the shadow that was Saffie, long dead, had reached out to touch me. ‘I’m sure it’s her…’ I met his eyes. ‘I’ve dreamt about finding her since the moment I became pregnant.’

  ‘All cases of missing children in the Seremban area over the last twenty years will be investigated. I am afraid you cannot take it for granted it is your sister, Miss Montrose,’ Mohktar said quietly.

  Jack had come back to the table. ‘I need to be in Port Dickson,’ I said to him urgently. ‘Please let’s drive on. It’s not far. I must find Fleur. I’ve slept all afternoon, I won’t sleep tonight…you know I won’t.’

  I felt Jack look over my head at Mohktar. Mohktar leant towards me. ‘Miss Montrose. By the morning I will know more. You will not reach Seremban or Port Dickson before dark. It is much better you stay here and rest and drive on early tomorrow. I can phone you if there is anything you should know or if they have located your mother. I think you should do as the doctor tells you.’

  Jack was looking anxious again. I gave in.

  ‘OK,’ I said to Mohktar. ‘But please promise you will ring if you find out anything, however small?’

  He smiled. ‘I promise. Now I will leave you.’

  He shook our hands and we watched him drive down the one little dusty road. It felt rather as if our only friend had disappeared.

  FIFTEEN

  Fleur woke in the small, shuttered room and knew immediately it was late. She could feel the warmth outside, heavy and waiting. The room smelt of electric mosquito repellent. She threw the shutter open and the heat hit her in a wave and shimmered off the rooftops outside. She looked at her watch; it was nearly half past ten. How on earth had she slept so long? Her throat was dry and she picked up the telephone to order coffee then went into the shower.

  She felt as if she was someone else. Why had she stopped here? She felt anxious, desperate to be on her way. The Chinese woman knocked on her door and brought her a tray with tea and anaemic-looking scrambled egg and bread. Fleur could not eat it. She filled in her visitor’s form, put her things together quickly, paid her bill and, thanking the small, impassive woman, she left the hotel and made her way to the bus station in a state of urgency.

  A bus to Port Dickson had its engine running and Fleur hurried across the square and climbed on. It was half-full of people and of fowl alive and dead from market. Old women with string baskets full of soft scarlet tomatoes and small local bananas sat and watched her impassively.

  The driver took her offered Malaysian ringgits and poured coins back into her hands as he too looked at her curiously. She did not look poor and she was not a young backpacker, why did she not catch a taxi?

  Despite the running engine the bus did not move off and Fleur realised the driver was waiting for it to fill. Her heart sank. The heat trickled down the inside of her dress and she was just checking whether she had enough money for a taxi when, at last, with a blast of its horn the bus slowly rattled out of the small town onto the main road, kicking up dust and sounding as if any moment it might splutter to a halt.

  The driver let people out of the doors at regular interva
ls and they melted into the shady trees that lined the road, off towards their kampongs, into little clearings in the jungle, carrying their live chickens and fruit and brightly coloured rolls of cloth.

  At times, the bus stopped and waited on the highway to pick up people, and Fleur thought it was the longest, hottest, smelliest journey she had ever taken. When at last they rattled into Port Dickson she felt sick with relief.

  The taxi drivers watched her, but she had no idea where to go. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them they focused on a hoarding. Selamat Datang to Blue Lagoon Hotel.

  ‘Blue Lagoon Hotel, please,’ she said to the taxi driver. It would do for tonight while she got her bearings.

  At the reception desk she told the sultry Malaysian receptionist that her husband was coming later with her luggage. The girl took ages checking her form, looking at her passport, and finally smiled sweetly and wished her a happy stay with Lagoon Hotel.

  In her room Fleur looked down at the curved manmade lagoon with its carefully positioned palm trees. It was not very blue. All these years later, how was she to recognise the coastline and the wild places she had walked with the twins? This hotel was too near the town, the colonial rest houses had been further down the coast, she was sure of this.

  She went down in the lift and ordered herself a strong coffee. Then she crossed the road to the little row of dusty shops. She bought herself odd underclothes with her card, two cheap tee shirts, a length of material to use as a sarong and a batik bag to put them all in. She went to the pharmacy and bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and shampoo. Some instinct also made her buy some medical supplies.

  She walked round the man-made lagoon onto the beach and looked both ways but did but recognise any landmark. Nothing was familiar. All was high-rise hotels and large swimming pools. The sea looked grey and uninviting. The afternoon sun beat down on her relentlessly and soaked her clothes. She felt sick and giddy. Going back up in the lift she had to hang on to the sides as waves of dizziness swung over her.

  Was she ill? In her cool room she showered, made tea, then drank the miniature brandy with ginger and two paracetamol tablets and fell onto the bed.

  Through the darkness of sleep Fleur still felt the motion of the train carrying her slowly towards her dead daughter. The fear of not finding the place where she lay haunted her until memory surfaced and the world outside her room turned again in to a beautiful lonely stretch of beach below the government rest houses.

  All those hundreds of little wooden steps she had watched Ah Heng help the twins down. At the bottom they would run laughing through the sand full of tiny spider crabs that ran ahead of their small feet.

  Their beach ended at Tanjung Tuan lighthouse bordering the state of Malacca. Away in the distance, the land curved and became jungle. They used to climb up to the lighthouse to get the view out over the glittering water of the Malacca Straits.

  In the dark, Fleur sat upright. It was night and sounds outside were hushed. Now she knew the direction she must take. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and rocked gently as the awful image kept at bay all these years surfaced again.

  Saffie’s hand in a stranger’s. Fleur never saw his face, only the back view of him leading the small child away from her towards the jungle where the monkeys cried out and chattered like overexcited children.

  The hand was dark, always dark in her mind, and Saffie, her small hand in his, felt no danger. She skipped, her blonde hair bobbing as she walked beside him, wondering what he was going to show her in the long hot afternoon when the grown-ups slept and made love and children should have been safe with amahs.

  Fleur shivered and her guilt, forever with her like a second skin, surfaced in a cold layer of sweat. That long ago afternoon she had slept the drugged irresponsible sleep of a selfish woman who had put her own needs before those of her children. She should have made sure they could not leave the room…She should have kept them both safe.

  Fleur faced once again in the dark Saffie’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance. She thought about her last lonely and trusting walk to the edge of the jungle, to this moment now, when her small skeleton had been found in a hidden grave. She saw the curled little body, all bones intact, in foetal position, the same position in which she had lain beside Nikki in Fleur’s womb.

  Why now? Why had Saffie’s body not been found before? How was it that she had not been taken by animals, all identification of her long gone as her bones were spread about the jungle?

  Someone had placed Saffie in that shallow grave. She had lain alone, for a long, long time.

  Dimly, Fleur realised she was feverish. She turned and thrashed in the damp bed, neither asleep nor fully awake, until stomach cramps forced her out of bed. She sat up, shakily, realising with a sinking heart, that this was not tiredness or jet lag, she was ill.

  She staggered to the bathroom and was sick. She made herself get under a cool shower, then wrapped herself in the hotel bathrobe and switched up the air-conditioning. She went to the small fridge and got out a bottle of water, checking that the seal was intact. She had not eaten anything except toast so it had to be the water, possibly the Malay woman’s on the train.

  Fleur knew there was nothing she could do until this passed. She swallowed two codeine tablets and got back into bed. For hours her stomach contracted painfully and she staggered to the bathroom and back until she was shaking with exhaustion. Finally, she fell into a deep sleep and slept all that day, only waking to sip water. She was aware of someone knocking to clean her room and then go away again.

  Fleur slept through the next night and woke in the unfamiliar hotel room with a cry in the early hours of the morning. Her fever had gone and her stomach was merely empty. She remembered where she was with a start. It was cold and she turned the air-conditioning off. A picture of the twins kissing on a dry lawn with Ah Heng standing in the background against a great burst of bougainvillaea stayed painfully with her.

  She showered, made tea and ate the packet of biscuits on the tray. In the mirror she saw a thin, pale and haggard woman and turned quickly away. Fleur dressed, gathered her things into the Malaysian bag and left it on the bed. She went downstairs where, even in the early hours of a new day, the hotel breathed and lived a life of its own. She ignored the glances of the Malay girl on duty and went outside and woke up a sleeping taxi driver and asked him to take her to Cape Rachado.

  As they drove, the sun was edging up over the sea in a familiar blaze of beautiful bruised colour. Fleur ached to be at the place where her daughter had been pulled from the earth. She needed to see and touch and gather up Saffie’s remains, to keep them safe; to take her on her long journey home.

  She did not stop to think that it might not be Saffie that the workmen had found, but someone else’s child. It never entered her head that the white bones found lying in that small grave were not her missing daughter.

  SIXTEEN

  James Mohktar stood looking down into the shallow grave. The ticker tape attached to metal rods surrounding this tiny piece of jungle blew gently, drooped and made the site look forlorn and forgotten. The colour of it jarred against the merging greens; a flash of white and red, signalling alarm.

  Dawn was coming. In the distance, beyond the trees full of monkeys screeching noisily, lay the sea. Mohktar sat on a boulder and poured himself tea from a flask. It was like being a child again. He missed these familiar sounds living in the middle of a city. Cicadas you could hear everywhere, even in a town, but you could not listen to the distant sound of the jungle coming alive and stirring with vibrant morning life.

  He thought of the tiny room he had shared with his brothers and sisters in the kampong. His parents still lived in the same house near Kajang, but now, because of the erosion of the forest, the life of the river had changed, and each year when the rains came the kampong would be flooded and swirl round those little atap houses on stilts. His brother’s children would gaze down at the muddied water and fish with bamboo r
ods and hurl down objects with glee to watch them float away.

  The sun came now, edging up over the water, bringing with it the heat of a new day. His mobile telephone rang suddenly, jarring the peace, making him jump. He answered it abruptly.

  ‘Alamak! Ya?’

  Mrs Campbell had been found. She had apparently stayed the night in Port Dickson and had risen early and got a taxi, but they had not located the taxi driver yet to find out where he had taken her.

  ‘Okay,’ Mohktar said. ‘Tidak apa-apa. Never mind. I stay here. Selamat tinggal.’

  The sun touched his hands through the trees. The clearing in the stillness of early morning had a pervasive and lingering aura. Not so much evil intent as a thing unfinished. James Mohktar thought about his small son. He could not bring himself to imagine evil coming to him. Could not bear to think either of his death or of a world in which he would have to live without his child.

  Instinct had made him come here and instinct made him wait. It would have been easier for Mrs Campbell to go to the police, to ask exactly where the small body had been found and if it was European, but he did not think she would. In her place he would come here. She would come here first. Mohktar was sure of it.

  He saw her alone in a foreign city staring down at the photograph of the grave and believing with absolute clarity that her small daughter had been found.

  Far away down on the road he heard the faint sound of a car, possibly making for the lighthouse. Fleur asked the taxi driver to wait or come back in an hour. She turned and climbed down the steep steps to the beach. She felt breathless and heady. The sun flaming across the sea warmed her cold limbs. At the bottom she turned left and walked slowly, looking up at the new red-tiled houses on stilts where she was sure the government rest houses had once perched on the hillside. Because of the steps she could just about work out where they had stayed that last time in Malaysia. There had been five rest houses along this stretch of coast and over the years she and David had stayed in all of them.