The Hour Before Dawn. Sara MacDonald
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.
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