The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  James Mohktar, alerted to something in her voice, waited to see if she was going to say more, and when she did not he said, ‘It is very sad that your happy time as a family was destroyed, Miss Montrose. But it is good that you can still remember those times of happiness.’

  Nikki got up. ‘They fade. People too. You have to keep conjuring them up from photographs and memory. You become terrified they will disappear altogether as if they had never lived, their faces a blur…But it is easier here, in Malaysia. Here the images are clearer. My father and my sister feel nearer…’ She trailed off. ‘Sorry. Did you come to tell me something? Inspector Blythe is with my mother in the house.’

  ‘Yes. I know this.’

  They looked at each other. James Mohktar did not want to tell the girl how her sister had died on this dark beach. But something told him he would learn more from her if she was alone rather than with her mother. Together, in that house, the two women managed to create an uneasy atmosphere, and Mohktar wanted to know why.

  ‘Miss Montrose, come, let us walk back to the house. It is late and I must let the inspector know that I am here.’

  ‘You came to get me? You have something to tell us?’

  ‘Yes, but I think it better if I tell you when you are with your mother.’

  ‘I know you’re going to tell me how my sister died, but, you see, I already know how she died.’

  Nikki’s voice was so low that he only just caught her words. Mohktar stopped and looked down at her and quite suddenly he felt chilled. He shivered in the warm night air and wished he had entered the house and not come down to the beach to this strange Englishwoman.

  ‘What do you mean, Miss Montrose? You cannot know.’

  She did not reply for a moment, but turned and looked out to sea. When she turned back to him, she said, ‘Yesterday I went up the cliff path to the forest. I needed to see Saffie’s grave—’

  ‘Not her grave,’ Mohktar could not help interrupting. ‘It is just the place where she was found. You and your mother will give her a Christian burial and that will be her grave, her resting place.’

  It was as if he had not spoken.

  ‘I was walking up the path in the shadows of the trees. I saw Saffie, as I often do, a little ahead of me, as if she wanted to lead me to the right place…’ Nikki’s eyes were intent on his, willing him to believe her. ‘Then…’ her voice wobbled, ‘I suddenly felt frightened, as if I heard steps behind me. I dropped my water bottle, and as I bent to pick it up I couldn’t breathe. I could not get my breath. I felt as if I was being suffocated…I was kneeling on the ground, terrified. Then it was over. I got up and turned the corner and saw the clearing with ticker tape round the hole…’ She gave a sigh, suddenly exhausted, and then she moved nearer to him and said urgently, her hands on his arms. ‘I know. I know that Saffie was suffocated by someone holding a hand over her mouth. She wanted me to know that. She wanted me to know…’

  Despite the warmth, her hands on his arms were cold and Mohktar felt a superstitious dread in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘The most likely cause of death, Detective Sergeant Mohktar, is suffocation. A hand held over the mouth with undue force. So much force, in fact, that the child’s thin neck was broken.’

  He met the girl’s eyes, hypnotised by a primitive fear of the unknown. His mother believed that the ghosts of their ancestors, their loved ones, were all around them. As a child he had thought so too. Now he did not. He was a policeman.

  ‘Am I right? Is this how Saffie died?’ Nikki’s eyes on his were bright and insistent.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, Miss Montrose.’ ‘So you believe me?’

  He did not answer, but took her hands in his and held them firmly for a moment. ‘Let us go back to the house; you are cold and it is late,’ he said gently. ‘To visit the place where your sister died was perhaps unwise on your own. Imagination plays such a part in what we believe.’

  But Nikki saw that James Mohktar was disturbed by what she had said. He let her hands go with a smile, and together in silence they made their way over the sand back to the house.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Fleur said the next morning, ‘Nikki, let’s go out for a while, I’m beginning to get cabin fever. It seems cooler today. Do you feel up to walking to the little row of Indian shops near the big hotel at the other end of the beach?’

  Nikki looked up from her book. She had read the same sentence fifty-two times. ‘I’m not ill, Mum, just huge. Sounds like a good idea.’

  They walked across the beach and then turned down a track by one of the hotels and carried on by the road, which led to the small square of local shops that tourists from the hotel considered a bargain after the expensive hotel precincts in Kuala Lumpur. Rows of bright hippy skirts and cheesecloth shirts hung on racks outside the cramped and hot little shops. Small electric hand-fans whirred inside, only stirring the stale heat and dust until it settled somewhere else. Flip-flops in boxes on the pavements adorned with gaudy plastic flowers lay beside balls and spades and faded sun-creams.

  Fleur and Nikki walked slowly, shaking their heads as the shopkeepers called out persistently, each trying to outdo the others. They stopped at a shop with a rack containing vast quantities of batik shirts and Nikki riffled through looking for one for Jack. Immediately she was surrounded by whole families. What size, Mem? What colour? How many you like? This colour? That colour? This size? That size?

  What am I doing here? Nikki thought, suddenly claustrophobic; buying shirts for Jack when…Hastily she bought two large traditional ones with subdued colours and she and Fleur moved on.

  Out of the corner of her eye Nikki suddenly spotted a corner shop selling baby clothes. She moved towards the rail with its tiny shirts and dresses and trousers hung neatly in rows under the hot sun. She had not bought anything for the baby yet because she was superstitious and now she glided towards the shop as if pulled by a magnet.

  Fleur smiled as she watched Nikki touch each item with wonder, fingering the dresses and baby suits with amazement that any human child could be so minute as to fit into these Thumbelina clothes.

  Nikki had clipped her long fair hair up but strands had escaped and curled in the heat round her neck and face. As she made her way dreamily through the baby things a small smile lit up her face at the prospect of dressing her child in little garments like these. It was as if this array of baby clothes had reignited the excitement, the reality of the life growing steadily inside her.

  Fleur, watching her, was suffused with love and pride. How beautiful Nikki looked bending to baby clothes with the same concentration she and Saffie had picked out clothes for their dolls. Nikki’s face changed when she smiled, lit up everything around her. Her blonde hair against her creamy brown neck was ravishing.

  How wonderful she would be to paint, Fleur thought. How lucky I am to have my lovely daughter here with me.

  She saw how people turned and watched Nikki, smiled at her obvious pregnancy and dreamy expression, totally oblivious to them all; bent, intent on a miniscule white dress with pink rosebuds. She took it from the rack and held it up and her fingers trembled.

  ‘Our white dresses. Mine was like this. Saffie’s had blue roses. Do you remember you only liked us to wear them on holiday?’

  Fleur said quietly, ‘How could I forget? Ah Heng brought them back from Chinatown for you both.’ Her fingers reached out to touch the dress. ‘I was immature and snobby in those days. Ah Heng loved dressing you both in clothes she bought from the markets but I thought her clothes looked cheap so I used to change you back into my clothes in the car as soon as we turned the corner. I kept those little dresses for your holidays…’

  They both looked down at the dress. Saffie had been wearing the dress with pink rosebuds when she died. Nikki could not put it back. She held it to her, clutched it to her and tears streamed silently down her face. ‘Saffie wanted the one with the blue roses because you laughed and said there wasn’t such a thing as blue roses…’

 
; Gently, Fleur took the dress from Nikki and replaced it on the rack. Then she led her away to an outside café and sat her down. Nikki took a small, battered straw hat from her bag and placed it on her head so that her face was hidden. She blew her nose and said, ‘Sorry…I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Mum.’

  Fleur ordered two cold drinks and they came in monster glasses full of watermelon and orange and mint. Nikki cooled her fingers against the glass.

  After a moment, Fleur reached out and tentatively took her hand. ‘Don’t be sorry, I know you weren’t, darling…I’m just so glad that you’re here with me. Nikki, you must try not to let anything spoil the enjoyment and excitement of your baby.’

  Fleur stopped because she was frightened of saying the wrong thing; of the small hand in hers withdrawing, snatching itself away. She searched desperately for the right words. She wanted to reach Nikki, to help her understand that life had to go on, had to be lived and loved and enjoyed for the most each day had to offer.

  How many times do we have to learn this in one lifetime? Fleur wondered. There was Jack, and Nikki must think of him and her child and a future full of opportunities and good things.

  Saffie was dead. She had been dead for a long, long time.

  But not to us. Not to us. The refrain was a familiar wail inside both of them. It is not Saffie’s death now that is going to haunt us but the manner of her dying.

  Nikki looked at her mother. ‘When I was a child I used to think about Saffie with foreign parents, unable to speak the same language and terrified. Then, to make it better, I thought of her as eventually having to accept this and changing…letting herself be loved by another family, because she must.

  ‘In the night I used to cry thinking of her lying with other people, out there somewhere far away in the dark, trying hard to keep us, her real family, alive inside her head. If it had been me, I couldn’t have coped, I would have fragmented…gone mental. If it had been me who had been taken I would rather have been dead than without Saffie…without anyone I knew or loved…’ Nikki looked down at her hand in Fleur’s and slowly withdrew it. ‘Now we know she really did die that strange, horrible afternoon. That all these years she has lain buried underneath boulders up there, under the trees…’ She gestured up towards the promontory. ‘And it seems so lonely a place to die, to lie in the dark…worse than if she had been snatched to live with foreigners who could neither speak her language nor understand her. So sad, Mum, I can hardly bear it…’

  Fleur wondered how many times you quietly died in one lifetime.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Finding Saffie after all this time is like a nightmare returning, Nikki, but if we dwell on how she might have died…it will drive us mad…would be…wrong.’

  ‘Morbid, you mean?’ Nikki’s voice had a hint of the old challenge.

  ‘Yes,’ Fleur said, firmly.

  Nikki, surprised at what she saw in Fleur’s face, said, ‘Did you feel that Mohktar and Blythe were keeping something from us last night?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t believe anyone could ever be a hundred per cent sure what happened to Saffie or how she died after twenty-eight years.’

  She hesitated, again willing the right words to come; words that Nikki might accept and believe from her.

  ‘I rather think Sergeant Mohktar and Inspector Blythe are gently putting the case to bed rather than reopening it.’ Fleur leant forward. Her hands shook and her voice was suddenly croaky with stress. ‘We won’t be needed here much longer. It’s all too long ago; there’s nothing left for us to remember. We have to let go, darling. We have to let go…’

  Nikki’s hand flew to her face. ‘And leave Saffie? Leave her again? No! She’s still trapped here…and there’s something—’ She stopped abruptly. Fleur would think she had lost it.

  Fleur stared at her daughter uneasily. ‘Nikki, of course we’re not going to leave Saffie here, we’re going to take her home and give her a proper funeral. Say our private good-byes at home.’

  Nikki said nothing. She had never told Fleur that she saw Saffie. She had only ever told Fergus. Nikki never knew if he believed her. She had wanted to keep Saffie to herself as a child. Fleur hadn’t deserved her.

  She looked up at the people passing their table without seeing them. Americans, so fat. French, dainty and voluble. English, appallingly badly dressed.

  She said suddenly, ‘The man who did it will get off scot-free. He might even have forgotten he once killed a child. He’s lived a whole life without paying.’

  ‘We don’t know he hasn’t paid,’ Fleur said. ‘We don’t know he hasn’t been haunted by killing Saffie and will be for the rest of his life…’

  At that moment the Chinese lady from the baby-clothes shop appeared by their table. She shyly handed Nikki a package, then beamed at them both and nodded her head up and down.

  ‘For you,’ she said. ‘For baby. I see you like.’ Then she was gone like a little sprite back into the crowded square.

  Startled, Nikki peered inside and saw the tiny dress with the pink rosebuds. She pulled it out and laid it on the table smoothing it out.

  Fleur said worriedly, ‘You don’t have to keep it, darling. The woman thought she was being kind.’

  But Nikki was warmed to the heart. ‘Oh, I want to keep it. Mum, do you think she knew who we were?’

  ‘Perhaps, darling.’ Fleur reached out to touch the dress.

  ‘Nikki, this is your future, this child you’re carrying.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I’m having a boy or a girl,’ Nikki said. ‘I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the bungalow,’ Fleur said. ‘It’s getting very hot.’

  They both walked slowly across the long stretch of beach back to the wooden bungalow. A hot wind blew from the sea, churning it white and choppy. Sudden clouds appeared in the sky. Both women glanced sideways. Their shadows, elongated across the sand, seemed to have substance as if a third person walked unseen in their footsteps, as she always had.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Come on, Detective Sergeant, think about it logically. In a crime against a child what is the easiest way of silencing her? By placing a hand across her mouth, of course; and if you keep it there you will suffocate her. Nikki Montrose doesn’t have to have second sight to work that one out!’

  ‘Of course,’ Mohktar said defensively. ‘I know that, Inspector Blythe, but Miss Montrose is a twin and twins have a…connection with each other. I know this to be true. My wife’s sister had twin boys. One of them got trapped in an old freezer in his grandfather’s garden. The other twin was at home with his mother. He started to have breathing difficulties. He knew immediately that his brother was trapped somewhere. He made for his grandfather’s house, indeed, it was as if he was pulled by a magnet. The boy was saved in the nick of time.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately Miss Montrose did not have that ability to help us find her twin twenty-eight years ago, or we wouldn’t be sitting here now!’ Blythe said dryly, then seeing Mohktar’s face, he added, ‘I’m sorry. I know what you’re getting at, Mohktar, and you’re right. It’s very possible Nikki Montrose did see or hear something at the time without realising it. She was the first one up and out on the beach by late afternoon. I’ve asked Mrs Campbell if they could both write down everything they remember now, before they look at their original statements again. I’d like to compare them. May be a waste of time, but there’s an hour or so missing.’

  He drummed the desk with his fingers. ‘A five-year-old has little sense of time. When she was questioned as a child, Nikki said she woke up and her sister was gone. She went out to find her on the beach but couldn’t see her anywhere. After a while she went back to her mother’s room but she was still sleeping.

  ‘She went out again, hungry and wanting her sister. This time the sun was low in the sky, we established that from her, and when the light began to go she was suddenly afraid and ran to the house to wake her mother.’

  ‘Something might have
frightened her out there alone in the coming dark?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve also wondered why she didn’t go to the next rest house if she couldn’t wake her mother. Why didn’t she go to see if her sister had gone there? She must have seen the lights. They were all army families, people she knew…’ Blythe pulled the statements towards him. ‘Mrs Campbell’s parents left early that morning in a hired car to Kuala Lumpur to fly to Penang, and the wife in the next rest house – Beatrice Addison – called in to see if Fleur was all right on her own. She did not leave until nearly two and then Mrs Campbell and her children ate a late lunch.

  ‘The twins always slept straight after lunch at about one o’clock, but this afternoon it was two thirty. Fleur took both children into her room and they were in bed each side of her when she fell asleep. According to Nikki, Saffie woke first and tried to get her to wake up and go outside with her. Nikki got cross, turned over and went back to sleep. The last thing she remembered was Saffie out of bed and pulling her dress over her head.’

  Mohktar said, ‘There was the Malay girl in the main room. She was asked to stay in the house to keep an eye on the children when they woke. She too had fallen asleep, but she would not have seen or heard either twin as they both climbed out of the bedroom window. She said it was late, about five to five thirty when she took Mem a cup of tea. She did not wake her but left the tea beside her. Neither twin was with their mother, but she heard Nikki in the bathroom and thought both children were in there. She had slept too long so she hurried to her own quarters to shower and change ready to help the Chinese cook with dinner.

  ‘She was not employed as an amah, lah? She was just an eighteen-year-old girl who had been asked to stay in the house because of the children…’