The Hour Before Dawn

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘I remember her,’ Blythe said. ‘She was very pretty and very upset. We had to keep reassuring her it was not her fault. I wonder what happened to her.’

  Mohktar smiled. ‘She is married now with five children and she is rather fat.’

  ‘Oh!’ Inspector Blythe smiled back, his memory spoilt. ‘So, between about three thirty p.m. and five thirty when Mrs Campbell woke up, the other twin, Saffie, disappeared from the face of the earth. Possibly murdered between the rest house and where we found her remains.’

  ‘Unless she was taken somewhere else and buried there later.’

  The two men looked at each other. Blythe said suddenly, ‘Do you ever have a strong gut feeling about a case?’ Mohktar looked puzzled. ‘Does murder upset my stomach? Indeed, Inspector, how can it not, especially when a child is involved, when families are destroyed.’

  Blythe laughed dryly. ‘I meant – and I felt this twenty-eight years ago and I still feel it now – that the answer lies within the army community, not with a local man. Yet they were all officers, they were all acquaintances, if not friends. A sexual motive seems perverse in this setting. And it can never be established now.’

  ‘Unless,’ Mohktar said quietly, ‘the child saw something she should not have seen on a hot afternoon when she should have been sleeping?’

  Blythe looked at him with interest. ‘A bit of extramarital activity would certainly not be unknown.’

  ‘It could be that her murder was a mistake, an accident.’

  ‘You mean he did not mean to kill her but was too rough, broke her neck by mistake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t tell the mother and her daughter that the child’s neck was broken, did you?’

  ‘No. It is too much information for them. I see no need unless they ask. I agree with you, Inspector, I too think the answer lies in the British community. It was, and still is, very rare here for a Chinese or Malay to harm a child.’

  Blythe got to his feet. ‘I’m retiring. I thought on the plane flying out here how good it would feel to solve this last nasty little murder before I go, but we’re not going to, you know, Mohktar, we’re not going to.’

  Mohktar’s face was impassive. ‘Do not be too sure, Inspector. Do not be too sure. The answer lies in Miss Montrose’s head. I feel this.’

  Looking down at his handsome, cerebral face, Blythe wished he felt as confident, and yet there was something magnetic and reassuring about this strange Malay detective. He had come highly recommended and apparently had a nose for odd cases; for getting inside people’s heads when all else had failed. But most of all, Blythe thought, this was a man who really cared. A man you could trust.

  The two men smiled at each other. ‘Inspector, once the child’s body is released by the coroner we cannot keep the two women here.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’ve asked the powers that be not to release her body for another forty-eight hours.’

  ‘It is not long.’

  ‘No, Mohktar, it isn’t nearly long enough, which is why I think this case is a crime that will never be solved.’

  ‘I do not yet give up,’ Mohktar murmured. ‘But soon they must lay their child to rest. I hope this is what they can do.’

  ‘Yes,’ Inspector Blythe said. ‘So do I.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When they got back to the house, Fleur went to check her mobile phone for messages. She had left it behind to charge. There was one from DI Blythe to say there was nothing to report today but he and Mohktar would come to the house tomorrow. If they needed anything they must ring immediately. He added that it would help greatly if they could both jot down anything they remembered on a piece of paper, including things that seemed totally irrelevant.

  Sam had texted her: Fleury. Will ring 6 p.m. your time. Sam x.

  As they sat down for lunch, Nikki said, ‘At Fergus’s funeral, Sam said he was going to try and get home every two years. Be nice for you if he could, Mum.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fleur smiled. It had been a shock when Sam had married an Australian and decided to live there permanently all those years ago. They had always been close. He had been the big brother, always there for her, conscious perhaps that he was Laura’s blue-eyed boy.

  ‘Now his boys have flown, I think it’s going to be easier for him and Angie to get away. Also, of course, he’s conscious of Laura and Peter getting frailer.’

  Nikki had seen more of Sam in the last few years than Fleur. Both his boys had backpacked to New Zealand and Sam had flown out to sail a yacht back to Sydney with them. He and Jack had immediately taken to each other. They had sailing in common and a passion for boats, and Nikki saw that Sam and Jack were the same sort of gentle giants with little emotional baggage. Funny; perhaps she had subconsciously been drawn to Jack because she and Saffie had adored Sam when they were little. He used to stop off on his long-haul trips between Melbourne and London to visit them.

  Nikki vividly remembered Sam and Fleur clutching each other when Saffie had gone, when they were all back in England. He had held his sister in his bear-like grip and they had rocked together, to and fro, to and fro, in a dark room of that cold house. Nikki had watched the tears stream down Sam’s face as he whispered over and over, ‘Fleury, Fleury, Fleury.’

  He could not say it was going to be all right or things would get better or time would heal, or any of the clichés people say to one another to comfort, knowing as they speak that it is the tone and texture of their words that register, not the content.

  Sam knew, in those searing moments he held Fleur, that his beautiful, happy sister’s life was blighted forever by this second tragedy. Here was a sorrow that could never be healed, never absorbed into everyday life.

  As they sat at the table, Fleur said suddenly, as if it still hurt, ‘If David hadn’t died and then Saffie been taken, I don’t think Sam would have gone to Australia for good. He couldn’t cope with all our combined grief. You, me, Laura and Peter. It was too much; bits of him broke off and fragmented. He had to get away…’

  ‘He ran away, Mum. He left us.’ Nikki could hear the childish lament in her voice. Sam had been the third beloved person to disappear from their lives.

  Fleur looked at her. He ran away. In that second, Nikki saw that she had done exactly the same when she couldn’t bear any more.

  Fleur broke the silence. ‘Sam needed to make his own life away from the shadow of mine. People can only take so much unhappiness. I think it was brave of him. He knew himself. He was a happy person whose good nature would have been destroyed if he hadn’t got away.’

  Nikki thought suddenly: Fergus was the only one who didn’t run, who was steadfast throughout my whole life. And I gave him a hell of a lot of grief.

  ‘We’re lucky Fergus didn’t run too, then, aren’t we?’ It came out before Nikki could stop it.

  Fleur could not interpret the tone in Nikki’s voice. Then she remembered Nikki’s reaction at Fergus’s funeral. Nikki had cried silently by day and inconsolably at night. When Fleur couldn’t bear the sound any longer, echoing her own grief in the silent house, she had gone into Nikki’s room.

  ‘Darling, enough! Fergus would be so upset to see you like this.’

  ‘I never told him I loved him! I never told him I loved him,’ Nikki had wailed over and over.

  ‘He knew! Nikki, he knew. How could he not know? He loved you as much as you loved him.’

  Nikki had not let Fleur touch her, only her grandmother, but she had listened to their words and flown home to Jack comforted by them.

  ‘Yes,’ Fleur said evenly. ‘We were lucky to have Fergus and there was rarely a day when I didn’t thank God for it.’

  Nikki saw her mother’s hands tremble as she put down her knife and fork. It was back, this thing between them; this unsaid thing that Nikki had wanted to shriek out at her mother all her life. Why? How could you love my dad and have an affair with Fergus? How could you?

  Fleur got up from the table to get more water from the f
ridge. ‘If you’ve finished, Nikki, I’m going to go and have a rest. What about you?’

  ‘I’ve finished. Can I borrow your Hundertwasser? I can’t get into my book.’

  ‘Of course you can. I’ve got some paper here, Nikki. Will you do what Blythe suggests and write down anything you can still remember?’

  ‘As if,’ Nikki said, ‘either of us is remotely likely to remember more than we did twenty-eight years ago.’

  ‘I suppose they just want to compare minor details.’

  ‘Or clutch straws. Have a good sleep, Mum.’

  In her bedroom, Fleur found the amah had closed the shutters against the hot midday sun and, feeling claustrophobic, she opened them slightly to let the glare of the day slide into the room in a sliver of heat that slanted across the floor. She took her dress off, turned the ceiling fan on, and got under the thin cotton sheet.

  It seemed such a long time since morning. The days had a strange lost quality, like a dream, but real too, like slow, somnolent, heavy steps back towards something she did not want to remember. Fleur felt a longing to return to her normal life; the life she had made. To be doing the thing she had set out to do when she started this journey.

  The day she left her London house swam back; that uneasy sensation that she would return home a different person.

  She closed her eyes, longing for sleep. She reached out across the bed with her hand to touch the empty space the other side.

  ‘Fergus…I miss you.’

  Fergus, who had flown into her life and changed the balance of everything. He had been David’s best man at their wedding, but she hadn’t known him then. Not then. And she could not possibly have foreseen the future, not on the day she and David got married.

  TWENTY-NINE

  They married in David’s village church with the reception in his parents’ garden. There was a marquee on the lawn and the sun shone the entire day.

  ‘Well it would, wouldn’t it?’ someone remarked. ‘Lovely couple, picturesque village, quaint church, wonderful house and garden. Fun people. It wouldn’t dare rain.’

  Laura flew back from Northern Ireland to help Kate, David’s mother, and his unmarried older sister, Cecile, to organise it all. Laura and Peter’s house in Hampshire was rented out, and in any case Fleur had always hated it.

  David was the golden boy. He had inherited his mother’s good looks, while poor Cecile, who patently adored her brother, was shy and plain and had unfortunately inherited their father’s features. Life, as Laura remarked at the time, could be very cruel.

  David’s mother took Cecile totally for granted. Laura could see that clearly without experiencing any revealing insight into the difference with which she treated her own two children.

  David’s friends and fellow officers had been ensconced in the local hotel. They had whipped him up to London for his stag night and he had got married with little sleep and a hangover.

  Fleur had floated through the hot, dreamy summer day in a private cloud of happiness. In the run-up to the wedding she had not seen much of David as he was completing a flying course with the Army Air Corps in Middle Wallop and she was stuck in army quarters with her parents in Northern Ireland, bored and counting the days. She had escaped briefly to London. Sam was in his second year at Guy’s Hospital and she stayed in the flat his Australian girlfriend shared with two other girls and got a temporary job in a wine bar. Sam and Angie were both in medical school, working every hour God made, and Fleur found herself counting the days.

  Two weeks before the wedding David got his wings and was jubilant. He was also exultant to be getting married in the village he had grown up in. All he needed now was a good posting and life would be perfect.

  They went to Cyprus for their honeymoon and stayed in a villa in the middle of an orange grove with wonderful views of the sea. They dived together and went to clubs and ate out and read and swam in the pool. They lay on the marble tiles on cushions and read trashy books and made love for hours all over the house. To Fleur it was perfect. It was exactly what she wanted; just her and David in the middle of nowhere. She had not had him on her own for months.

  He suddenly announced that he had arranged a surprise for the second week because it was her birthday. They shut up the villa and drove up tortuous roads to the Troodos Mountains. As they climbed the air grew cooler until they reached an isolated farmhouse perched on the edge of a mountain with breathtaking views looking out over fir forests.

  There were two cars parked outside and David made Fleur close her eyes while he led her indoors. When she opened them in a large, empty room a table had been spread with food and there was a huge cake and balloons. The door burst open and Sam and Angie burst in shrieking,

  ‘Happy birthday, Fleury!’

  They had been closely followed by Laura and Peter. Her mother beaming, her father, who had been overruled, very unsure this was what Fleur wanted for her nineteenth birthday.

  The smile had frozen on Fleur’s face, then she had turned and seen David’s happiness at surprising her and had hastily acted out a cry of astonished delight. She had escaped to go and shower and change and she had howled silently in the bathroom with disappointment. Honeymoons were for two, even if it was her birthday.

  It had been a wonderful idea, generously thought out. David had obviously worked hard at this surprise. Local music, food and flowers had been arranged. Everyone had taken so much trouble for her. Fleur knew she was childishly ungrateful, but she had not wanted her wonderful spell with David broken, and it had been.

  Her parents and Sam had only stayed two nights and then continued on their own separate holidays. But in those two days, David, Sam and her father had gone off walking and exploring together, leaving the women trailing behind them. There had been boys’ drinks till all hours, long after the women had given up and gone to bed.

  Fleur knew she was lucky to have a close family who loved her and wanted to spend her birthday with her. She felt even more ashamed of her feelings when Sam, who knew her well, said: ‘Hope you didn’t mind us gate-crashing, little sis. It’s just, I guess we are all are going to go our separate ways now. I’m going to travel for a year with Angie, then make up my mind how I want to specialise. Mum and Dad will be posted who knows where next, and the same goes for you and David…You and I will have children and I quess we’ll never be so close again, will we? You’re all grown-up and married now!’

  Fleur had hugged him, looking over his shoulder at the sea glinting in the distance. It wasn’t just her and Sam. It was the memory of a particular time they had all had together, her parents and David. The bond they had all forged in Singapore living and working together would never be so close again. This was the end of a happy childhood for her and Sam. This party – her birthday party – had been recognition of this fact. Life was moving on.

  When she stood on the steps with David’s arm round her and watched the two cars pull away, she wept, unsure why. Perhaps the sudden realisation Sam had given her that all the people she loved had been here in one place together.

  She suspected David felt the same. An anticlimax had hung over the rest of the day. They drank a lot of wine at supper and tottered up the stairs to bed and had fallen asleep without making love.

  Making love. David had laughed at her: ‘You’re a little floozy, you!’

  She would wake first and watch him sleeping, aroused by his beauty. His lashes were dark and thick and made shadows under his eyes. His limbs were long and lean and brown. She felt amazed that it was really her in the bed with him. She lay in early sunlight just watching him sleep.

  She saw women turn to look at him; their eyes following him around a room. He had a slow, laconic walk and an air of constant amusement which was deeply sexy and Fleur wanted him every minute of the day.

  ‘I’m exhausted!’ he would laugh, holding her away. ‘You’ve got the body of a little boy and the voracious appetite of a dancer who’s totally aware of her own body…not to mention mine! I’ll have a
heart attack.’

  ‘No you won’t. You’re too young!’

  ‘I’m getting older by the minute!’ He swung her under him.

  ‘I don’t think you fancy me, you want a woman with large breasts and child-bearing hips!’

  ‘So why did I marry you, youngster?’

  ‘Tell me why you married me?’

  ‘Because your dad has a wonderful sailing boat?’

  ‘Wrong answer.’

  ‘Well, it must be that I married you because I love you to bits and because I cannot imagine ever wanting to be with any other woman but you, Fleury.’

  ‘Is that really true?’ she whispered, thrilled.

  He laughed and kissed her nose. ‘Of course it is.’

  But she had seen something sad or wistful in his eyes for a second, as if he knew she was going to ask for more than he was able to give.

  Fleur reassured herself in the following months, ensconced happily in army quarters with lots of other young wives, all complaining in a good-natured way that their men could not talk about anything but aeroplanes. She told herself that it must be his new job; that he’d only just got his wings; that he had to prove himself flying. The fact remained, and she buried it mostly, because she was so happy and David was fun, life was fun…the fact remained that David did not want to make love to her as much as she wanted to make love to him.

  When he did it was as lovely as ever, but he had rebuffed her very gently a couple of times and it had cut her to the bone. He knew, and was immensely attentive to make up for it, but Fleur realised instinctively her neediness would put him off. She felt almost ashamed of her body and how she felt about him.

  When she backed off it was better. He would initiate their love-making. But Fleur learnt in those first few months of marriage that his sexual appetite for her was much less acute than hers for him.

  She read magazines: she knew it happened sometimes. People’s appetites were different. It wasn’t as if he never slept with her. But supposing, and this niggled at her, it was chemistry, and he loved her but she just did not arouse him in the right way, the way he dramatically aroused her.