The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  Fleur smiled at him. I was surprised how normal her voice sounded. ‘It would be wonderful to have an air-conditioned car, DS Mohktar. I think Jack and I would feel much easier about Nikki. If you can spare the time, it would be good to go this morning. Please, sit and have your coffee before it gets cold…’

  I stared at my mother. How was it possible to keep to the niceties when she must be in turmoil? I’ve never been able to. Jack was watching me. I got up from the table and walked inside and he followed me. Outside I heard Mohktar talking on his mobile phone.

  I turned to him. ‘Jack…sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darlin’…I just wish I could take this from you, and I can’t.’

  ‘You’re here,’ I said. ‘You’re here and it makes a difference…I can’t wait till this afternoon, Jack. Fleur and I have waited so many years…I need to see for myself that Saffie is really dead.’

  The small skeleton was almost intact. They had laid the bones of my sister as she had been found, curled for sleep. The Indian pathologist told us they had taken great care with her. They had been sure that the bones fitted the profile of a small European girl aged about five years, who must have died about twenty-five or so years ago, and the DNA had confirmed it.

  The room was cool and Fleur’s hand in mine was icy but did not shake. We could not take our eyes from the tiny skull, turned sideways still. They had asked us if it was a good idea to see her. They said: Why not remember her as she was, alive and happy? The living child my mother and I carried around with us every day of our lives. But when there has been no body, there has been no death that you can really believe in. At first you carry hope, then when that dies you think of her somewhere else, but alive. Kidnapped and living with strangers. At least I did. I made up another life for Saffie for years and years. I thought of her with people who loved her, where happiness was possible. And then as I grew up and that slid from me I prayed that she had not had time to be too frightened. I hoped only that death had been quick and that she had not been aware it was coming.

  I needed to see concrete evidence that I had been a twin. That once, long ago, I had another part of me that was inseparable, for sometimes it seemed only a lovely dream that I conjured from loneliness. In that terrible, swift and sudden end to Saffie’s life a part of me died too.

  I moved forward to peer into the hollow eyes that once had eyes like mine and I bent to my own skull and felt the rustle of unease ripple round a room that was so silent it felt surreal.

  We were one, Saffie. We were one and the same, you and I.

  Lying safe in Fleur’s womb we lay curled together, submerged and sealed in warm, protective water. We could have been fraternal twins, but we were one egg which split in two. Conceived together; just a speck of a billion sperm, random eggs that swam upwards making us identical.

  Even when you died I thought we could be one again. I made myself believe that by sheer will I could conjure you to me. I put on your blue cotton pyjamas. I pulled my hair up in that old blue band of yours, just like you used to do.

  I went to the mirror. See? See? Who is to say this is not you, Saffie? Who is to say that this is really me? No one! No one! I can re-create you. I can be you and you can be me. I can do it. See, Saffie, how I stand before you in the mirror in these blue pyjamas you always wear. I am you, Saffie, and if I am you, you cannot be dead…

  Fleur touched me, pulled me gently away from that small, fragile skull, from the bones of a child who died long ago.

  ‘Darling…Come away now. Enough. We have seen…and it is real to us now after all this time. Come away…’

  I turned to her, mystified. How can I leave her? We have only just found her.

  The child in my womb kicked hard and I drew in my breath, put my hand on my stomach and felt the strange urgent movements of my baby turning. It was like coming back from a long journey to some dark place and I breathed deeply and started to shake and was led quickly away out of the room.

  Outside, Jack leapt up and came to me, held me to him, and I was so cold that my teeth chattered, making a noise in the silence. I hung on to him as darkness came rushing sickly upwards.

  The journey home passed like a dream as we sped past old colonial buildings built from mellow stone, places we might have visited long ago. They thought I would be hot but the car was cold…so very cold…

  I woke to find myself in bed. The room was dark and I had a cover over me. The shutters were open and outside I could see the sky livid with the sun setting. Somewhere, not too far away, I could hear soft voices talking earnestly.

  I looked round. I did not know how I’d got back here or how long I had slept. I lay still, and the dark thing I knew was waiting for me edged nearer. The same thing that had waited unseen in the corners of my grandparents’ cold bedroom in England; a thing I could never remember when we returned to their house without Saffie.

  On my tongue now was our secret language, Saffie’s and mine. I thought I had forgotten it, but now I found my lips forming the question.

  ‘Meit to?’ I whispered into the shadows.

  ‘Favlo!’ came the reply like a breath. And there she was by the window, her hair in a ponytail, wearing the faded cotton dress with the tiny pink flowers on. My dress. I wore pink. Saffie wore blue.

  I sat up, leant forward to see her face, but as always it was in shadow. She stood there quite still but she did not move my way. I wanted her to stay. I needed to see the expression on her face, needed to see if she smiled or was sad. Mostly I needed to know, and dreaded knowing, if I would see her last expression of fear imprinted forever upon her features.

  I pulled the cover back and swung my feet onto the floor and I saw her shake her head slowly once.

  ‘Pinot. Pinot,’ I begged. ‘Don’t go, Saffie. Don’t go.’

  I think she turned or the shadows in the room changed. I saw her face briefly and there was no expression there at all. Yet the room was full of her pleading. Then she was gone.

  ‘Saffie!’ I whispered. ‘What is it? What do you want me to do?’

  Beyond the shadows, beyond the mosquito screen in the window, I saw the frangipani trees moving as the wind got up. I thought I heard the faint sound of crying, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Fleur was impressed by Jack. She had expected a rather detached man’s man, but she saw immediately he was a gentle person and very protective of Nikki.

  Her daughter’s reaction in the pathology department had alarmed Fleur. It was as if Nikki had immediately regressed, frighteningly quickly, to the days after Saffie’s disappearance. Twenty-eight years had not diminished Nikki’s loss or prepared her for the finality, the evidence of Saffie’s death.

  Fleur got up and went to the door of the bedroom where Nikki was sleeping with the help of a relaxant from a softvoiced Indian-woman doctor. Safe for a pregnant woman, she had assured Jack.

  Nikki lay in exactly the same position on the bed, heavily asleep. Fleur moved back along the veranda and sat down with Jack again. She had been jerked out of her own shock by Nikki’s distress, but she was fighting exhaustion.

  The small bones of her child, curled as if for sleep, remained behind her eyes like a clear photograph through all that she was saying to Jack. Seeing Nikki pregnant and vulnerable, her detached and cool exterior blown away, Fleur realised that all these years Nikki had maintained a furious defence against a loss she had had to endure but had never come to terms with.

  She said, as she looked at Jack’s worried face, ‘Twins, especially identical ones, are immeasurably close. Closer to each other, in a way, than they are to their parents. I learnt, when I had Nikki and Saffie, that I could never be cross with one twin or the other would be outraged. Sometimes you could never be sure which one you were talking to because they liked to play games. I used to dress them in different colours so people would not get confused, but they would swap their clothes around and imitate each other’s mannerisms, so from a distance even David and I had troub
le knowing who we were talking to…’

  She met Jack’s eyes. ‘Of course, as they grew up it would have got easier and easier as their mannerisms and characters developed…but…’

  Jack leant towards her. ‘I can’t imagine what you must have felt in there…or what you’re feeling now, Fleur. Nikki gave me a hell of a turn back there. She’s not the fainting sort…but she’s not having an easy pregnancy.

  ‘Even after all these years, it is your daughter and Nikki’s sister in there and I don’t know how I could expect any different. It’s still a terrible shock and time doesn’t change that.’

  Nikki has touched gold with this one and I thank God for it, Fleur thought.

  ‘Would it have been better never to know?’ Fleur seemed to be talking to herself. ‘Or is it better to be confronted by the evidence of my child’s death after all this time…You see, I dread…if they can tell, somehow, how she died. Jack, I’m sorry, I’ve had it. I’ll have to go to bed.’

  Jack leapt up. ‘Of course. No worries. You look all in.’

  Fleur’s face was ashen and drawn and she seemed very small. Her dark hair, flecked with grey, was clipped up in the way Nikki sometimes clipped hers, elegantly with a tortoiseshell clip.

  ‘Good night. I hope…Try and sleep. I’ll keep an eye on Nikki.’

  Fleur smiled. ‘I know you will. ‘I’m so glad she’s got you, Jack. Good night.’

  In her room, Fleur, trembling, pulled a nightdress over her head, climbed under the mosquito net and slid between cool cotton sheets.

  She slept for minutes at a time but kept waking, her mind throwing up images and memories she would rather had remained buried.

  If only she could have that time again; change the sequence of those long, dark days that led resolutely from one tragedy to the next.

  TWENTY

  James Mohktar shook hands with the English detective who had flown out from London. He had brought a short stack of files dating back twenty odd years. Gordon Blythe was about to retire but had been a young military policeman at the time of the disappearance of the small army child in 1976.

  He had no illusions as to why he had been spared to resurrect this old case. By the time he returned to London he would only have a few months to do. He had been let out to graze.

  ‘Detective Inspector Gordon Blythe,’ he said, shaking Mohktar’s hand.

  ‘Apa khabar? How are you, Inspector? I hope your accommodation is satisfactory and you have recovered from your journey?’ Mohktar asked politely, glancing at the older man’s tired face.

  ‘It’ll take a day or two for that,’ Inspector Blythe said. ‘But it helped having a night in Singapore.’

  James Mohktar had expected to be recalled to Singapore himself, but Inspector Teddy Chan had agreed to leave him in Port Dickson as he had established a rapport with the family. He also came from the area and was familiar with the families of some of the locals who had been questioned at that time. He would be useful to Inspector Blythe.

  Mohktar doubted he would be able to help as he had only been a police cadet in 1976, but the disappearance of a European child had shocked this small state at the time and people did remember it.

  He had moved Fleur, Nikki and Jack to a different location at the quieter end of the beach, purposely, to protect them from any press intrusion. He had managed to prevent them seeing the local papers, which once the DNA had been formally established were free with opinions as to what might have happened all those years ago. They also offered various gory theories about child trafficking and what sort of person might have perpetrated the crime. Some of the papers had also published the names of local men who had been questioned but released at the time.

  ‘If you could plough through these old reports with a couple of your men, I will do the same with your old case notes, Detective Sergeant,’ Blythe said. ‘Bearing in mind the Met aren’t going to leave me here indefinitely, so time is vital.’

  Mohktar smiled to himself but said politely, ‘Indeed. But you must bear in mind that we are not in England and people here rise early but do not work in the afternoons in the heat of the day, Inspector. Here is also a small provincial force so our main help will come from Kuala Lumpur. All these records have come from there and there is only one policeman left in the force who was involved in this case and he will be our link with KL.

  ‘Good,’ Blythe said. ‘I presume that it will be almost impossible to determine how the child died after all this time?’

  ‘I believe it is doubtful,’ Mohktar said. ‘Unless the bones show specific breakages.’

  ‘What was the mother doing in Singapore? It seems odd that she was here when the body turned up after all this time?’

  Mohktar was unsure due respect was being given to Mrs Campbell and her dead child. But perhaps it was the English way.

  ‘Mrs Campbell was on her way to see her daughter in New Zealand. She had a stopover in Singapore and she saw The Straits Times with the article about the grave, quite by chance, lah? When she went missing the hotel rang us and we contacted her daughter who flew to Singapore immediately. I believe it to be a sad coincidence that the lady arrived as the body of the child was found in the clearance of that piece of coastline.’

  ‘I am not sure I entirely believe in coincidences,’ Blythe said. ‘How come the child’s body was still intact and in one place in the jungle after all this time?’

  ‘It had lain, or been pushed, under rock in a natural underground cave. It had also been wrapped in something; many fibres of material were found on the body. If the driver of the machine had not stopped for the call of nature, the child’s body would never have been found.’

  He looked at the English policeman. ‘Do you really expect after all this time that we will find out what happened, Inspector?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Blythe said. ‘But maybe we owe it to the family to have one more try. I have a list of all the Europeans staying at the government rest houses in 1976, plus a list of local Malay and Chinese working or living there.’

  ‘You would like me to look into the whereabouts of any locals who were here at that time?’

  ‘Yes. I know it’s time-consuming, but…’ It was also complicated, Blythe thought, by the fact that some families had brought their own servants on holiday.

  The two men looked at each other. It all seemed a prodigious amount of work for an uncertain result. He had not been sent to solve the case, Blythe thought, but more to close it. He shook himself out of his jetlag. He shouldn’t have agreed to come if he had such a negative attitude.

  James Mohktar opened his palms. ‘Inshallah. We must investigate. It is what we must do. A small child died long ago. No one has paid for that crime. We must do our best for the family, lah?’

  Blythe looked at Mohktar startled. It seemed they had the same opinion of their chances of success.

  ‘If I could meet Mrs Campbell and her daughter…Is it her husband with her?’

  Mohktar looked disapproving. ‘They do not marry and she has a child on the way. But he is a nice man, I think.’ He got to his feet. ‘I will now go and see how they are, and to arrange a time for them to meet you.’

  Blythe nodded. ‘I will make a start on these reports.’

  As the Malay sergeant left, Blythe thought he seemed efficient but rather too sensitive to be a policeman. He opened the first report, trying not to feel he was on a wild goose chase, which is what Mrs Blythe had called his sudden departure as she crossly cancelled their weekend in Brighton.

  It was almost worth having jetlag to get out of Brighton.

  He looked down at the Military Police report with the names of the forces families staying on this coastline twenty-eight years ago. He had been unable to gather any information from the army. Two of the army detectives were now dead, one played a minor role and the last could not be found.

  How this small piece of Malaysian coastline had changed. He got up and went to the window of the basic office. He looked out on the dusty street whe
re market traders called out in front of their fruit stalls piled spectacularly high with colourful fruit. Durians, water and honey melons, oranges and limes, small sweet bananas and papaya. Bicycle bells rang, taxis hooted at pedestrians and a small child sat on a wall playing with or tormenting a thin, hungry-looking kitten.

  Chinese and Malay voices, shrill and high, echoed into the square, mingling with Indian music playing from one of the dusty shops selling rubber flip-flops and cheap tee shirts and skirts.

  Heat and dust and a life where all the days inexorably melt into the next, Inshallah, as the Malay policeman would say.

  He could hear the noise of the small police station around him and away from the ceiling fan sweat began to gather under his armpits and over his chest and across his back. The morning had hardly started. Hastily he went back to the desk and looked down at the names on the first page.

  Rest House 1

  Sqn Ldr Richard Allis. Mrs Barbara Allis. Grp Capt. Andrew Morris. Mrs Alison Morris.

  Rest House 2

  Colonel Bill Dury. Mrs Christine Dury. Saul aged four. Susan aged six months. Amah Ah Ming.

  Rest House 3

  Four teachers: Miss Tessa Brown, Miss Natalie Clarke, Miss Anna Wilson, Miss Daphne Broadbent.

  Rest House 4

  Capt. Alex Addison. Mrs Beatrice Addison (pregnant).

  Major Gardam. Mrs Elizabeth Gardam. (British High Commission.)

  Mr Andrew Right. Mrs Paula Right. (Civilian friends living in Singapore.)

  Rest House 5

  Brigadier Peter Llewellyn. Mrs Laura Llewellyn.

  Mrs Fleur Montrose.

  Twin girls: Saffron and Nikki Montrose.