The Hour Before Dawn. Sara MacDonald

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      D.S. Mohktar asked Nikki all over again about Fleur’s exact travelling plans. Was Mrs Campbell meeting anyone on her stopover here? Had she any worries? Was she a confident traveller? Was she in good health? Had Nikki got a recent photograph?

      Nikki had only one recent photo of her mother, taken at Fergus’s funeral. She had brought it with her and she took it out of her bag and handed it to the Detective Sergeant. She had asked someone to take this particular photograph because her grandparents had flown over from their retirement in Cyprus for Fergus’s funeral and Sam had flown back from Australia. The family had all been captured together, a rare thing.

      Fleur was dressed in black, her dark hair streaked elegantly with grey. Nikki had thought when she saw her mother again, God, she even goes grey elegantly. No aging pepper and salt for Fleur. Her mother had lost weight. She had shadows under her eyes and her cheekbones had become more prominent, yet there was something ageless about her.

      Mohktar stared down at the photograph. This woman was younger than he had expected and she was still attractive. It made his job easier because she would not have gone entirely unnoticed, but it also increased the chances that something had indeed happened to her.

      ‘We will need to keep this photograph 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.

       ELEVEN

      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 СКАЧАТЬ