Contents (54)
- The Hour Before Dawn
- Table of Contents
- 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
- THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN
- By the same author
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Port Dickson, 2004
At four o’clock Fleur gave up trying to rest, pulled her dress over her head and went and sat on the veranda, watching families beginning to trickle back onto the beach.
Ah Lin immediately materialised with a tray of tea and a piece of cake and nodded to Fleur to eat it. ‘I make,’ she said, smiling.
‘Thank you. It looks lovely,’ Fleur said, knowing she would have to eat it or smuggle it in to Nikki.
The amah disappeared again on backless little shoes and Fleur felt a lingering déjà vu, evocative as a sudden drift of familiar scent when someone passes. Sight, smell, sound; if you kept quite still you might almost believe it was possible to step back into your childhood…that sure, safe place where nothing threatened.
But you could not go back. Nor could you edit your life and take out that one second of total irresponsibility.
Fleur trembled, clutched her hands together…That day her parents left for Penang, one of the wives in another rest house, someone she hardly knew, had come round to see if she was all right. She had drunk two strong gins, even though the other woman was pregnant and not drinking.
After lunch she had taken the twins into her own room and put them in her bed for the long, hot afternoon. She had asked the amah to stay in the house, to be there in case they woke before her. The twins had gone instantly to sleep, and, longing, craving for oblivion, she had taken some strong codeine, thinking:
If I just take these maybe I can sleep too and then I can get through the evening. If I can only sleep and blot everything out…just for a couple of hours, I’ll be all right…That’s what I’ll do…I must sleep…
Fleur moaned, lifted her face to an evening breeze from the sea. She felt the creak of the wooden floor expanding as it cooled. A chit chat dropped from the ceiling and ran along the balcony rail and away. The cicadas stepped up their noisy rhythm as the sun sank and the shadows lengthened.
Somewhere in the house she heard Jack and Nikki begin to move about. She heard the thin trickle of a shower and the clink of crockery from the back kitchen. She absorbed these sounds like sun upon her skin. She saw her younger self, dry-mouthed, crouched, waiting. Waiting in a wooden house for the torches on the hillside to bring back a frightened little girl who had wandered too far from home.
She had the sensation of having never left this place, that a piece of her had remained forever here, absorbed and held, a ghost in the fabric of a wooden house. Part of the shadows…waiting.
NINETEEN
I wondered if DS Mohktar had pulled stings because he arrived the following morning as Fleur, Jack and I were having breakfast. We watched him walk across the beach towards us and my heart began to hammer and sweat trickled down the inside of my dress.