The Hour Before Dawn
Sara MacDonald

For my beloved twin Nicky, with love.

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, The future futureless, before the morning watch. TS Eliot

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Fleur treads water in the deep end as the twins slowly climb to the diving board. An older girl goes up behind them to make sure they don’t fall.

Fleur is laughing at their excitement. Nikki jumps first, plummets downwards, hits the water and keeps going down. Fleur hauls her up to the surface and she opens her mouth and screams with joy.

Fleur sits her on the edge of the pool and swims back to the middle for Saffie. Saffie leaps and lands almost into Fleur’s arms and Fleur scoops her up before she sinks. The onlookers round the pool clap their hands; it is an amazing sight to see toddlers jumping from the diving board.

‘We did it! We did it!’ they both cry.

Fleur swims to the edge and pulls herself out and sits next to them. ‘You’re so brave! I’m so proud of you!’

‘Now you! Now you, Mummy!’

Fleur looks at them, small brown bodies, wrists and ankles round and babyish still, their fair hair plastered to their heads. They could both swim before they could walk. They have no fear of the water, no fear of anything. She is suffused with love, overtaken; wants to pull them to her and bite into those plump legs and arms, bury her head in their wet little stomachs.

‘OK. But go back to the rug and get your armbands first.’

She watches them run noisily away over the grass; watches heads turn as they always do at the two identical little figures. When they return she blows up their bands, then blows a raspberry on each brown stomach making them shriek.

‘Go and sit on the edge of the shallow end, you noisy little girls, and don’t jump in until I’ve dived and I’m in the water. You know the rules. I mean it. If you jump in before I’m in the water, no more diving board.’

The twins nod solemnly and Fleur walks away and climbs the ladder to the top board. Over to her right the sea glitters over the Straits of Malacca and sounds from the naval base below reach her. It is late in the afternoon and a cooling wind is coming from the sea, ruffling the palm trees, touching her wet skin like a whisper. Colours are softening over the grass and families, some with amahs, sit scattered on towels and rugs around the pool, reading, talking quietly, and waiting for the men to finish work and join them.

Fleur stands poised, eyes almost shut, dark hair, dark skin, in a white bikini. She raises her arms, thinking about her movements and the alignment of her body as only a dancer does. She pauses, the diving board rocks, and then in perfect slow motion her body bends, jumps and turns in a perfect arc as she dives, breaking the water with hardly a splash.

She isn’t aware of the watchers, of the men turning from the bar, of the women stopping for a moment, of the children, their mouths open in admiration. She is only aware of this small act of precision reminding her of what her body can do.

When she surfaces, the twins are swimming like small, fat beetles towards her, racing to see who can get to her first. She laughs and propels herself towards them and when her feet touch the bottom she holds her arms wide, turning her face upwards away from their splashes. They grab her arms.

‘I won!’

‘No, I won!’

‘You both won,’ she says, clasping them to her. ‘Now let’s go and get dry because Daddy will be here any moment.’

She plonks them on the side and they start to pull their armbands off. When she looks up David is standing in his uniform watching them, his eyes shielded by dark glasses. Her heart turns over as it always does when she sees him from a distance. She thinks, ‘Oh God, he’s mine.’

The twins haven’t seen him yet and Fleur knows why he hasn’t called out. He likes to watch them. He likes to watch them when they are unaware because he too cannot quite believe in this happiness.

She smiles and the twins turn to see who she is smiling at, then squeak and jump up and run across the grass to him. He scoops them up and walks towards Fleur, laughing.

‘Ugh! Horrid, beastly little wet rats.’

‘No, no! Peapods. We’re peapods.’

‘You jolly well are not! Peapods are nice and dry and green.’ He drops them beside their armbands, takes off his dark glasses and bends and puts out a hand to pull Fleur out of the water.

‘Hi, you.’ He kisses her nose, his eyes amused, and Fleur wants to wind her arms round him, press her body to him; the feeling is visceral and overpowering.

‘Are you going in?’

‘Yes, I’ll cool off for ten minutes while you get these rats dressed. Can you get me a beer, darling? I’m parched.’

He walks back with her across the grass where the shadows are lengthening and goes to change. Fleur dresses the twins and gets out their colouring books. She walks over to the outside bar to get them cold drinks and the twins turn and watch her.

She has wrapped a thin, filmy piece of material across her hips and people turn as she passes. The young Malay waiter who is clearing the tables hurries back to the bar so that he can serve her. He carries the tray all the way back across the grass for her and places it on the table beside the twins.

‘Hello, babies,’ he says. He says it every time and they say in unison,

‘Not babies.’ And he laughs and gives Fleur his glittering smile and swaggers laconically away.

Fleur lies on her stomach in the last rays of the sun, soporific, listening to the different voices coming to her as the day fades. She can hear David’s voice faintly talking to someone as he swims. They will be talking helicopters or flight rotas or new pilots or the boss.

The twins move closer, their warm bodies touch her on each side. Saffie has her thumb in her mouth. They are both getting sleepy. Fleur puts her arms around them both.

What should she wear tonight? They are driving into Singapore with friends to have a meal and walk around night markets before going dancing.

How many times has she worn the green Chinese silk dress? It is ages since they’ve been into the city…maybe she will get some material for a new dress…

‘I love you, sweet peas,’ she murmurs, drawing the twins even closer so that they seem welded and part of her.

‘Blub you.’

‘Blub you, Mummy.’

The day is drawing to a close. People are leaving. It is the gap between afternoon and evening when only the single officers prop up the bar for a little longer before they too go and change for dinner. She hears Laura’s voice in her head.

‘You’re throwing your life away. I can’t believe that after all those hard years of training you can just…give it all up…What a waste! You’re a born dancer…You’ll regret it, Fleur. One day you’ll wake up and regret it…’

She hears David return, pick up a towel, drip near her feet. He takes a deep drink of his beer. He is humming under his breath.

Fleur smiles. I don’t regret it, Mum. I’ve never regretted it for one single second. I’m so happy I want to burst.

As she thinks this, she remembers someone saying, Never, ever say out loud that you’re happy because a jealous God will hear and strike you down. The sun goes suddenly, slips behind the sea and all is black and white.

I didn’t say it out loud. I only thought it so it doesn’t count.

Fleur sits up and David smiles. ‘I guess I’d better swallow this beer and get my three sleepy women home…’

ONE

I saw so clearly the hollow grave on the edge of the jungle and the small skeleton curled inside it that I woke up screaming.

Jack erupted from the pillow in fright and switched on the lamp.

‘God, Nikki.’

His startled face peered at me, still full of sleep. I clamped my hand over my mouth willing the image to fade.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered, but my whole body was shaking and I felt icily cold.

‘That must have been some dream. Are you OK now?’ Jack rubbed his hand up and down my arm to sooth me but it had the opposite effect and I shrank away, back under the covers.

Jack turned to look at the clock. It was four-fifteen.

‘Oh God,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve got to be up in two hours.’

‘Sorry,’ I said again, trying to stop shivering.

‘I’ll make you tea,’ he said in a resigned voice. ‘I might as well. I’m never going to get to sleep again.’ He got out of bed. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here.’

He wound a sarong around his naked body and went to the window which was wide open and shut it.

‘I wonder why it’s so cold? I’ll come back and warm you up…’ He paused, staring at me worriedly. ‘You’ve only had bad dreams since you got pregnant, haven’t you?’

I nodded and he grinned at me. ‘I’d better start monitoring what you eat for supper.’

When he’d gone the room was still, but it was full of something too, full of the cold darkness that was Saffie. Saffie, desperately trying tell me something. Why now, after all these years, when I had run so far and thought the past was settling into something I could just about manage?

Of course, she was always with me, each and every day, because she was my twin and her likeness was mine. Of course she was with me, a shadow, a mote in my eye, there on the turn of a stair, on the end of a street, waiting.

But I had never known her frightened before. She had never called out to me in my dreams as she was doing now. Nothing should hurt her. She should be safe.

I carried new life in me and I felt full of dread. I tried to tell myself that terrifying glimpse of a grave was something I had watched on the television and nothing to do with my sister.

As she faded the room warmed, and when Jack came back with tea and dry biscuits I was able to smile. He kissed the top of my nose and climbed back into bed.

‘Thank God, it’s warming up,’ he said.

‘Thank you for the tea.’ I smiled at him gratefully.

‘No worries,’ he answered sleepily, and I knew in a moment he would be asleep again, leaving me to wait for the birds and the sun creeping up over the bay.

An hour later I slid out of bed and pulled my clothes from the chair. I went into the bathroom and dressed quietly and pattered downstairs and out into the new day. I walked down the garden and the dew was heavy and cold and drenched my feet. The bay was full of yachts below me and the sea beyond the oyster beds was the deepest blue, yet summer was beginning to fade, the height of the season was over and soon Jack would be able to relax a little.

In England the worst of the winter would be over and sliding into spring and my mother would be leaving her London garden and making her way inexorably my way. I dreaded it. I dreaded the thought of her here in New Zealand, in our small piece of paradise. I wondered suddenly if that was why I was having bad dreams. If the dread was manifesting itself in my sleep, because it was difficult to articulate to Jack, to explain how I felt about my mother.

He looked at me in a certain way when the subject of her came up, a little shocked and uneasy, as if mothers were sacrosanct, and my not wanting to see her was breaking some taboo. And the worst thing was, I knew he would be charmed by her.

TWO

Fleur finished packing and sat back on her heels. She longed to ring her daughter to say, Let’s try hard. I haven’t seen you for years, darling. Just a few days together, then I won’t see you again for heaven knows how long…but she dared not risk it. She closed her last piece of hand luggage and walked slowly round the house wondering if the distance between them, literal and resonant, would ever end. Perhaps Nikki’s pregnancy would change and warm her somehow. A pregnancy Fleur would have known nothing about if she had not rung her daughter. It was still hard to bear the thought of Nikki living almost as far away from her as it was possible to live.

Fleur was planning a trip to New Zealand on the trail of Hundertwasser’s architecture as part of her dissertation and there was one of his buildings quite near where her daughter lived, in Kawakawa, a public lavatory, and Fleur wanted to see it. If she had rung her daughter and said, Can I come and see you? Nikki would have made excuses about being in the middle of a busy season, or that she was just about to take off with Jack, or, Frankly, it’s not convenient just now. So making Hundertwasser her reason for visiting was the only chance Fleur had of catching a glimpse of her troubled daughter for she had always refused to foist herself upon her.

Nikki was amused by the fact Fleur was a mature student, but she had never troubled to ask her mother about her paintings, which Fleur had surprisingly started to sell for quite large sums.

Fleur missed Fergus. She missed his love and encouragement, and somehow, when he was alive, the shadows could be kept at bay, for he had been a part of them and they had come through that awful time together.

They did not hide it away, that tragedy so long ago. They took it out sometimes in the dead of night and turned it over yet again to see if they could find some clue, if the shape of it could change. But it never did, and the best they could do, like so many other people who had to go on living a whole long lifetime afterwards was to carry it forward with them, haul it after them like a dead weight, until it became part of them and absorbed into the people they became.

Saffie was the first thing Fleur remembered when she woke and the last thing she thought about before she slept.

Nikki had given her and Fergus a hard time. Fleur was unsure how they had survived, but they had. Fergus had died suddenly, three years ago, leaving Fleur abruptly without warning, and for the first time in her life she was completely alone.

When Fergus retired he had turned his architect’s eye to painting. He had gone to classes and turned out pleasing little watercolours. Small paintings of the garden and of their holidays by the sea in Cornwall; of Tuscany on their last holiday together.

‘I have an eye for detail and can copy, that’s all,’ he said to any compliments. ‘To an untrained eye I might seem proficient, but this is strictly painting for my own pleasure.’

When he died, Fleur had the paintings of Tuscany framed and they now hung on the wall outside her bedroom. They reminded her of a happy time but also of the random cruelty of life. They had both felt young still, with plans to travel now that they had the time and money. There were so many things to do and places they had never seen. As well as shock, Fleur felt cheated of all the years she should have had with Fergus.

He was able to join his father’s firm when he’d left the army but he’d had to retrain as an architect, five long years when they were relatively hard-up. Fleur had to qualify too, to teach dance professionally, and without the help of both sets of parents they would not have survived.

Fergus was an imaginative architect and had worked long and hard to become successful. He’d relaxed a little as the money began to come in, then his father died and he had to take over the firm and his hours became even longer, until he suddenly realised he didn’t want to do it any more. He wanted his life back. He wanted to see more of Fleur and travel and enjoy the money he had made. He sold out and retired with huge relief and whirled Fleur away to Italy. Eighteen months later he was dead.

One night Fleur had gone to his little studio and stared at an empty canvas. She had picked up a brush and some of his paints and had simply thrown the colour of her grief and anger at the canvas. She had never looked back. It had released something inside her and she went each day to the place where Fergus seemed nearest to her. She painted her loss instinctively without thought until her work seemed to coalesce into form and meaning: canvases covered with strange abstracts with a hidden power that gave way to something gentler and infinitely lonelier. It was these paintings, full of the loss of him, that got her a place as a mature student at a college of art. Her world changed abruptly, and slowly became full of new and different people and a life that challenged.

She found, left to her own devices, that she was quite practical and deft with her hands, and now the hands that changed light bulbs and fuses also made pots and jugs and little bowls. She loved the feel of clay, the excitement of moulding something from nothing, and the bright fiery colours she painted on canvas and clay were the colours of her childhood; the colours of the east.

Fleur wanted Nikki to see the person who had evolved from years and years of dependency, to approve of the person she had become.

It had taken her a long time to decide whether she could bear to fly via Singapore. Just the name of the city on her lips made her shiver and ache with longing, but with fear too. The Singapore of her memory would have turned into somewhere unrecognisable, would have a different identity to the place of her childhood and youth. A city of memories where everything changed in the blink of an eye. From light to darkness.

Every morning of her life Fleur turned Saffie’s photo towards her; a missing child forever caught in childhood. There was rarely a night when Fleur did not wonder where her daughter’s body lay or worry about the possibility that she might live in some distant, alien culture, brought up with unknown people with little memory of her birth and a long-ago family who loved her.

It was the not knowing. The certainty, as the years went by, that they would never know, which haunted and maimed the lives of Fleur and her surviving daughter.

But it was Fleur that the long, relentless shadow of guilt fell on. She was their mother and her mind and heart had been on other things; on David. She had not taken care of her children. Haunted with misery, she had left them to roam free. She had left them to chance, ignored their safety, and something random and terrible had swooped.

It is this that my daughter can never forgive.

THREE

Singapore, 1976

The monsoon was coming. The wind was rattling the shutters, catching the chimes outside Ah Heng’s window. They swung and jumped and clashed in a mad little Indian dance. The strings would get all muddled and Saffie knew she and Nikki would have to untwist them in the morning.

The smell of rain filled the dark room, reaching up the stilts of the house, rising up from the damp earth full of bruised frangipani blooms and dead leaves and small branches of trees.

Saffie lay still, listening for the sound that had woken her. She was facing the open door, staring at the closed shutters that kept out insects and the great blind moths as big as sparrows who threw themselves out of the dark into the light, their fat little bodies hitting the lampshades; their dusty, fluttering wings falling into the twins’ hair, jumping across the surface of their skin like mice.

Saffie could hear the familiar sound of cicadas, but there wasn’t the heavy warmth of a coming day. Her feet touched Nikki’s feet at the other end of the bed. She did not think

her sister was awake, but she could not be sure. Nikki’s breath could be held, like her own; Nikki could be silently listening too.

Suddenly Saffie heard again the sound that had woken her. She saw the shadow of her mother in the corridor that was a balcony during the day when the shutters were thrown back against the house each morning. Fleur had opened a shutter and was leaning out into the dark, listening, looking upwards to the stars that filled the hugeness of the night.

With a lurch of sickness Saffie knew. Daddy was not home yet and she strained like Fleur for the sound of helicopters overhead. She could hear her mother’s voice keening. It was this soft, monotonous sound that had woken her, that and her mother’s fear. It shimmered across the night and reached both children, touched them with cold fingers and they shivered at their mother’s terror.

‘Oh, God!’ Fleur whispered. ‘Oh, God in heaven. Please. Please. Let him come in safely. I beg you, God.’

Both girls sat up abruptly as one. Stared at their identical selves.

‘Daddy!’ they whispered and reached for each other, catching their mother’s panic.

At that moment they heard the aircraft engines. Behind dense cloud came the faint sound of rotary blades. Clear, like knives cutting through the blackness, the sound of helicopters rumbling and whirring their way home. Tail-lights winking and blinking like comforting fireflies through the purple massing clouds, which were growling with thunder and bursting with violent wind and rain.

Saffie and Nikki leapt out of bed and ran to their mother.

‘Hurry!’ they called out into the night. ‘Hurry, hurry, Daddy. Hurry, Fergus…Hurry, everyone…the storm is coming. Hurry, hurry before the lightning comes…’

The sound of engines was louder now, near to them, and suddenly out of the clouds, in formation, five helicopters appeared out of the night.

‘Hurrah!’ Saffie and Nikki shouted. ‘There they all are…hurrah!’

‘Shush, darlings. Shush! I need to listen.’ Fleur’s voice was trembling.

They watched as the helicopters hovered over the airfield. One turned in a circle as if testing the power of the wind and then dropped slowly at an angle to land at the airfield beyond their sight.

The next two helicopters were being buffeted up and down and they too circled quickly, one after the other, well apart, and turned and dropped from sight into the darkness.

‘Three down!’ Fleur let out her breath like a sigh. A violent damp wind wrenched the shutter from her hand and it crashed back against the house, and then the rain came in slanting, weaving arcs, blowing crossways, bringing great suffocating black clouds which obscured their vision.

A white streak of lightning shot into the night making the children jump back. They all heard but could not see the fourth helicopter drop from the clouds. The engine was making a lot of noise as the pilot searched for the airfield lights below him.

The last helicopter emerged from cloud and circled. Daddy. It seemed to the twins to move nearer to the house, as if to say, I know you’re watching…I’ll be home in thirty minutes, Peapods.

Daddy was always last down. It is like being the captain of a ship, he’d told the twins. Your men’s safety comes first.

They saw the red flickering tail-light against the lightning as the helicopter hovered, tried to turn and drop out of the savage wind to land. But it was impossible. It was caught as the eye of the storm lifted and threw it about the sky like a toy. Pilot and machine were suspended and buffeted against a backdrop of lightning shooting and cracking across the sky like fireworks.

The helicopter looked pathetically small as it was thrown about the sky like an unbalanced bee and tossed this way and that. Fleur and the twins held their breath in hypnotised terror.

‘Land, Daddy. Land!’ Saffie cried out into the night. Nikki gripped the windowsill as they watched the tail rising, tail-blade whirring frantically as the engine screamed.

‘Holy Mary, mother of God…Please…’ Fleur was crying over and over. She clutched the twins, held them into her, gripped them so tightly she hurt, and her eyes never left the sky.

‘David…David…I’m willing you down…You can do it. I know you can do it…Come on, David…please, darling, get her down…’

Something terrible was gripping Saffie’s stomach in a cramp so painful she wanted to fall to the ground. Nikki was sobbing, still clutching the windowsill. They were only five but they both knew, like their mother, that their father was powerless to do anything to save himself, because he no longer had control of his machine, which was turning upside down and falling out of the sky and spiralling down to the ground so fast that if they’d blinked they would have missed it.

Already, far away, they could hear the sound of sirens. They heard the explosion as the aircraft hit the ground when it was out of sight. They saw the flames leap upwards into a sky cracking with thunder. They could not move, Fleur, Saffie and Nikki. They stood watching the sky where the helicopter had been a moment ago.

A long way away a telephone was ringing and Ah Heng ran in her little backless slippers to answer it. Still, the three figures stood, unable to take their eyes from the empty sky that was growing light now. The rain blew in great gusts sideways, filling the monsoon drains, flushing the snakes out of the dry collected leaves.

Into the dawn, low on the horizon, there suddenly sailed one small pink cloud. Fleur stared and stared at it. She said in a strange thick voice, ‘Twins…look…see? That cloud…Daddy will always be there to look after us. Always.’

Saffie reached behind Fleur for Nikki’s hand. They stared at the cloud in silence, their small bodies trembling, unable to entirely comprehend that their father was so suddenly dead. They did not want a pink cloud. They wanted their big, laughing, silly, whiskery, safe daddy, who called out each and every day, ‘Hey! I’m home! Where are my little peapods?’

Far away on the Chitbee Road they could see the military car containing the padre and the commandant and the military police making its way down the long road to their house.

‘Missie?’ Ah Heng touched Fleur’s arm, took the twins gently from her, holding them to her. ‘You come away from window now. You cold. You come away. I make Missie tea. Army men coming.’

But Fleur could not take her eyes from the cloud that was fading to orange and had only been the reflected colour of the flames.

‘You will always be with us to keep us safe,’ the twins heard her whisper. ‘Oh, David…David.’

But their father was not there to keep them safe. Did Nikki blame Fleur for what happened later? Was she angry with her? Yes, she was. If you had children you must look after them, no matter what happened to you or however sad you were. You must look after them and keep them safe forever, because you were their mother and if you didn’t, who would?

FOUR

‘What time is your mother’s flight from Auckland?’ Jack asked me at breakfast. He was standing at the sink, buttering toast.

‘Five o’clock, I think. I’m going to check in a minute. It’s OK, Jack. I can meet her on my own.’

‘No, Nik, we’ll both go. I’ll make sure I’ve finished by four; it will give us an hour to get there. Just be ready, we don’t want her standing around jetlagged waiting for us. Did you tell her to stay in the main airport until it’s time for the flight to Kerikeri? That other terminal is the pits.’

‘Yes. I e-mailed. It’ll be a miracle if she’s got to Auckland and not sailed off to Hong Kong by mistake…’ I joked weakly. ‘I don’t think she’s travelled so far on her own for a long time.’

Jack gave me one of his looks. ‘Well, she’s had the courage to stop off in Singapore on her own so she can’t be quite as dumb as you make out…’ He paused and I waited. ‘Your Mom is staying two nights, just two nights, Nik. Surely it can’t be too hard to be nice to her for a fleeting visit.’

He’s right, it shouldn’t be too hard, but it will be.

I was aware that the fault lay with me, that I was carrying a perceived injury long after it should have healed, that my feelings were immature, to say the least, in someone of my age. I wasn’t a teenager, for heaven’s sake. But there are some people who are so different from you that they get under your skin and make you itch as soon as they appear. My mother is one of those people.

‘Will you try,’ Jack kissed me, his mouth full of crumbs, ‘to be kind? Or it’s going to be embarrassing, especially as she’s meeting me for the first time.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Pollyanna is my middle name.’

‘Who?’

I grinned at him. ‘Just an American goody-goody schoolgirl book.’

When Jack had gone I wandered round the house tidying, trying to see all we had done here with my mother’s eyes. Then I took towels up to the spare room, which had its own balcony, and I looked out over the bay and then stared down at the bed my mother would sleep in. It seemed strange to think of someone I hadn’t seen for over three years lying there tonight.

Disturbing; a sudden mix of my two, so different, lives. One I had wanted to leave behind me, so that I could be born anew, slough off that old teenage skin and turn into someone else, perhaps the person I was now. I had come so far, to another culture and another continent, and it seemed suddenly as if my mother was following me, as if to remind me of the shadows I left and the person I once was. I didn’t want to be reminded.

The baby was moving now and I could feel the tiny flutter of life; a small, tentative movement to alert me to his presence, his curled life within me, slowly growing into the person he will be. And the person he will be will want to know his family and his English roots and his grandmother.

I knew, in the moment I stood by the bed my mother would sleep in, that I wanted them to know each other. I couldn’t deprive either of a relationship I had needed in my childhood.

I stared out to the yachts in the bay, beyond the garden Jack and I had created out of jungle, and remembered how hard I sometimes thought my grandmother was on my mother, yet I could do no wrong. I went out onto the balcony and breathed deeply, the sun warm on my face, and I swore that I would try my hardest to welcome my mother. She was obviously lonely without Fergus and seemed to have thrown herself into painting and studying the history of art.

I smiled. Fleur was quite brave really, to start again on something new at her age. I will be nice. I will. Jack was right, it was time to move on. After all, I didn’t know when I’d see her again.

I went downstairs and put my hat on against the sun and set off for my jungle trail. We had joined an experiment to cull the possums. They were ripping the trees to pieces and Jack and I had placed poison as small enticements, fixed to the trunks of trees.

I wished they weren’t so cute. I wished they looked like rats and then I wouldn’t feel so bad. But I knew it had to be done, we had more than enough stripped trees that were going to die on our land.

As I walked I felt a sense of achievement; it was an adventure, this life I shared with Jack. There were years ahead of us, preserving and finding new ways of conserving land that could never be tamed, nor would we want it to be. All these acres were becoming familiar, becoming home after years of nomadic existence. I never thought I could settle anywhere.

I hadn’t planned to get pregnant, although I knew time was ticking. There was so much to do and pregnancy had reined me in. Jack’s face was enough, though, when I’d told him. So instead of gardening in the heat I could only walk round checking things, feeding the hens and gently weeding up near the house, planting rows of vegetables that struggled in the poor soil.

As if by some tacit agreement, neither Jack nor I mentioned it to each other, but we both wondered if our time here would have to come to an end with a child. We lived in the middle of nowhere, miles away from a doctor, school or human habitation. Children needed other children and I didn’t want an only child, which is what I had become.

The horror and the loneliness when Saffie disappeared was like losing a limb that went on twitching with the loss of the other half of me.

I feel it, even now.

FIVE

Fleur woke early on the day of her flight to Singapore. She never drew her curtains and she saw it was the most beautiful day. The leaves of the tree outside were motionless. The day seemed to be holding its breath. A blackbird sang clear into the morning against the growl of cars in the distance as the city woke up. It felt like the first day of spring.

Fleur lay looking round her room, where the sun slanted across the floor highlighting the dust motes which hung and floated in the air. She felt a strange sad-happiness, when to be alive was almost enough in the moment of a bird singing; in the moment of sunlight on your hands; in the small awareness of yourself in a new day.

Since Fergus died she had learnt to be still and treasure these mornings, waking alone and listening, really listening, both to the sounds of a world waking up and to herself. The first moments of the day could reveal feelings she could not articulate or write down, but would sometimes attempt to capture in paint.

A lack of professional technique – for Fleur thought of herself as an apprentice – could not hide the intensity behind her paintings. A fleeting spiritual second could transform a simple painting into a canvas that people stood in front of and gazed at, captivated by the power with which Fleur captured the enormity of loss alongside the budding awareness of something beyond herself that went on moving and growing within her.

The loss of a child ended innocence. To be pre-deceased by your child was the worst that could happen to a parent. It took a lifetime of walking towards a hope of understanding to realise that there was nothing to understand. Sense could never be made of a random wicked and meaningless act. This was the bleak knowledge you carried all your life like a second self, buried, but always with you.

Fleur, triggered by the sudden loss of Fergus, found that she could suddenly translate this knowledge into colour and texture and turn it into something people could relate to. Something they felt in the core of themselves, in the pit of their stomachs, in the ache of their throats as they stood staring at her large, brightly coloured landscapes full of heat and bustle. Their eyes drawn to the one small object or person within the picture that stood quite separate and alone.

Fleur did not know from where her inspiration came. Only that it came from some unexplored source and she painted fast and concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, in the silent nights and into the pale, cold dawn of another day.

As she lay staring at the tree outside her window, she felt as if she had already left this small terraced house and begun her journey of discovery to her daughter and to Hundertwasser’s architecture, all without corners, all without angles, all part of the earth and its constant cycle of rebirth. She was aware of why she was drawn to his philosophy and architecture; it was connected indivisibly to her need for reparation with her daughter.

She felt in those first moments of sunlight that she might not return to this small house that she had shared with Fergus for so many years, or that even if she did, everything would be different, never quite the same again. Unease stirred, but she also had the sensation of moving inexorably towards something dark but necessary; that nebulous feeling that something was going to happen.

She got out of bed and pulled on Fergus’s towelling robe, caught the scent from a vase of freesias the gallery had sent, which stood on her dressing table. All part of this safe life she led. She padded downstairs and drew back the sittingroom curtains. The man next door was wheeling his bicycle down his path, pausing at the gate as he always did to fix his cycle clips. The teacher two doors down was gunning the reluctant engine of her Fiesta. Fleur found she was listening for it to start and thinking, This time tomorrow I will be in Singapore.

Fleur looked down across the glinting wing of the plane onto acres of perfect white cloud the texture of fluffy mashed potato. She remembered as a child the thrill of believing those clouds were solid enough to sit on, that she could have jumped from one floury cushion to another.

The mystery of land mass, ocean and sky from a height never left her. The changing patterns and shape of mountains and desert and the progress of herself encapsulated in tons of moving metal remained a wonder of human engineering.

It was as if, once airborne, between lives and destinations, all normal, taken-for-granted things were rendered, by stress or fatigue, abnormal. As if she was circled by an odd tight silence, worn like a cloak to distance herself, making her progress, a stranger among strangers, infinitely obscure.

Travelling forward through time, arriving thousands of miles into an unfamiliar or distant landscape of tomorrow, imbued Fleur with an almost catatonic immobility and invisibility. She neither moved nor undid her seatbelt but sat and stared out at the wondrous mass of virgin cloud.

An old man on the aisle seat was telling the woman between them how he had built the pipeline down in the vast dry expanse of desert below them in Dubai. For thirteen years he had toiled in the unforgiving sun, taking water to the Bedouins. His skin told the truth of an engineer’s harsh life in the sun. Unmistakable patches of skin cancer marked his hands and face like a badge of office.

Normally Fleur would have been fascinated by his reminiscing, but she wanted to remain in her no-man’s land, devoid of social interaction, the telling of stories, the re-telling of lives. She loved it when the lights went out, when the blinds went down against the night outside and she could lie tiredly listening to the rustle of passengers, the dull plom of the bell as they asked for drinks, the swish of recycled air around the cabin, as inexorably they ploughed through the night sky to Singapore.

Singapore and another life. She thought of David, tried to conjure his face, his voice. But they would not come or came blurred like an unfocused faded photograph. The city contained so much that had been a part of her young life. She had spent time there as a child and a young adult. She had returned there a married woman, carrying the baby twins.

So much happiness. A beautiful couple who had it all. Then, those small, relentless steps that led slowly but surely to tragedy.

Snatches of lines from somewhere popped into Fleur’s head…

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled[…]To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the pastInto different lives, or into any future;You are not the same people who left that stationOr who will arrive at any terminus

A sense of smell could unlock memories faster than the blink of an eye. Fleur could not tell what would leap out at her when she stepped into the shimmering heat and smell of a city where so much of her life had unfurled faster than she had had the wit to stop it.

SIX

Singapore, 1966

When Fleur saw David for the first time he was sitting on the edge of the pool at the Tanglin Club in Singapore City. She thought he was possibly the most graceful man she had ever seen. After her brother and the spotty youths she had travelled out from England with he seemed like a god.

She was fifteen and home for the long summer holidays. Her father, Peter Llewellyn, was colonel of a regiment on a three-year posting to Singapore. It was his second posting to the Far East and Fleur and her brother, Sam, had grown blasé with flying back and forth from boarding school in England. It was Singapore that felt like home.

They had both pretty much done their own thing that summer as their mother, Laura, bored with army life, was studying for an Open University degree, and she trusted Sam to keep an eye on Fleur.

David was on his first posting as a subaltern. He was dark and immensely charismatic rather than good-looking and he always seemed surrounded by teachers, nurses, or young service wives. He noticed Fleur, however, watching him covertly. She was still all angles, like a colt, but she walked like a ballet dancer and had a hint of the exotic, even at fifteen.

Fleur had her mother Laura’s dark skin, inherited from a French grandmother, that tanned easily, and a way of rolling up her hair like her mother in a quick and particular French way. Sam’s skin was fair like his father’s and he moaned about it.

Fleur loved the water and both she and Sam were excellent swimmers having been taught professionally by a Singaporean coach. Peter had insisted on lessons for both his children as he loved sailing. People would stop what they were doing to watch Fleur dive. She would take time to position her limbs in the same way she perfected her dance steps, and once committed her body would arch and spring and break the water almost soundlessly.

David thought her dive was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. He watched her shrugging off Sam’s friends and the schoolboys of her own age. She seemed perfectly self-contained and content with her own company. He was amused to see that, young as she was, she attracted the attention of the young naval officers who sailed into the naval base on the frigates, as well as the young army and RAF officers serving in Singapore.

They were all fairly cautious for she was the colonel’s daughter, but Peter Llewellyn was not a fierce man, he was more like a vague scientist than an army officer. He was popular with his subalterns, and underneath his slightly bumbling exterior lay a first-class brain.

At weekends the family would drive down to the naval base for the swimming pool, evening barbecues, and films. It was less stuffy than the Tanglin Club, which had more than its fair share of aging expats and high-ranking service wives who loved rules.

The Officers Club with a large pool faced out to the Straits of Malacca and looked down on the harbour and dry dock below. When the frigates were in, the navy would throw constant parties and Fleur never lost the thrill of being piped aboard. She would walk with Laura in front of Sam and her father, male eyes swivelled their way. The ships were often at sea for some time and any woman from fifteen to fifty was made to feel glamorous and witty. Sam was allowed to drink moderately as he was nearly eighteen. Fleur was not and Laura watched her like a hawk.

It was an incident at a cocktail party on board a small naval frigate that brought David and Fleur together. As they were piped aboard the sun hung low over the Straits, the sky flaring and fired by scarlet and orange. When darkness came, it came swiftly: no dusk, just velvety blackness. Fleur and Sam stood with a group of young sub-lieutenants drinking on the top deck. Her brother was eagerly discussing sailing, and Fleur, a little awed by so much attention, was swallowing a mixed-fruit cocktail rather fast as she practised the art of flirting.

She caught sight of her parents circulating from time to time and was impressed with her mother’s practised habit of throwing back her dark hair and laughing hugely; of putting a hand lightly on a young man’s arm and leaning towards him to catch his words, as if he was the most fascinating man in the room.

Fleur wasn’t quite ready for that yet, but she did practise the head-tossing and smiling up into young, tanned faces. The more glasses of fruit juice she had the better she seemed to get at this. A small warm wind blew in to the harbour bringing with it the smell of spices and petrol and rotting vegetation. A plump sub-lieutenant kept topping her up from a jug snatched from a passing waiter. Sam, suddenly aware of Fleur flushed and laughing louder than usual, moved over to her.

‘Fleur, you’re not drinking, are you?’

‘No. Just fruit juice and mint. Promise.’

‘OK.’ He looked at her closely for a second and then turned back to the group of young men. Fleur leant over the rail and looked down at the dark water. It looked invitingly cool.

‘Do you ever swim from the ship?’ she asked one of the naval officers.

‘Bit of a way down,’ the plump one said, laughing. ‘It’s not that far,’ Fleur replied.

Plump officer stared at her lazily. ‘I can’t see a girl doing

it.’

Fleur looked down, feeling dizzy, but it did not seem that much of a leap. No more than a diving board. She moved forward away from the crush of people.

‘You think I’m too scared to jump?’

‘I’ll put a bet on it.’

The other officers stirred uneasily. ‘Come on, let’s go below and get something to eat, Fleur. Take no notice of Billy Bunter.’

‘Of course she won’t take any notice. She’s a girl.’

Fleur moved fast, climbed the rail and put both her legs over. She wasn’t going to dive because her skirt would come up over her head and that would be undignified. She felt no fear at all, just exhilaration. She leapt into space.

The officers hurtled to the rail and looked down. One moved to the jug and picked it up and smelt it.

‘You stupid bastard! You’ve been giving her Pimms. She’s only a kid…’

David, making his way towards the group, saw Fleur leap over the side and plummet downwards. He took in the empty Pimms jug and the guilty and furtive fat officer. Fleur hit the water and disappeared. Someone was already undoing a lifebuoy. David leant over the rail with the other men, waiting for her head to appear. It did not.

Fleur, plummeting through dark water, wondered vaguely but without panic why she was still effortlessly headed downwards. It was not an unpleasant feeling, just interesting.

David threw his jacket off and dived, closely followed by the fat officer and Sam.

Everyone else held their breath. Senior ranks, alerted, moved to the rail with sudden alarm, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

Underwater, David saw Fleur now beginning to rise to the surface. He grabbed her and hauled her upwards, helped by the fat officer. As her head rose above the water she sobered abruptly, took a huge shaky breath, choking.

Sam grabbed her under her armpits and kicked his way back to the ladder, where two naval ratings lifted her up onto the deck and wrapped her in a blanket. Laura bent to her daughter, relieved, angry and embarrassed in equal measure.

The captain, furious, quickly assessed the situation and sent his junior officers to their quarters until he could deal with them. Peter Llewellyn turned to him without raising his voice.

‘If I accept an invitation I do so in the knowledge that my family are guests and as such my daughter is perfectly safe. Fleur does not drink. She knows that if she drinks she will be barred from all parties. There is a difference between high spirits and mindless stupidity. I do hope that your officers will be made fully aware that their crass behaviour could well have resulted in my fifteen-year-old daughter being drowned.’

He turned, white-faced, and gathered his wife and children. The party came to an abrupt end. Uncomfortable, people drifted away, back down the gangplank to the club where they could eat dinner and gossip about the evening.

Peter Llewellyn turned to David. ‘Thank you, David. You acted quickly. Go to the M.O. and get yourself a jab. The water is polluted. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Sir,’ David said quietly, unnerved by his colonel’s anger, which he had never seen before.

Fleur was being bundled into the car, still not entirely sober or realising quite what she had done. Sam said miserably, ‘Dad, it wasn’t Fleur’s fault, honestly. There’s so much fruit in those Pimms that you can’t taste the gin. Fleur doesn’t even like drink.’

Laura, getting Fleur into a hot bath soon afterwards, did not want to know the details. Her two concerns were the fact that they had been the centre of a stupid and avoidable incident and Fleur, by leaping inanely into the polluted water, had caused this. She was abrupt and short with her daughter.

It was Annie, the amah, who took Fleur hot chocolate and her father who sat on her bed while she wept with humiliation. Peter adored Fleur. He did not want her to grow up too quickly but neither did he want to deprive her of having fun. He wanted her to look back on this time in the Far East with excitement. His children were almost grown up, would soon be gone. This would be the last posting they would all have together.

He also believed that people were basically decent. Tonight had been gross stupidity, not evil intent, but he advised Fleur to be more aware of the things young men got up to and what they handed her to drink.

‘If it had been one of Sam’s friends, I guess I would have been on my guard, Dad. But I was with you, so I didn’t think…’

That was precisely why her father had been so angry.

‘I’ve rung the doctor,’ he said. ‘Go with your mother and get a jab tomorrow, just to be safe.’

‘Oh! Why did I jump? So stupid! Everyone will be laughing at me.’

‘No, they won’t,’ Peter smiled. ‘Sam’s friends will envy your panache and bravery in leaping that far for a bet.’

But Fleur was not thinking of Sam’s friends, she was wondering what Lt David Montrose thought of her.

The next morning the plump naval officer appeared outside Peter Llewellyn’s office. He apologised profusely. He had called to let the colonel know he was resigning his commission and that no other officer had been involved.

Peter, looking at him after a night’s sleep, thought this penalty a little excessive for one evening’s intoxicated foolishness. He invited the captain of the frigate up to the mess for lunch and they decided on a regime of a hundred hours of punishment watches and that his promotion would be delayed. He had jumped in the water after Fleur and he was deeply sorry.

Laura invited David over to their quarter in Singapore for supper to thank him. He brought orchids. Small bee orchids for Laura. Pure white for Fleur. She took them to her room and put the vase on her dressing table. They lasted a long time.

Peter and his subaltern discovered they had a shared love of classical music. After that night David would drive from the naval base to go to concerts with Peter and Laura. He started to sail with the family at weekends and sit and talk to Sam and Fleur at the club barbecues.

One weekend there was a film of The Tale of Two Cities on at the naval base. Fleur, sitting with Sam, thought with a jolt how like a young Dirk Bogarde David was. That thing they did with their eyes, half-closed as they watched you. How when they said something quite innocuous it could sound like a caress. The something gentle but stomach-churningly sexy about the movements of a man who had a beautiful body.

Yet there was also something trustworthy about David. It was why Laura and Peter never worried about Fleur or Sam when they were with him. Swimming, sailing or dancing with the young, David could always be relied upon to see them safely home.

When Fleur was back at school in England, she lived for the Easter holidays. When she returned to Singapore after her sixteenth birthday, the mouths of the men and boys round the pool literally dropped when she appeared. She was not a sweet schoolgirl any longer and Laura saw this immediately. Saw the knowingness in Fleur. The innocence of being an attractive child had flown. She had become, overnight, it seemed to her parents, a stunningly beautiful young woman, quite aware of the effect she had on men, young or old.

Oddly, Fleur realised with a pang, her budding new confidence in herself seemed to distance David, as if he too was unnerved by her rapid transference from sweet adolescent to full-blown feminine beauty. It was years before she understood the dilemma she posed for David by growing up so quickly.

SEVEN

At lunchtime I locked the house up, drove round to the marina and sat waiting for Jack. He had rung to say he’d taken the afternoon off and we were going to have lunch together on the seafront in Paihia. I sat in the shade of a tree, a book in my lap, watching the Maoris who were often there diving for oysters off the concrete pier, collecting them in great piles to cart away in their aged pick-ups.

Petrol from the boat engines lay in purple-green pools on the surface of the water, but it did not seem to worry them. They called out cheerfully to their beautiful raggedy children who watched with their legs dangling in the water, their white teeth suddenly dazzling at some private joke.

A young Maori boy was poling an ancient canoe around the edges of the bay in the shallows by the trees, bending and digging his pole into the mud, his arm muscles flexing as he began to make it skim across the water, gaining confidence and pace with each stroke.

Out of nowhere came a memory. So slight it was a floater dancing in front of my eyes; a second, a fleeting second of remembrance. A long, empty beach at evening and a Malaysian fisherman poling fast across the horizon as the sun faded. He was silhouetted in black, like a cut-out against the dying sun, before he disappeared into the suddenness of a tropical night. Suddenly, behind me a shadowy figure appeared from nowhere, sliding past me away fast into the darkness; gone before I could turn.

The image faded abruptly leaving me full of unease. I saw Jack coming towards me and I got heavily to my feet and walked towards him. Whenever I saw him from a distance I felt a rush of gratitude. He was a lovely, uncomplicated man who made life easy; made loving effortless.

We got to Kerikeri early and Jack immediately got talking to people he knew, not difficult in a small place with a tiny landing strip. I paced up and down watching the sky, imagining Fleur emerging from the plane, getting into our ancient car, viewing our house for the first time. I wanted the time to come and go in a flash, leaving us as we were, content and hidden in our own lives, without any outside interruptions to halt the succession of each day.

The speck in the sky appeared and everyone stood looking skyward, jangling car keys, waiting. There were mutters and sometimes ribald murmurs. Most families, it seemed, had wanted and not so wanted visitors about to descend from the small jaw of the aircraft.

Jack threw his arm around me as the little two-engined plane circled and landed. Steps were wheeled out, and as the aircraft door was thrown open I realised that I was hardly breathing. Would Fleur be first out? Last?

People descended singly, blinking as they emerged. We watched everyone get off the plane and still we stood staring at the now empty doorway, waiting, but my mother did not appear.

‘Oh dear,’ Jack said.

‘Oh God. I might have known.’

‘Did you check she was on this flight?’

‘Yes. I also checked her flight from Singapore was on schedule.’

‘OK. Let’s go and talk to someone at the desk.’

The girl looked down her list. Yes, Mrs Campbell was on the passenger list. The girl got up and went out and talked to the two pilots and then came back. Mrs Campbell had not taken the flight from Auckland, despite calls over the Tannoy.

Was it possible, Jack asked, for her to make a telephone call to see if Mrs Campbell had been on the flight from Singapore to Auckland?

The girl looked irritated as I rummaged in my bag for Fleur’s flight number from Singapore. She obviously wanted to go off-duty. ‘I’ll try, but you might have to do it yourself from home…the lines get busy.’

‘That would be great of you. Melanie, isn’t it? So sorry to be a nuisance…’ Jack said smoothly, giving her his most toothy and boyish grin. It did the trick.

She spoke on the phone for some time, obviously being transferred from one department to another. Then she looked at us and nodded. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ She shot me a look. ‘Yes. Someone’s here in Kerikeri to meet her. Her daughter. Yes. OK. I’ll put her on.’ She handed me the receiver.

‘Hello?’ I said. ‘I’m Nikki Montrose, Mrs Campbell’s daughter.’

‘Hi there.’ The Kiwi voice was relaxed, wanted to reassure. ‘Now, Mrs Montrose, try not to worry, perhaps there is a message waiting for you at home. Mrs Campbell was on the passenger list from Heathrow to Singapore but she was not on the second leg of her flight from Singapore to Auckland.’

‘Did she book in for her flight to Auckland from Singapore airport? Did her luggage have to be offloaded when she didn’t board?’

‘No. The information I have is that she did not return from her stopover in Singapore and the flight left without her.’

‘Oh God,’ I said.

‘Could I have your home telephone number, Mrs Montrose? If we hear anything we’ll contact you straight away, but what I advise is for you to contact her stopover hotel. Do you have the name of it?’

‘Yes. It was the Singapore Hilton. It’s Miss, by the way, I’m not married.’

‘I’m sorry’ the man said ‘to hear that, Ms Montrose.’

Humour was the last thing I felt like responding to. I also caught a quick flash of regret cross Jack’s face, because I didn’t want to get married.

‘It could be your mother has been taken ill or missed her flight for some reason and is booked on a later one…’ I could hear him fiddling with his computer. ‘She is not on any of the flights out of Singapore tonight or tomorrow…Sorry, I don’t think I can help you further at the moment…’

‘Thanks…you’ve helped all you can. Thank you for your time. If you hear anything you will contact—’

‘Of course. No worries. Good luck, Ms Montrose. I’m sure you’ll find your mother safe and well. Old people do go astray, you know.’

I laughed as I put the phone down. Fleur, old! Never. But she was vague.

We thanked Melanie and left the now deserted little terminal. As we drove slowly home I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know whether I was annoyed or anxious.

‘It seems you were right, Nik, she has gone walkabout.’ Jack looked at my face. ‘Darlin’, you really are worried something’s happened to her?’

‘I was being facetious before, Jack. Fleur is perfectly capable of travelling long distances. She spent her whole childhood doing it. How can you miss a plane on a stopover? A bus picks you up and deposits you, bang, at the airport. She knew we were meeting her. If something has happened why hasn’t she rung us?’

‘As soon as we get home we’ll ring that Singapore hotel. There may be a message waiting for us.’

But there wasn’t. Dark seemed to descend quickly and the house seemed oddly stilled. We had been poised waiting for Fleur. I didn’t want her to be ill and alone in some huge hotel full of strangers.

I rang the Singapore Hilton and could not make the first girl understand what I wanted and needed to know. I could feel my voice rising and Jack took the phone and calmly went over it all again. Then he put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘They’re getting the manager.’

Jack repeated his message once more and then listened. I watched his face change and he flashed me an anxious look. He gave the man our number and said, yes, we would ring later. He put the phone down and came over to me.

‘Your mother booked in for one night only…’ He hesitated. ‘She didn’t catch the airport bus when it came and no one could find her. Her luggage is still all in her room and she hasn’t booked out of the hotel. No one has seen her since early yesterday morning.’

I stared at him, felt the blood drain from my face. Something really had happened to Fleur.

Jack took my hand. ‘I’m going to run you a bath and then make you toast. You’re getting into bed. Do you hear me? We’ve had one fright with the baby, we don’t want another…’ He paused.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

‘The manager is going to contact the police if she doesn’t return tonight. We’re to ring the hotel in the morning. They are going to ask Fleur to ring us immediately if she comes back.’

My back ached and Jack ran me a bath and made me get in it. I was glad to be in bed. He came and sat on the edge of it with toast, which we shared. Then he brought the phone upstairs where we could hear it and I checked my mobile was switched on. He went for a shower and then got into bed and held me tight, and even though he warmed me I could not stop imagining all the terrible things that could have happened to Fleur.

Jack always could fall asleep straight away and he did tonight. He had been up since 5.30. I lay there against him thinking it served me bloody well right. I had not wanted my mother to come and now she was probably dead in some alleyway in Singapore. Or…Or what? If she had been taken ill she would have had her passport on her, and hotel and flight details. If she was in hospital we would know by now. Which meant she was in trouble. Or dead.

I shivered and carried on circuitous conversations in my head. It was a long time since I had prayed. I tried to remember what my mother had said to me on our one and only telephone conversation, how her voice had sounded, and I couldn’t.

If my mother was dead, I would be to blame for not checking all her plans in detail, like any daughter would have done. For not phoning or texting or letting her know she could contact me and not feel a nuisance. For not monitoring her progress thousands of miles towards me. For not caring enough; for being wickedly self-absorbed and childishly selfish.

Could it be she had gone looking for some piece of architecture and got lost or gone further than she’d meant to? Or maybe her phone had been stolen and she couldn’t contact us. Maybe she had met an acquaintance or colleague and was staying with them. I was clutching at straws.

I lay very still with a terrible sense of prescience. More than that, fear lay under my skin as if something dark was crawling my way. Jack breathed beside me and the night stretched on and on and the dawn came, surprising me with its suddenness.

The phone went and I leapt upright. It was a Detective Sergeant James Mohktar who spoke perfect English. He was ringing from the Singapore Hilton. He asked me if I was Mrs Campbell’s next of kin. Her luggage was still in her room and her disappearance was worrying. Had she contacted me? Was there any place I could think of that she might have gone to?

No, I told him. She had not contacted me and I had no idea where she could possibly have gone. ‘She once lived in Singapore a long time ago, but she doesn’t know anyone there now. I’m very worried, this is not like her, or the fact that she hasn’t been in touch…’

There was a pause and then the detective said, ‘You are advising me that Mrs Campbell is definitely missing and that you have no explanation whatsoever for her disappearance?’

‘Yes, I am. My mother was flying out to us in New Zealand via Singapore. She caught the plane from Heathrow to Singapore, but did not catch the second leg of her journey to Auckland. She was then due to fly from Auckland to Kerikeri where she knew we were waiting to meet her. If she’d missed her flight or was ill she would have let us know.’

‘OK, Mrs Montrose. We are going to make a search of the hotel now. My men will make inquiries to try to ascertain her whereabouts and safety and which member of staff may have had a conversation with her and who saw her last. Then I will ring you again…’ He paused. ‘If we do not find your mother, I am afraid you must fly to Singapore to register her officially missing and identify her belongings. She did always carry her passport about her person?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t have left her passport in a hotel room. She would have kept it with her.’

‘We will’ the detective sergeant said, ‘maintain hope, Mrs Montrose, that there is a rational explanation. I will ring you this evening. Try not to worry. Good day.’

I crumpled on the edge of the bed, Jack’s anxious eyes on me. Was God or fate visiting some sick and terrible retribution on me? Was my mother too going to disappear without trace? Her body never found, so that I would never know what happened or where she had gone, who took her or why?

Just like Saffie. Snatched from under our noses; disappearing from us without trace twenty-eight years ago.

EIGHT

It was time to leave for the airport. Fleur walked round the army quarter which would soon be empty of all their personal things. She moved slowly, touching the heavy mahogany furniture, staring past the small Malay house that chimed in the window of the twins’ room, the sound as familiar as breathing in the easy, somnolent days spent there.

Far below her came the dull thud of the naval base and the hot morning breeze brought to her a vague smell of sea mixed with frangipani blossom from the garden. Fleur stood looking out, invoking the image of David moving through the house with her.

Surely if she closed her eyes for a moment she could shift time back, change by sheer will the sequence of events. Make it all a bad dream. A small tragedy you spot suddenly in a paper, the abrupt end of someone else’s life.

The sun flowed across the polished floor and touched one arm, making the other instantly cold. She shivered and moved to the front of the house. There it was, the black car moving sleekly up the road towards her, small pennant flying. Fergus would get out, immaculate in his starched uniform, looking as pale and stunned as Fleur; a familiar presence to take them to the airport and the long journey home to bury David.

Fleur turned and walked through the house and down the steps from the kitchen, and stood watching the twins and Ah Heng crouched outside the amah’s room. Ah Heng was filling little bags for their journey and the three of them squatted outside her door on the concrete, heads bent together, chatting in Cantonese like noisy sparrows. From her open doorway Chinese pinkle-ponkle music issued softly.

Two fair heads, one dark smooth one. Ah Heng, feeling Fleur’s stillness, looked up and in that fleeting unguarded moment Fleur saw the bleakness in the amah’s flat, impassive face. The two women stared at each other, accepting an ending where nothing in either of their lives could ever be the same again. No contentment so taken for granted; no happiness so whole.

In lives at each end of a cultural divide, they would, Fleur knew, remember in quiet moments their innocent rivalry for the twins’ love. Here in a house that had been filled with the cheerful life of Master and husband; a place the three of them had experienced together the thrill and joy of the twins, the flourishing of small lives.

‘Time, Missie?’ Ah Heng broke the silence.

‘Yes, Ah Heng. The car’s coming up the road. Saffie, Nikki, come on, time to go.’

The twins looked up but hung on to Ah Heng. Their mother had an unnerving listlessness, a restless preoccupation with something that lay beyond them. It was as if she could no longer see them, as if they had suddenly become frighteningly invisible.

Ah Heng gathered their bags and led them firmly up the steps past Fleur, through the kitchen to their bathroom where she made them use the loo and washed their hands and faces one last time. She checked that the small jumpers she had bought them were still in their cases. Missie had a habit of changing over the clothes she bought the twins from Chinatown. She led them down the front stairs to the open front door where the black official car was crouched, waiting for them.

Mohammed, the driver, had stowed their luggage in the boot. Fergus stood beside Fleur. He was watching the twins with Ah Heng. The children seemed passive, too devoid of emotion. Had Fleur given them something?

Ah Heng let go of the children’s hands and moved towards Fleur. ‘Missie take care. Missie have chil’ren think about. If Missie no come back to hand house over to army men, Missie write me all news of babies, please.’

She held out both hands and Fleur took them, clasping them tight, and tears sprang up between the two women.

‘I have to come back, Ah Heng. There is an army memorial service for Master…’ She hesitated. ‘I will leave the babies in England…I think it is best…I don’t want them to have to say goodbye to you twice…and…’

Ah Heng nodded. ‘Yes, Missie. I stay here. I clean house. I wait till you return. I help you hand over to army men…’ She pulled her hands gently from Fleur’s.

Fleur whispered, ‘Ah Heng, you must look after yourself. I know the High Commission want you back. You must leave when they need you…’ Her voice broke. ‘Ah Heng, thank you, thank you for everything…’

‘Missie go…’ Ah Heng turned away in misery and bent to the twins and held them hard as Fergus gently pushed Fleur into the back of the car. Ah Heng hugged them tight to her and closed her eyes to breathe in their skin. She placed her small, flat nose to their cheeks, took a huge breath, so that they were with her always, clear as their laughter, the childish smell of them. Her babies captured forever, not only in the photographs she would display in her next job, but hidden inside her always.

Fergus went round the car, picked the twins up quickly and placed them in the back of the car with Fleur. Then he went to sit by the driver. ‘Drive, Mohammed. Drive away quickly.’

Mohammed started the car. Ah Heng stood like a statue, hands clasped to her cheeks, when suddenly the rear door of the car was thrown open and the twins leapt out screaming like small banshees. They rushed at Ah Heng, threw themselves at her, clutching her black baggy trousers, hanging on to her legs.

‘No…Heng…Heng…No…Heng…You come too…You come…’

Ah Heng folded to the ground in a fluid movement, holding them to her, and her tears spurted, cascaded down her face, soaking the heads of the children.

‘Shit.’ Fergus leapt out of the car, followed by Mohammed. ‘We should have left five minutes ago.’

They tried to tear the twins from Ah Heng but they kicked and screamed hysterically. In the car Fleur sat immobile, staring straight ahead. She could not take any more.

‘You…’ Mohammed suddenly commanded the amah. ‘You come airport with English babies…You calm…You tell babies must be good for English Missie or their dada not pleased. Come! You come, please, or I not get to airport in time.’

‘It’s a good idea,’ Fergus said quickly. ‘Would you mind, Ah Heng? We’ll see you home again…We must leave now.’

Ah Heng glanced in the car at Fleur’s blank white face. ‘I come. I lock up quick.’

In the car Ah Heng wiped the twins’ faces. They had stopped crying and she put her arms around them and whispered to them in Cantonese, admonishing them softly. ‘You’re big girls. No more crying. Look at Mama. She’s very brave, yes? Well, twins too must be brave, take care of Mama for Ah Heng. Who takes care of Mama, if you do not?

‘Ah Heng wants letters to say you are being good girls, then Heng will know you are very grown-up children and Heng will be very happy you are no trouble for Mama. This is what your dada would want…and who knows? Ah Heng’s brother might come to England, and bring Ah Heng to work in cousin’s Cantonese restaurant…Who knows, twins might come back to Singapore one day to see Heng. Heng is always here. Ah Heng will send Mama her new address. No more now. No more crying or Heng will get cross. England is a very good place. You will be very, very happy with your grandparents in the big English house…You’ll see. You listening to Ah Heng?’

‘Yes,’ Nikki said.

‘Yes,’ Saffie said, putting her thumb in her mouth.

Ah Heng took it out again. ‘You too big girl for that. You no do. I tell you…crooked teeth…’ And she held them close and rocked them to her as the car purred along.

In the mirror Fergus saw that Fleur was still looking blankly out of the window. She was leaving all the comforting to her amah. She did not look, touch or reassure the twins. She did not feign cheerfulness or bravery. Fergus felt unease. Those little girls had just lost a father who idolised them. The life they were leaving was all they had ever known. Had Fleur even acknowledged her children’s loss? Or was she only capable of feeling her own?

If I long to comfort my godchildren, how is it Fleur can bear not to?

The coffin was waiting. The RAF plane to Brize Norton had already loaded its normal passengers. A small contingent of top brass and David’s squadron were waiting to march David to the plane, on his last journey home.

Ah Heng handed the twins out of the car to Fleur, who took their hands like a robot. The twins turned once to blow Ah Heng a kiss with their hands, their lower lips wobbling, and then they turned back and walked towards the coffin, which was being slow-marched to a Scottish lament to the rear of the plane.

Fleur, Saffie and Nikki all shivered in the heat. Like a sleepwalker, Fleur shook hands and accepted the words of condolence and comfort said all over again. Fergus hugged her briefly and painfully and for a moment Fleur clung to him.

‘I wish you could come to the funeral.’

‘So do I, Fleur. But we’ll all give David a wonderful memorial service when you come back.’ There was a big exercise coming up in Malaya and it was impossible for Fergus to leave now. He was doing David’s job as well as his own and one of the squadron pilots was still in hospital. ‘Take care. I’ll see you in two or three weeks.’ He shook her gently. ‘The twins need you…You’ll have help keeping them occupied on the plane. I’ll ring Laura and Peter when I get back to the mess to say the flight has just left.’

‘Thank you,’ Fleur said dully.

Fergus suddenly wanted to shake her, wanted to say, This is me. For God’s sake, Fleur. React. The man we both loved is dead and he was a huge part of my life as well as yours. Don’t shut your children out…or me.’

As the coffin disappeared into the bowels of the plane Fergus felt like weeping. ‘Keep an eye on her,’ he said to one of the air stewards, as Fleur and the children climbed the steps into the plane. ‘She’s still in shock and I’m not sure if she is capable of looking after her little girls.’

‘Don’t worry, Sir,’ the corporal said. ‘We’ve got army wives on board. We’ve also made arrangements for the stops at Gan and Cyprus. The colonel’s wife is going to be with her.’

Fergus walked back to the car and stood to watch the huge plane prepare for takeoff. The heat beat down and drenched his uniform, shimmered over the tarmac in the lee of the plane revving up and moving noisily along the runway, gathering itself for flight.

Last week he and David had played tennis. They’d swum together at the club…But that had been before the barbecue…the barbecue where Fleur had worn the shimmery red dress to shock. And it had shocked the older officers’ wives, and caused admiration and envy in almost everybody else.

At first, David had been highly amused at her entrance, had let out a whistle of pride. Fergus had felt startled, almost dismayed. Fleur was making a sudden statement. Her beauty hit him between the eyes, but this wasn’t the Fleur he knew. She was glittery and hard and…hurting. It had been disturbing. As if that night she had to prove to David, and perhaps to him, the power she had to attract. It had been awful watching them hurt each other and using him to do it. He loved them both.

He watched the plane carrying his friend’s body take off in a roar over the paddy fields, signalling an ending: to everything.

Ah Heng, in the back of the cool, air-conditioned car, watched her babies fly away in a plane like a heavy, pregnant bird. The sun radiated in waves over the ground where it had been standing. She watched the glint of silver in the sky until it was a speck and wondered if she would ever fill the hole that was opening making each and every breath painful.

Every time a British baby left it hurt, but this time it tore out her heart. There were no babies in her next job, back in the city with the British High Commission. No babies at all.

NINE

As the plane started to descend for Changi airport, Fleur looked down, but the paddy fields had gone. No black-clad figures, knee-deep in water, bent to the rice in their wide-brimmed hats.

Yet, excitement gripped her. If she closed her eyes she could almost be a child, a young wife again, with a safe, happy life and children before her.

The smells as the doors were thrown open were as she remembered. Shimmering wet heat, petrol, and spices. No frangipani this time; the vague, pervading scent of blossom was missing.

Fleur sat in an airport bus as the rain sprayed out from the wheels, splashing cyclists. The luggage, balanced precariously at the front, wobbled and swung behind the driver. The heat was swallowed behind cloud and air-conditioning. The other passengers were as dazed and tired as Fleur, and the bus was oddly silent.

Fleur, looking out at a changed landscape, still felt she knew the basic geography of it. She had driven so often on this Changi Road, to the sailing club, to the military hospital, to see friends. She supposed all the buildings must still be there in a different guise. Was the prison still standing; the atmosphere around it heavy with despair and death; full of the ghosts of captured servicemen imprisoned there by the Japanese in the Second World War.

As they reached the outskirts of the city she recognised the long Bukit Timar Road and thought she remembered some of the older buildings hidden beneath and between vast skyscrapers. Land reclamation started so long ago had continued and the city had spread out into places once underwater. Spread out and out and up.

The bus weaved in and out of the fronts of hotels, dropping passengers and their spreading pools of luggage in front of ornate glass doors with tall turbaned Indian porters. Fleur and two couples were the last to be dropped off at the Hilton in Orchard Road. An old couple who looked on the point of collapse and a young, possibly honeymoon, couple. They all smiled wanly at each other, tiredness and jetlag making everything distant.

The young couple hauled their suitcases up the hotel steps before the porters had time to rush out with their trolleys and admonish them for even thinking of seeing to their own luggage. Fleur and the old couple stood waiting, knowing, unlike England, that their cases would be loaded carefully onto a trolley, and when they had checked in they would be seen efficiently into the lift and up to their rooms.

Once in her room the young Malaysian porter showed Fleur how everything worked and she dived into her bag to tip him, trying to find her Singapore dollars. The porter held his hand up. ‘Later, later, you tired, Mem.’

Fleur smiled gratefully and thanked him. ‘Terima kasih.’

He gave her a wide smile. ‘Sama-sama. Selamat tidur.’

‘Selamat tidur.’

Night was approaching. Fleur went to the window and looked down on Orchard Road, at the streams of traffic heading home or into the city to eat and shop. The pavements were full of people and the volume would increase as the night wore on. Singapore was a city for serious shoppers.

She had wanted to be in the centre of the city where she could walk to shop for presents for Nikki and Jack. Right here, in the centre where, even after all this time, much would be familiar. Fleur smiled, leaving the curtains open, and went to the fridge and took out water. Then she had a shower and lay on the bed, the hum of the air-conditioning masking the noise of anything outside the room.

Fleur knew she must not sleep or she would never come up from the depth of jetlag, but she closed her eyes and let her body relax. She longed to phone Nikki, to say, Here I am in the Singapore Hilton and so, so looking forward to seeing you the day after tomorrow, darling; to meeting Jack; to looking at your lovely face, which I miss every single day…

But she couldn’t. She had brought a phone that would work anywhere in the world, but she could not ring her estranged daughter. There were no small intimacies or concerns or chit-chat that could be exchanged as comfort. Not yet.

It was the thing Fleur missed most of all with the death of Fergus, having anyone to tell, I got here! I’m fine! You needn’t have worried. Really, the journey was wonderful…no problems at all.

The room hummed around her. She knew she must get up if she wanted to go out into the streets before she collapsed. So strange that hotels could be the loneliest places in the world when they contained hundreds of people.

She dressed quickly in clean clothes and went out into the corridor. There was a lounge eating area on the same floor which served snacks and light food. Fleur ordered a coffee and helped herself to some fruit and nuts beautifully laid out on a table. She went and sat in a corner where she would not be self-conscious on her own and looked out at the night.

As she stood in the lift going down to the foyer the old couple joined her. ‘We’re just going to have a quick look round the hotel and call it a day, we’re much too tired to explore tonight.’

Fleur smiled. ‘I’m just going out for an hour or so.’

‘Well, you be careful, on your own…’

‘I think,’ Fleur said, ‘Singapore is probably the safest place I know. Certainly safer than London. Sleep well.’

She swung out of the glass doors and down the steps into the street and turned right and walked slowly up Orchard Road. She wanted to buy Nikki a Chinese blouse, green silk. All the little night markets seemed to have disappeared, to be replaced by glittering designer shops and huge stores. There was even a Marks & Spencer. Fleur, tired, did not think she could tackle working out the currency tonight. She would scout and return in the morning. She walked, jostled and pushed by the good-natured crowds. There were no rickshaws any more and she was glad. She used to be horrified at the huge varicose veins that stood out like spreading roots of trees on the rickshaw driver’s legs.

She stood on a corner waiting for the lights to change and suddenly saw, across the road in a space between the shops, a children’s play area and some market stalls. She crossed the road with the surge of people and went to look.

There it was, pale green, the perfect Shantung blouse with small daisies embroidered on the front. Fleur held it up to judge its size. Of course she couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be about right. She saw it had a price tag on and hesitated to barter. Perhaps people no longer bartered?

Did she have enough Singapore dollars? She opened her wallet to look. The small Cantonese stallholder touched her hand. ‘I take card. You have this one too, velly good for you. Good colour for you.’ She took up a red blouse and held it against Fleur.

Fleur bought both blouses and a length of batik for a sarong for Jack and paid with her credit card. She was feeling sick and dizzy now with the heat and the crowds and she turned back towards the hotel. Even at this time of night the sweat trickled down the inside of her shirt and thin trousers.

Back in her room she made tea, nibbled a biscuit and fell into bed feeling pleased with herself. She had at least small gifts to give to Nikki and Jack. She fell asleep almost instantly.

In the morning Fleur woke disorientated and went to draw the curtains. The steamy rain of yesterday had gone and the day glared and flashed against the window. She felt excited and rested. She had the whole day, until four thirty, when the airport bus would come to collect her. She could do anything she liked.

She made coffee, showered quickly, and put on a thin dress against the heat outside. She opened the glass doors and walked out onto her balcony that looked down on Orchard Road. She leant out and watched the cars snaking along bumper to bumper through the city and saw what you could not see from the road.

A line of trees edging the pavements made a long green snake through the heart of the city, as if the trees had sprung from the roots of the buildings, so that the city could constantly be reminded of the jungle from which it had sprung.

Hundertwasser! Fleur felt astonished to see so clearly and by chance a view he must have looked down on, here or in some other eastern city that steamed with heat and vibrant colour. The ghosts of the jungle and dead tribes rising from the pavements in leafy green, their wavering branches, the arms of the dead, re-created to live again, to breathe again in the heart of a city. Forever alive, forever continuing the pattern of life. A city that had once been jungle.

The Garden of the Happy Dead.

If I had not come, if I had not stood on this balcony eight floors up, I would not have seen so extraordinarily dramatically what Hundertwasser meant and what he practiced so clearly in his colours and architecture.

She smiled, drinking in the snake of green trees below her, a wavy line through the flash of metal cars and spirals of buildings. She could have read and read and studied and stood in front of one of his paintings or buildings, but she might never have glimpsed the exactness of meaning, that bolt of sudden understanding of something deep and fundamental which drew her and thousands of others to his work and philosophy.

Fleur turned away, back into the room. It was like a small sign from the gods. Hope for her and her daughter; new life in the grandchild to come. She ate a quick breakfast and took the lift downstairs. The young Malaysian porter stood by the huge glass doors. He beamed at her.

‘Selamat pagi! Apa khabar?’

Fleur beamed back. ‘Baik. OK. Terima kasih. Can I walk to the Botanical Gardens from here?’

‘Yes, Mem, turn left out of hotel. About fifteen minutes’ walk.’

‘Terima kasih.’ ‘Sama-sama.’

Outside on the steps she blinked in the glare and put on her sunglasses. She turned left, waited for the lights and crossed the intersection. The heat bore down on her. Fleur lifted her arm for a taxi. She could not walk far in this heat without melting and she wanted to explore the gardens.

The taxi turned off Bukit Timar Road and into a wide road full of colonial-type buildings that had probably been embassy houses. At the end of one leafy road stood the Botanical Gardens with its gated entrance. Fleur remembered none of this. The taxi took her inside the gates and dropped her in front of the building where groups of taxi drivers waited for fares. She walked through the entrance and inside.

Years ago, there had been no formal entrance. Fleur remembered entering from a small side gate off a busy road. It must have been at the other end of the gardens. It had been more of a park then; people picnicked on the grass. There had been one small place to eat and buy drinks. Amahs and Indian ayahs pushed prams or ran after toddlers and flitted like exotic butterflies round the small paths through the trees. There had been a fountain and in the pool fat yellow fish hid behind lily leaves. There had been monkeys swinging from the trees and down beside you to pinch your food. Grumbling and fighting up in the branches, their tails switching, their voices screeching ominously above you. There had been a man in uniform leaning against a tree by the fountain, waiting for her.

Fleur’s heart pounded in memory as she walked the wide tended paths that were all signposted now. Large glasshouses stood on a hill and a new pavilion was being made. The grass was neatly kept and there were fewer trees to hide in the shade. Fewer places to hold hands when you should not; to kiss, shaking with the possibility that all might become well and whole again if you did not think, if you pretended for an afternoon away from the army base, away from the uniforms, in this one anonymous place in the centre of a city. If you clung to the only sure and safe person in a life so suddenly turned on its head.

Restaurants and cafés were now placed strategically in clearings. There was no anonymity any more. Wealthy Europeans and Chinese walked together, pushing expensive buggies full of children down the wide cleansed paths. It had all been sanitised and commercialised. It was beautiful still, but the gardens had lost their mystery. Without the monkeys and the deep shade of trees and the hint of danger, it was a place that could have been any botanical gardens anywhere in the world.

Fleur made her way to the Orchid House and bought a ticket. Instantly she was back in the army quarter in the naval base with Ah Heng bringing orchids back from the market and placing them in Chinese vases all over the house. Ah Heng arranging them just so, her stiff little back and dark glossy hair drawn back in a bun, bent to the blooms, her face inscrutable.

She took some photos, unable to compete with some Japanese tourists who had cameras the size of matchboxes. She stood still, watching water trickling on polished stones and small tendrils of ferns arranged against trees. One orchid stood in a wooden vase by a sculpture.

Ah Heng had slept in a little room in a block behind the kitchen with a lavatory and shower. Her small shuttered room had contained so much: an aged sewing machine, materials bought in Chinatown, chairs of ironing ready to bring into the house, toys and books for the twins. Baskets of personal things, hanging chimes, but always, always flowers for luck in a little wooden vase outside her door.

The heat trickled down the inside of Fleur’s dress. She was not used to the humidity any more and her tongue stuck to her mouth. She had left her bottle of water in her room. She made her way slowly back to the café; she had seen. The gardens were not the same, but she was glad she had come; they were still an oasis in the middle of the teeming city; still somewhere you would come for peace again and again.

She bought a cold drink and ordered nasi goreng. She glanced at her watch. Plenty of time; she had nothing to pack. Everything was still in her suitcase. All she had to do was change into trousers and check out, and then she would wait in the foyer with her book for the airport bus.

This time tomorrow she would be with Nikki. The Chinese waitress flip-flopped over with her food. Fleur got herself another drink. The nasi goreng was wonderful; familiar. Ah Heng had made it once a week, usually when David was flying, because it was light and Fleur and the twins loved it. She smiled as she remembered how proficient their tiny hands were with chopsticks, which they used long before a knife and fork.

The couple at the next table got up to go and Fleur leant over to pick up a paper in English they had left behind. It was The Straits Times. She flicked through the pages looking for headlines that used to make David and Fergus laugh when she pointed them out. AN AMOK CAUSES PANIC IN CHINATOWN. BUSINESSMAN CHARLIE CHAN FOILS INDEFATIGABLE ROBBERY.

She turned another page and another, smiling. Suddenly a small headline with a photograph caught her eye, near the bottom of the page. She started to read it. Her heart jumped painfully making breathing difficult. Her hands began to shake and her eyes became blurred with shock. She placed the paper flat on the table, her food forgotten. She blinked and made herself read the words over again, very slowly, sickness rising up in her throat.

She placed her hands over the page and stared down at them as they trembled over the print. She thought for a second that she would pass out and she gripped the edges of the table until her knuckles were white. She made herself breathe again. Breathe.

The gardens and the people around Fleur receded, leaving her beached and isolated at her small table. She did not know how long she sat staring down at her hands. Then, infinitely carefully, she tore the page out and placed it in her bag. She paid for her unfinished food and walked to the entrance.

Taxi drivers called out to her: ‘Datang…Datang…Teksi…Teksi, Mem? Hotel? Restoran? Shops?’ She walked past them, stumbling, blind and numb to anything but that terrible small and lonely image etched indelibly on her heart.

TEN

‘No,’ Jack said. ‘Nikki, there’s no way I’m letting you fly to Singapore on your own. You’re seven and a half months pregnant and you shouldn’t even be flying. I’m coming and nothing you say is going to make any difference.’

‘Jack, listen, you should be here when the charter boats start to come in. It’s the end of the season and what if my mother suddenly turns up…’

‘Sorry, Nik. You’re my priority, you and the baby. Both Neil and Rudi can manage the boats without me and Dad says he will fly down with mum and stay in the house if the boys have any problems.’

‘But, it might just be a complete misunderstanding with mum…’

‘Nikki, your mother’s left all her belongings in a hotel in Singapore. We’ve heard absolutely nothing for twenty-four hours.’

Nikki closed her eyes. ‘Oh, God. I’m so frightened for her.’

‘I know you are. So don’t push me away, Nik. We’re in this together and we’ll find out what’s happened together.’

He pulled her to him and they stood in the middle of the room listening to the bamboo chimes clunking outside in the garden, heads turned towards the sea glinting in the bay.

Nikki gave in with relief. ‘OK. We’ll both go. Thanks, Jack.’

‘Will you try to stay as calm as you can? I’m really afraid of you losing this baby.’

Nikki turned away from him and took the coffee pot off the stove and poured him coffee. She took it to the table and sat down. ‘I want to say something.’

Jack sat opposite her, pouring milk into his coffee and wondering what was coming.

‘Jack, pregnancy isn’t an illness. I’m resting and taking all the care I can. I want this baby as much as you do but I have to go to Singapore and find out what’s happened to my mother. It could be that she’s dead, that something terrible has happened. I have to deal with that, pregnant or not. Please, if you come, just be there with me, don’t add to the things I must worry about. I have to have blind trust in this baby going full term. That it is my karma…whatever happens.’

Jack looked at her. He loved her intensely, in a way she probably did not yet love him. Nikki had been marked by watching her father die and losing her twin. She had been scarred in ways Jack was still discovering. Every now and then he had a glimpse of her bravery and of her apparent ability to just accept passively whatever fate might land at her feet.

Sometimes, Jack thought, this passivity could be mistaken for a lack of hope. He wanted Nikki to believe in their future together; in the life they were building here. You had to have faith that sometimes things did come right despite the odds. He saw this as his job, to keep faith for the woman he loved.

Secretly, he thought karma was a cop-out, an excuse for not acting. Sometimes you had to fight for the life you wanted. He got to his feet and bent across the table to kiss her nose.

‘I’ll go and see how soon we can get a flight to Singapore tonight.’

‘I’ll go and find our rucksacks.’

They smiled at each other. Below them, a motor boat full of tourists wrapped up in wet weather gear shot out of the harbour across the bay to The Hole at speed. Their screams of mock terror and excitement were drowned by the sudden burst of the engine and did not rise up from the water to reach them. The speed in the lazy stillness of yachts at anchor seemed out of place, the long white wake disturbing the acres of blue. Then the sound faded and was gone. Peace. The sea straightened out again into glassy stillness.

Nikki moved around the house touching things uneasily like a cat marking a territory she was afraid she might never return to.

Detective Sergeant James Mohktar, a Chinese-Malay, met them at the airport. Nikki stared: he had the most extraordinary and beautiful face.

He drove them straight to the police station. ‘It is just for the paperwork, Miss Montrose. Also, we have not quite finished with the hotel room. You see we must explore every avenue…’

Nikki went white with shock. They must think Fleur is dead; they are treating the hotel room as a crime scene. James Mohktar, watching her face, said quickly, ‘We have no reason to think the worst, Miss Montrose, this is just normal procedure. The hotel will need the room back and before your mother’s belongings are removed we have to make sure there is no clue there to her disappearance. At this stage do not get too alarmed, lah? Sometimes people on long journeys get disorientated and lost. Let us hope we find your mother safe and well very soon.’ He glanced at Nikki’s protruding stomach. ‘Now, there are some questions you can help us with and then we will drive you to the Singapore Hilton to rest. I believe you have booked into the same hotel as your mother?’

‘Yes,’ Jack said. ‘We thought it would be practical.’

He wanted to say, Look, my wife is pregnant. Can’t she rest before you bombard her with questions? But he couldn’t, and he did not like to say girlfriend or partner because he was unsure how this Asian policeman felt about Nikki being pregnant and unmarried.

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 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 to tree, emptying the rubber from the small tap on the trunk and moving quickly on to the next tree, like shadows or ghosts.

Fleur knew her fear was due partly to the stories her father had told her about the communist insurgents of the 1950s when plantation owners and managers had been attacked and killed, but she always found the stillness of the rubber plantations sinister and in some way threatening; a place where people could hide and pounce. The palm oil trees, with their thick green fronds, softened the landscape, their shape curving like the tops of pineapples.

After David’s funeral, Fleur had lain motionless in the dark, one twin each side of her in the lumpy bed. Saffie placed her fingers on her mother’s ribcage to see if she was still breathing. Her fingers felt, under the cotton nightdress, the flutter and throb of Fleur’s heart. She wanted to whisper to Nikki over her mother’s still form. She wanted to feel her sister’s warmth seep into her. If Mum died there would be no one, only their grandparents. They would have to live in this horrid village and probably go to boarding school.

Saffie trembled with fear of the future. Would they have to stay in this cold house of long corridors and draughty rooms? Here in this rolling garden full of huge fir trees that shaded the lawns and made you shiver? Where the roses smelt in the middle of the day but there was no scent of frangipani wafting in on the morning wind; no white frangipani petals covering the lawns. There was no familiar sound of the kebun brushing the bruised petals up with his long, slow, indolent sweeps.

No bougainvillaea climbed the walls of this house in a great purple cloud. There were no sounds of cicadas in the night or Ah Heng’s high cackling voice coming from the kitchen. Saffie ached with homesickness: for the Chinese chimes moving imperceptibly in the draught of the shuttered windows; for Ah Heng just a shout away.

Home; where Daddy had been, his laughter filtering through the rise and fall of sleep, making you smile as if you were awake. His laugh mixed up with the sound of music, of people chatting and partying.

Saffie thought of his largeness, remembered his happiness just beyond the darkness of the room making you safe to turn and sleep again. She strained for the memory of his face. She could remember his smell: soap and tobacco. She could remember the feel of him, the strength of his brown arms…but she trembled in case she forgot his face…Singapore…the safe place where Daddy had been.

Her face, curled upwards towards her mother, was becoming wet. She touched her cheek. These were not her tears. She was not crying. She reached up to touch Fleur’s face. Her mother was weeping silently, motionless. Her chest was not heaving, her mouth was not open; she was crying without sound, tears cascading out of the sides of her eyes. The pillows and her nightdress and Saffie’s hair were becoming soaked. Saffie did not know anyone could cry this quietly. She heard Nikki whisper in the darkness,

‘Mummy, Mummy, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’

Saffie leant up on one elbow. ‘It’s all right…we’re here.’ She got out of bed and padded across in the dark to the dressing table to get a box of tissues. She handed Nikki a bundle and together they tried to blot Fleur’s eyes and cheeks and neck until she slowly became aware of them, came back from a long way away and registered their distress.

Saffie thought, Mummy doesn’t even know she’s crying.

Fleur sat up and wiped her face and blew her nose, looked down at them, one each side of her. ‘Cuddle up, darlings, cuddle in close, you’re both frozen. That’s it; pull the covers up to our chins…that’s right. Now we’re like dormice…’ She held the children to her tight, rubbed her chin over their smooth hair that smelt like hay, murmured to them to sleep, that it was all going to be all right.

‘Mummy, do we have to stay here?’ Saffie whispered. ‘In this house?’

‘No, darlings, we’re not going to stay here.’

‘Where are we going? Can we go home?’ Nikki asked.

‘We can’t go home, darling. All our things have to be packed up and Ah Heng has to go and look after a new family. I have to go back to hand our house back to the army and Grandpa thought we might all go and have a last little holiday in Malaya…’

‘Where we used to go with Daddy?’

‘Yes, in one of the rest houses in Port Dickson.’

‘With the round baths, where the water comes out of a big plug and goes all over the floor?’

‘That’s right. Does that sound like a good idea?’

‘With Grandpa and Grandma, or just us?’ Saffie was unsure she wanted them to come. On the other hand, it might feel safer.

‘I like just us,’ Nikki said quietly. But she could not help wondering if her mother was going to be like she was now or like she had mostly been since they got back to England. Would she see and hear them like she did tonight? Or would she go back to a place where they could not reach her, when sometimes she looked as if she didn’t know them any more? As if she had gone somewhere else and forgotten all about them.

‘Of course they are coming with us, darlings. But after the holiday we’re going to find a little house together, just us three. OK?’

Saffie could feel her heart swelling with a strange sad happiness because Mummy was holding them and for the first time the dark felt safe again.

‘You will stay with us all the time? You won’t ever go away and leave us in this house on our own, will you? You won’t leave us even for a minute?’ Nikki asked breathlessly.

Fleur bent to her and kissed the top of her head with sudden passion and then did the same to Saffie. ‘My silly little peapods, of course I won’t leave you. There is just the three of us now and we’ll stick together always, won’t we?’

Nikki smiled and curled in for sleep. ‘Yes.’

Saffie could feel her mother’s body going slack as she fell asleep. After a moment she whispered, ‘Nikki?’ but no one answered. Nikki too was asleep.

Lying in the dark, Fleur’s breath moving her fingers like the quiver of leaves, Saffie heard a fox bark suddenly out in the garden. It was a primeval sound that made her heart jump. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, wanting to sleep too. She thought it was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.

The train slowed and stopped at a junction. Fleur smelt betel nut and curry powder and the musty smell of live chickens carried in cages. She felt a nudge and a fat smiling Malay woman with a child was holding out her bottle of water. Fleur took it gratefully, drank and then handed it back. The woman shook her head, showing her she had another bottle. ‘You keep. You keep.’

Fleur thanked her and leant back and closed her eyes.

After the funeral she had flown back to Singapore with the twins and Peter and Laura There was an army memorial service and a quarter to hand over…and then…And then I let it happen. I let my child die for one selfish craving for oblivion.

The train shunted forward again. It seemed to stop at every single station. Fleur sat up and looked out. The day was ending. The carriages were emptying. People were leaving the train in droves now.

The Malay woman and her child had gone. They were still travelling inland. Her heart jumped; she must be on the wrong train. Oh God, where was she going? She shook with jetlag and tiredness.

A large Indian with a purple turban was watching her with gentle eyes.

Fleur lent forward. ‘I think I’m on the wrong train.’

The Indian smiled. ‘I was wondering, Madam. You are on what we call the Jungle Railway all the way to Kota Bharu. Mostly workers travel this line. The journey from Singapore takes fourteen hours, no less! Where is it you are wanting to be?’

‘Seremban. I must get off there for Port Dickson.’ Fleur fought panic.

‘Well, Madam, the next stop is Mentakab. Here you must get off immediately for the next stop is Jerentut. There is nothing in between. I am afraid there will be no train back to Gemas tonight. This is where you must return to catch the train to Seremban.’

He watched Fleur’s face. ‘Madam, do not worry. Mentakab is where I alight. I will show you to the best place in Mentakab to stay and then in the morning you will catch a train back to Gemas and there change for Seremban. All will be well. Do not be afraid. I fear you are a little unwell.’

The Indian accompanied Fleur off the train and took her in a taxi to a small guest house belonging to his sister. Very good and very clean. It wasn’t, but Fleur was grateful. She lay on the hard bed, stiff with anxiety, beyond tiredness, unable to sleep or shut her mind to the image she had seen in the paper. She was hardly aware of where she was.

Early the next morning the Indian took her back to the station and made sure she got on the right train to Gemas. His sister had changed some of her Singapore dollars for her, and given her Malaysian ringgits.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I have so little money on me to thank you for your kindness.’

He drew himself up with dignity. ‘Madam, I do not wish for payment for helping a lady in a foreign land.’ He smiled, ‘I hope soon the thing that troubles you will disappear.’

‘Terima kasih. Thank you.’

‘Sama-sama.’ He smiled. ‘You speak a little Malay?’

‘A very little. Selamat tinggal. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Madam and Selamat jalan to you. Do not forget Gemas. Change at Gemas.’

The train drew out of the station taking Fleur backwards to Gemas, when all she wanted to do was travel forward to the sea. To reach the place where she could grieve silently and alone. Just for a moment to feel the warmth of a life lost. Just for a moment.

TWELVE

The name Montrose was niggling at James Mohktar as he drove home that night. It registered with him, seemed somehow familiar. It is an English name, he told himself, and you are bound to have heard it before. Yet as he lay beside his wife and listened to her even breathing in the dark, intuition told him it was important, this nebulous something he could not recall.

He said to his inspector the next day, ‘Have you heard the name Montrose before?’

Inspector Chan pursed his lips and thought about it. ‘No. Should I have done?’

‘I don’t know. Something I can’t remember. Annoying.’

The phone rang and Chan picked it up. The day had started. Mohktar walked down the corridor to his office. He opened up his computer and then thought, How long ago did this missing woman live here? Twenty-eight years? Long before we were computerised. He would need to get someone to check the archives, find out how far back files were transferred onto disc and then search through old cases concerning Europeans or service personnel to see if that name came up. He got up again and went to find constables Ahmed and Singh.

Detective Sergeant Mohktar had given the hotel permission to move Fleur’s belongings to our room. Her room was then cleaned and hoovered for the next guests; all trace of Fleur was extinguished.

I woke before Jack and got up quietly so I did not disturb him. I bent over the small pool of my mother’s belongings. Two Chinese blouses beautifully folded, one red and one green. A length of batik. Presents for me? I opened the small overnight case again. Just her book, washing things, nightdress and underclothes. A white shirt, summer skirt and sandals.

Fleur only had her handbag with her. No change of clothes and nothing to sleep in. Fear caught at me once more in the silent room. Fleur had so obviously meant to return to the hotel because she would never have gone anywhere without clean underclothes.

Jack woke and sat up, fighting to get his bearings. He saw me sitting on the floor among Fleur’s belongings.

‘Come here.’ He held his arms open. I went over to him and he wrapped his arms around me. ‘Don’t think the worst. Don’t give up hope. I was thinking: do you think your mother might have had a sudden reaction to being back in Singapore? Do you think coming back triggered something unresolved? Could she be wandering about the city not knowing what she is doing?’

I sat up. ‘It’s possible. That could be it, Jack. She might still return here to the hotel.’

The phone rang. It was DS Mohktar. He asked me if I was rested. He would like to see me in an hour if that was convenient. He had witness statements from other guests in the hotel that he would like to go through with me. They had circulated Fleur’s photograph to all city patrols and they were hopeful that something positive would come from this.

Mohktar caught up with us in the breakfast lounge. Apparently an old couple Fleur had made conversation with had reappeared from three days in Kuala Lumpur. They had been on the same flight from Heathrow and also on the airport bus. They had talked briefly to Fleur in the hotel lift the night they arrived. She told them she was going out for an hour or so. They remembered distinctly because they told her to be careful, a woman on her own, and she had replied that Singapore was one of the safest places she knew. They had not seen her at breakfast the following day, but the honeymoon couple, now in Penang, had, although they had not spoken to her.

The waiter on this eighth-floor breakfast lounge had served her coffee and croissants and one of the porters had seen her go out that morning by the main entrance, cheerful and seeming fine. She had asked him the way to the Botanical Gardens. One of Mohktar’s constables was down in the gardens now, making inquiries with the staff.

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