Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

FIFTY-ONE

THREE YEARS LATER | ADAM

“Let’s have a look at you.” Mina brings her face level with Sophia’s, and with a jolt, I realize she no longer has to crouch. Sophia’s gotten so tall. “You look perfect.”

“Daddy did my hair.”

“Clever Daddy.”

At Sophia’s insistence, I’ve been teaching myself via a series of YouTube tutorials. Today I’ve attempted French plaits, the parting beginning in the center and meandering first left and then right. The frizzy ends stick out below her ears, one big and one small.

“It looks great.” Mina grins at me, then drains her coffee and dumps the mug in the sink. It was six months before we could move back after the fire. The insurance covered everything, thank God, and when we finally stepped through the door, there was no trace of what had happened. The new kitchen was different, and we pushed a dresser up against the wall so you’d never even know there was a cellar. I thought I’d see Becca everywhere I went, but the three of us had spent so much time deliberating over the choices that now made up the ground floor of our house that all I saw was home.

Butler gave me that Christmas off—given the circumstances—and the three of us drove from the airport to Mina’s dad’s house, where he’d left folded towels at the end of the spare bed, the way her mum used to do. On the floor was a single blow-up bed for Sophia.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Leo said, leaving Mina and me standing in the room, our bags on the floor between us.

“I never told him we’d separated,” she said.

“Sophia can go in with you. I’ll take the mattress.”

“No, it’s okay.” She hesitated. “If it’s okay with you, that is.”

I felt my heart skitter. “You mean…”

She nodded.

We slept fitfully, Sophia abandoning her blow-up bed to curl up like a comma between Mina and me, giving us another excuse not to talk. For two individuals whose jobs revolved entirely around talking to people, I thought, we were spectacularly bad at communicating.

We did speak, though, in fits and starts over the following few days. And when Leo took Sophia for races along the windswept beach, throwing anxious glances back at us as she whirled in the wind, I thought that perhaps he had known after all.

I wasn’t suspended. I was sent back to uniform, with a fierce command from DI Butler to sort yourself out, then come and get your job back. There was a referral to welfare and for counseling, an introduction to a debt management advisor. The intelligence I provided in relation to the loan sharks I’d used led to several arrests for associated criminal activity and a laconic nice work email from Butler.

Mina wasn’t charged with any offenses relating to the hijack, despite the witch hunt led by Alice Davanti’s paper. It was a year before we knew—a year of sleepless nights and what if I go to prison?—but eventually, two quietly dressed men came over and said the CPS felt it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute her for opening the flight-deck door. The decision didn’t lessen her guilt. Rowan put her in touch with a friend of his who specialized in PTSD cases, and slowly she came to terms with what she’d been forced to do.

Even slower was the unravelling of what had happened during her pilot training. I’d wanted to punch something—or someone—when she told me about Myerbridge.

“We should complain to the school. Or to the aviation authorities.”

“What would that achieve?” Mina was more sanguine than I was. “It was a different world back then. They have policies in place now—I’ve checked.” She was letting it go, and so I did too.

“No more secrets, though,” I said. “From either of us.”

“No more secrets,” she agreed.

Surprisingly, Sophia seemed to be the only one of us who escaped relatively unscathed. We took her to counseling, but she was pragmatic about Becca and the fire and proud of the special commendation she’d received from the police. Her experiences as a baby had given her a resilience that made me at once proud and sad, and I hoped that one day, she would lose these memories altogether.

“Ready?” Mina says now.

I look at Sophia, who nods. “Ready,” I say. I pick up the car keys.

“My name is Sandra Daniels, and when I stepped on Flight 79, I left my whole life behind.”

The woman in the dock is tiny—under five foot five—and almost unrecognizable from the photograph in the paper of the hijacker known to the world as Zambezi. The months on remand have faded her tan to nothing, and her hair has grown dark brown, the blond ends dry and brittle. Beside me, I feel Mina tense. Daniels is the first of the defendants to give evidence, a part of the trial expected to last at least another two weeks. This morning, the final witnesses were called, including Sophia.

She was allowed to give evidence via video link, her unblinking eyes seeming vast. She stared directly into the camera, the only sign of nerves a twitch as she nibbled at the inside of her bottom lip.

“How long did you spend in the cellar, Sophia?”

She frowned. “I don’t know.”

“A long time?”

“Yes.”

“An hour? Longer?”

Sophia’s eyes flicked to the side, looking for help she couldn’t have, from Judith the court chaperone, who had gray, bobbed hair and sweets for afterward. Mina had held Sophia’s hand as they walked with Judith through a maze of corridors to the vulnerable witness room. As Sophia gave her evidence, Mina sat on a plastic chair in the corridor, while across the Old Bailey, I watched my almost nine-year-old daughter being cross-examined.

“A lot longer than an hour.”

We didn’t want Sophia in court. Her evidence had never been contested, and although the six surviving hijackers had entered not guilty pleas, Becca had held up her hands without a fight. They’d found her at her mum’s, frantically trying to wipe the search history from a laptop that tied her neatly to the purchase of the restraints she’d used to keep me in the cellar.

“I’m sorry,” she’d told the arresting officers. I wish I’d been the one to tighten her cuffs.

It was the CPS barrister who called Sophia as a witness. “She’s very articulate,” he’d said, as though this might be news to us. “I think she’ll make a good impression on the jury.”

Sophia wasn’t called to give evidence. She was called to make the jurors’ hearts melt, to win them over with her earnest responses and innocent understanding. She was called to help them see the human cost of the hijackers’ actions, even though their plan ultimately failed.

“No further questions.”

Sophia’s face remained blank, but the twitch of her bottom lip ceased, and I could finally breathe. She’s missed a lot of school, called to court only to wait around all day, her slot pushed back again and again. Now that the defendants have been called, we are taking turns to hear their evidence, Sophia spending her days in the parks and cafés close to the court, looked after by Mina and me in turn, or, when we both had to be in court, by Rowan, Derek, and Cesca, whom Sophia adores.

It was touch and go for Cesca, but she made a full recovery. They’d taken her off the plane first, strapped to a stretcher. As the waiting air ambulance took off, the armed police moved in, removing each hijacker to a separate armored vehicle.

Weeks after Mina came home, I found her watching the news footage, the tiny figures marching across the screen of her phone. “It doesn’t seem real,” she said. Quietly, she named each handcuffed figure. Ganges, Niger, Yangtze, Zambezi, Congo, Lena. The passengers followed, ashen-faced and trembling, and then the crew, blinking as they appeared in the bright Sydney sunshine. Not quite the arrival photograph Dindar had planned for them.

“Enough,” I said to Mina, but she shook her head.

“I need to see it.”

She cried when the body bags were brought out. Roger Kirkwood, Mike Carrivick, Carmel Mahon, Ben Knox, Louis Joubert. Names everyone in the world now knew as well as they knew the names of their attackers. The postmortem confirmed that the two relief pilots had been given the same drug as Roger Kirkwood, the first man to die. It was likely one of the hijackers had slipped the crushed-up pills into the drinks Carmel had made for the pilots to take upstairs, although we’d never know for sure. With Missouri dead and her plan shared with her conspirators on a “need to know” basis only, there were a lot of questions with no answers. The relief cabin crew had been found, stiff, dehydrated, and terrified but thankfully safe, up in the cramped sleeping area—the door to the cabin jammed shut by one of the hijackers.

Photographs of the nine conspirators—the eight from the plane plus Becca—fit neatly onto a full page of the Daily Mail, above their real names and, opposite, a world map with helpful arrows denoting the etymology of each hijacker’s alias. The Guardian devoted several days of internet content to the critical status of said rivers, accompanied by pleas for donations so they could continue to educate people about the climate emergency.

It took almost three years to reach trial and two hours to read all the charges leveled against the defendants sitting in the two rows of seats within the glass box at the side of the court. Preparation for acts of terrorism, fundraising offenses, possession of articles for terrorist purposes, murder, conspiracy, kidnapping… The list went on and on, right down to offenses of using false instruments—the passports Missouri obtained for each of her team.

The trial itself has taken five months. We’ve lived with the aftermath of what happened for so long that sometimes I’m not sure we can be any other way, that we’re capable of talking about anything other than that week’s evidence.

Sandra Daniels’s defense—that she didn’t know the extent of the group’s plans—falls apart during cross-examination, leaving her to claim mitigation due to years of trauma caused by an abusive marriage. Over the next two weeks, we hear other similar excuses from the remaining defendants—promises made, escape routes planned—and a picture emerges of manipulation, grooming, and radicalization at the hands of one woman.

Missouri.

Every tributary leads back to her, and although she had covered her tracks well—the hijackers’ dark web message board was never recovered—police found paperwork in her house that tied her to each of her accomplices.

On the final day of the trial, when we’re called in to hear the judge’s verdict, I look around the courtroom at the people who have become as familiar to me as my own family after six months in court. Derek has a suit on today—he must be doing an interview later. He’s moved seamlessly from print to television, in stark contrast to Alice Davanti, whose career crashed into oblivion after one of the passengers leaked video footage of her trying to claw her way into an already-occupied seat.

Jason Poke has done better. He gave a heartfelt and impassioned public apology for all the insensitive jokes of his past and pledged to atone for his seat grabbing on Flight 79. “When you think you’re about to die,” he said on Good Morning Britain, “your whole life flashes before your eyes—and what I saw didn’t make me proud.” He’s become the go-to presenter for disaster documentaries, traveling the world to find the human stories behind tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires… Woke Poke, the tabloids have dubbed him. A born-again empath.

Caroline and Jamie Crawford haven’t returned to hear the verdict. Jamie left straight after giving evidence; Caroline hung around long enough to announce the launch of the Crawford Youth Sports Foundation. Their divorce sounds messy. SCREWED OVER FOR SCREWING AROUND, one tabloid said, listing the millions Jamie had signed over to his wife’s charity, only for her to give him his marching orders.

I thought the media would grow tired of the case, but the coverage has been relentless. With the hijackers on remand, it was the passengers who provided fresh copy, from AUSTRALIAN HIJACK HELL SURROGATE COUPLE GIVE BIRTH TO MIRACLE TWINS, to the haunted face of Carmel’s parents: WE’LL AVENGE OUR DAUGHTER’S DEATH.

The judge gives them life. Although really, he is taking it away, bestowing each with a minimum sentence of forty years. I squeeze Mina’s hand. Even Becca (I still think of her as that, despite her real name being plastered across the papers), the youngest defendant, will be in her sixties when she gets out. She’ll have no children, no career, no life.

We don’t cheer. There’s no feeling of euphoria as we leave the court; the length of the trial has sapped us of adrenaline. There’s just the overwhelming feeling of relief that it’s finally over.

“That’s that, then.” Derek looks almost disappointed. He claps me on the back, turning it into an awkward man hug, before kissing Mina on the cheek. “Brave girl.”

There are few people Mina would allow to call her a girl, but Derek is one of them. He has slotted into our lives like an additional uncle, and I like to think he sees us as family too.

“Cesca’s turn for dinner, I think?” he adds.

“It certainly is,” she says. “I’ll ping an email around.”

The monthly dinners had begun as a one-off, a few weeks after Cesca left the hospital. They were Mina’s idea, to introduce Sophia and me to Cesca, Rowan, and Derek. Conversation was stilted to begin with. We scratched about for small talk that kept us away from the very thing that had brought us together.

It was Sophia who broke the ice. “What will happen to the ’jackers?”

“They’ll go to prison,” I said firmly.

“They should send them on an airplane and tell them it was going to crash so they would be as scared as you were. And then put them in a horrible freezing cellar and set fire to their house and see how they like it.”

There was silence after this little speech. I wasn’t sure whether to applaud my daughter’s sense of justice or worry I was bringing up a psychopath, but when I looked at Mina, she was laughing. “I couldn’t agree more.” She raised her glass. “To Sophia.”

“Sophia!” we echoed.

“Maybe you should be a judge when you grow up,” Rowan said, but Sophia shook her head.

“I’m going to be a police officer.” She’d smiled at me, then looked at Mina. “And a pilot.”

“Busy woman,” Derek said.

“And an environ…” Sophia stumbled over the word “…mentlist.”

She might as well have said Macbeth in a roomful of actors. Derek flinched, Cesca closed her eyes, and Rowan—usually so unflappable—lost his eyebrows somewhere beneath his hair.

“They’ve been doing it at school,” Mina said. “Ice caps, single-use plastic, that sort of thing.” There was an apology in her voice we all understood.

“I’m in charge of recycling for the whole school.”

“And she’s persuaded the milkshake shop to switch to biodegradable straws.”

Three pairs of eyes stared at Sophia. We were used to this. Proud of it, I suppose, as though we were entirely responsible for the genes that gave our daughter the intellectual capacity of someone twice her age. And if sometimes the looks were more wary than awestruck? We could handle that too. We loved Sophia because of her quirkiness, not in spite of it.

“Well,” Rowan said suddenly, a fist on the table adding an exclamation mark to the word, “I, for one, think it’s remarkable.” He looked at Cesca and Derek, gathering their enthusiasm. “Five years old—”

“Nearly six,” Sophia said.

“Nearly six years old and already bringing about change.”

“Brava, Sophia!” Derek added. “Future pilot, police officer, and environmentalist!” We raised our glasses for the second time that evening, before Sophia was dispatched to brush her teeth.

“Will you read me a story—”

Mina had put down her glass in readiness.

“—Daddy?”

I’d been unable to hide the joy I felt, and I scrutinized Mina’s face for signs of jealousy as Sophia was saying good night to our guests. I knew what it felt like, after all, to play second fiddle. But there was nothing. As the weeks passed, I realized I’d had it all wrong. I’d been looking for fairness—for equal love, equal attention, equal status from my daughter. I’d been thinking about what I needed from her instead of what she needed from me. From both of us. Sometimes Sophia wants me to read to her; sometimes she wants Mina. Sometimes she reaches for my hand; other times, she pulls away, not wanting me near. Attachment disorder isn’t cured overnight, but slowly we’re making progress.

That first dinner turned into monthly get-togethers, and by the following summer, the occasional spontaneous game of rounders or sunny pub lunch. It was hard for outsiders to understand a tenth of what we’d been through, so much easier to not have to say it. It was good, too, for Sophia to see how we’d all come through it, and that adults, too, had the occasional setback. I liked to see her deep in conversation with Cesca or Rowan and watch her burst into laughter as the serious turned into the absurd. It was good for us all, I realized.

We walk away from the Old Bailey now, an awkward group on a too-narrow pavement, and retrieve our phones from the travel agent that acts as a left-luggage center for the court. Sophia is talking to Cesca, pointing to each of the signs in the window in turn.

“Athens. That’s in Greece. Rome is in Italy. Barbados is…Africa?”

“The Caribbean.”

Sophia frowns, although whether at Cesca or her own mistake, it isn’t clear.

“Bright kid, that one,” Rowan says.

“Runs rings around me.” I grin. “Did Mina tell you she wrote to our MP last month? All on her own. Got a letter back and everything.”

“Incredible. I’d put money on her going into politics, wouldn’t you?”

Rowan’s expression is guileless, but nevertheless I tense. “Ah, I’m not a betting man,” I say lightly. I don’t know if Mina told the others about my gambling problem. I don’t want to know. I still go to meetings, and apart from a tiny slip when we learned the extent of the fire damage, I haven’t placed a bet in almost three years. The odds of the three of us escaping with our lives had been as low as they could go—I won’t be throwing down any more chips.

We part ways on the corner, Cesca running for a train, Derek off to meet his editor in town. Sophia ends the earnest conversation she’s been having with Rowan, pulling a paper bag out of her rucksack.

“These are for you.”

Rowan looks inside. “Biscuits? Thank you.”

“She spent all weekend baking,” Mina says. “Honestly, I’m going to end up the size of a house.”

I’m about to tell Mina she looks pretty fabulous when Rowan tuts at her joke. “You’re beautiful,” he says, and I force a smile. Saying anything now would sound like an afterthought.

“Bye, then,” I say to Rowan. Mina raises an eyebrow at me, but Rowan shakes my hand and takes no apparent offense at my abrupt farewell. I wonder where he’ll go now—who he’ll share the verdict with. Despite his close friendship with Mina—and, by proxy, Sophia—I don’t think I know him any better now than I did three years ago. I’m not sure if it’s Rowan who’s kept his distance, or me: either way, we’re guarded with each other, as though we’re adversaries, not friends.

There are more handshakes and claps on the back, and Rowan gives Mina a hug. His hand rests lightly on the small of her back after he releases her, and I have to fight the urge to put a proprietorial arm around her. It would be easier if Rowan were unlikeable. If he were arrogant or bigoted or annoyingly smarmy. But he’s none of those things, and I don’t need a therapist to tell me that my watchfulness is borne not from Rowan’s actions but from my own inadequacies. Rowan was there when I wasn’t. While I was cuffed to a pipe in the cellar, relying on my five-year-old daughter to save me, he was storming the flight deck with my wife. In the immediate aftermath, I supported Mina through a video screen; he took her for dinner in their Sydney hotel, held her hand when she cried on the flight home.

Mina was upfront about the time they’d spent together. “I don’t know what I would have done without him. And Derek and Cesca,” she said, but the addition was for my benefit, and we both knew it.

“I’m glad they were there for you,” I said. And I meant it.

“Good luck back at work,” Cesca says to Mina now, kissing her on the cheek. Dindar was good to Mina after the hijack. She was off work on full pay for six months, spending time with Sophia, before taking an admin role, away from the airport. It fit well with school pick-ups—neither of us was ready to use a babysitter again—but I knew she missed flying.

“I think I want to go back,” she’d said. “After the trial.”

“Then go back.”

She smiled. Said I reminded her of her dad. “I’m a bit scared, of course.” She still had nightmares about Missouri and the others. “But you can’t let them win, can you?”

“How about fish and chips when we get home?” I say now once Rowan has turned the corner and it’s just the three of us again.

Sophia’s eyes light up. “Yay! As long as it’s—”

“—sustainably caught, I know.” She is wise far beyond her years, my daughter, and the last three years have made her wiser. We fight it to a certain extent—we encourage her to play, to be silly, to be a child—but I’m proud of our clever, passionate, perceptive girl.

I hail a cab, thinking of that day walking home from school, when she wouldn’t hold my hand, when she wanted Becca, not me. I think of how much it hurt and how far we’ve come since then. How much closer I am now to Sophia. I wouldn’t wish what happened on my oldest enemy, but as silver linings go, it’s a good one.

“Love you,” I say, more fiercely than I’d planned. The taxi pulls up, and I open the door, letting the girls in before I follow.

“Love you too.” Mina squeezes my hand.

Between us, Sophia sighs happily. “Love you three.”