Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

SIX

17 HOURS FROM SYDNEY | MINA

We’re somewhere over Eastern Europe, below us nothing but a swirl of cloud. I touch my fingers to the glass and tune my eyes into the shapes I would be finding with Sophia if she were here. An old lady, bent over in a shuffle on her way to the shops—look, there’s her handbag. A palm tree—look, there! You have to squint a bit…

I remember looking for cloud pictures with my own mother, lying on my back in the garden while Mum picked at weeds in the flower bed. She kept the garden beautifully, never knowing the names of any plant but instinctively knowing where each should go.

“Plants need five things to flourish,” she’d said. She was digging up a pretty shrub that had sported delicate white flowers last year but that this year had failed to thrive. I’d sat up, delighted by this chance to show off what I’d learned in biology.

“Water,” I said. “And food. Light, to photosynthesize.” I thought for a moment. “Heat?”

“Clever girl. What’s the fifth thing?”

I screwed up my face. I couldn’t remember there even being a fifth thing.

“Space.” Mum carefully lifted the shrub from the ground, filling the resulting hole with soil and patting in the surplus around the neighboring plants. “These three were fine together when they first went in, but now this one’s too squashed. It won’t die, but it won’t thrive. I’ll put it somewhere else, and you just see—it’ll be so grateful.”

I think about that conversation every time I step on a plane, swallowing the guilt I feel at leaving Sophia. We need space to thrive. All of us.

I blink hard and leave the clouds to make shapes alone. Inside, the plane is bright and filled with chatter. The meals we’re serving are carefully planned: the first to keep passengers awake, the second to encourage them to rest.

“They should give everyone a sleeping tablet,” Erik said when we were looking over the menu. “It would have been cheaper.”

I take a walk through the cabin, checking everyone has what they need. There are seven rows in total. A double row of seats runs along the two sides of the cabin, with a bank of four seats in the center. Screens enable each seat to be isolated from its neighbor, providing each passenger with a private cocoon. When they want to sleep, the bottom half of the seat slides forward, tucking itself beneath the TV screen and transforming the already-comfortable chair into a perfectly flat bed. Not a bad way to spend twenty hours, and very different from the economy cabin, where thirty-three rows of nine are afforded a three-inch recline.

“Are we nearly there yet?” asks a man in one of the center seats, traveling alone. I laugh politely, although he’s the fourth passenger to ask the question, each convinced of their own originality. Behind him, a sweet couple has retracted the privacy barrier between them and reclined their seats to an identical angle. On their screens, the same film plays, with a synchronicity only achievable by design. Newlyweds, perhaps, although if they are, the passenger list tells me she’s kept her surname.

“May I have another blanket?” The woman’s in her late twenties, with a riot of auburn ringlets held back by a wide band. “I’m freezing.”

“Ginny’s part lizard. Needs a heat lamp to be truly happy.” Her partner’s older than her, lines etched on his brow. He smiles as he speaks, but his eyes don’t sparkle the way hers do.

“Well, you’ll be glad to know it’s twenty-five degrees in Sydney right now,” I tell them. “How long are you there for?”

“Three weeks.” Ginny bounces upright as though propelled by the force of her announcement. “We’re eloping!”

“Gosh, that’s exciting.” I think of my wedding to Adam—church, family photos, hotel reception—and of the week we spent in Greece afterward. Conventional, perhaps, but reassuringly so. It felt solid. Safe.

“Ginny!”

“What? It doesn’t matter now, Doug—we’ve done it. No one can stop us.”

“Even so.” He puts in his earphones, and Ginny flushes, her excitement squashed. I leave them to their film, but although they’re sitting just as close as they were, something’s shifted between them, and I’m uneasy for them. For her. I feel a sudden sadness for the couple Adam and I were, on that Greek island, and for the way we have ended up. Every relationship changes when you have children, no matter what route you take, but a child with special needs places pressure on a relationship that neither of us was prepared for. My response was to search for solutions, to read everything I could about adoption trauma and attachment disorder.

Adam’s was to run away.

He was physically present—when he wasn’t at work—but emotionally, I started to lose him years ago. I don’t know if that was when the affairs started, and I don’t know how many there have been; Katya is the only one I’ve been certain of.

I asked him once. I’d found a bank card for an account I hadn’t known existed, then realized he’d changed the passcode for his phone to one I didn’t know.

“Are you having an affair?”

“No!”

“Then why change your code?”

“I put the wrong one in three times. I had to change it.” The lie was written all over his face.

I’m summoned to a seat across the aisle, where an older man with round glasses and thinning hair is frowning at his laptop. “There’s still no Wi-Fi.”

“No, I’m sorry. They’re doing their best to find out what the problem is, but—”

“Will it be sorted soon?”

I resist the temptation to press my fingers to my temples and gaze into an invisible crystal ball. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Only I need it for work.” The man looks at me expectantly, as though the power to mend the Wi-Fi network lies entirely within my hands. “It’s a very long flight.”

“It certainly is.”

The flight crew is almost ready for the first handover. Cesca and Mike will go upstairs to the relief bunks for six hours; by the time they return, we’ll be halfway to Sydney. There’s a second rest area at the back of the plane for the cabin crew, accessed via a locked door in the rear galley. Eight small bunks, foam barriers and a curtain between each. I doubt I’ll sleep much during my first break, but it’ll be a different story by the second. The whole crew will be back on duty two hours before arrival, with strict instructions from Dindar to be box-fresh for the landing photos.

We’ll have a couple of days in Sydney before the return flight. It’ll be great to explore the city but even better to revel in sleep undisturbed by Sophia’s screams. She’s had nightmares every night for months, no matter what bedtime routine we adopt, no matter where she sleeps. I wake, heart pounding, running down the landing to find her bolt upright in bed, stiff and unyielding in my arms for a second or two before she lets herself be held. “Maybe she’s missing Katya,” I said once to Adam. The implication was clear: the fault lay with him. He flushed, as he always does when her name is mentioned, and I let it drop, but something had nagged me like a sore tooth, and it wasn’t until the following day that I worked it out. The nightmares had started before Katya left.

“Excuse me.” A young boy—maybe nine or ten—puts his hand up and waves his fingers as if he’s in class and needs the loo. Next to him, his mother is stretched out on the flat bed, her mouth slightly open beneath an eye mask with Charging—do not unplug embroidered on the satin fabric.

“Hello, what’s your name?”

“Finley Masters.”

I smile. “Hello, Finley. Would you like something to drink?”

“My headphones are tangled.” The boy looks at me earnestly, and I feel the sudden tug in my chest that so often ambushes me when I’m away from Sophia.

“Oh dear, that’s very serious. Let’s see if we can sort it out, shall we?” I use my nails to pick at the knots in the cable, returning it to him with a smile.

“Thank you.”

“Any time.”

Finley’s the only child in business class, although right at the front of the middle section, there’s a couple with a tiny baby. He’s crying, a kitten’s mewl—not loud, but insistent—and I catch the anxious look between his parents. I smile at them, trying to convey that it doesn’t matter, but they’re fussing over the baby’s clothes as though the key to his discomfort lies in the way his Babygro is fastened instead of the pressure building in his tiny ears.

I check the passenger list—Paul and Leah Talbot—and go to see if they need anything. Their baby can’t be more than a month old.

“Three weeks and two days,” Leah says when I ask. She’s Australian, her hair sun-bleached and her face tanned and freckled. Straight, white teeth give her a wholesome, outdoor look, and I imagine her and her husband barbecuing on the beach come Christmas Day. Maybe Adam, Sophia, and I will do that one year—escape the cold and run off to the sunshine.

Still Adam, then?my inner therapist prompts.

“What a cutie! What’s his name?” I ignore my subconscious. It’s habit, that’s all. Five years of being a family. Adam’s made it perfectly clear where his priorities lie, and they aren’t with his wife and daughter.

“He’s a beaut, alright.” Leah beams at her son. She’s older than me—well into her forties, I’d guess—but in far better shape. “Meet Lachlan Hudson Samuel Talbot.”

“That’s a lot of names.”

Her husband grins. “We couldn’t decide.” His accent is English but with the upward inflection at the end of a sentence that expats down under so readily acquire.

“You look amazing,” I tell Leah. “I can’t believe you’ve just given birth!”

The compliment embarrasses her, and she drops her lips to the baby’s head, breathing in his smell. Her husband puts an arm around her, and it feels as though they’re shutting me out, that I’ve said something wrong.

“If you need me to take him later so you can get some sleep, just let me know.”

“Thanks.”

I leave them, an ache in my heart as though I’ve swallowed a stone. Adopting hasn’t taken away the grief of infertility, hasn’t stopped the occasional but visceral longing for a taut, full belly or the barely there weight of a minute-old baby. Sophia is my world—you don’t have to give birth to be a mother—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to think of what might have been.

At the very least, I wish Sophia had come to us as a newborn. It could have happened. It should have happened. Her mother was already on a watch list; Social Services was hovering, the older siblings already in care. But there was a process to follow, and it robbed us of the first year of Sophia’s life and Sophia of the ability to trust. It robbed us of the family we could have been.

Neither Adam nor I had been able to sleep the night before Sophia came home for the first time, for fear we’d mess it up.

“What if I never feel like I’m her real dad?”

“You will! Of course you will.” I knew Adam was nervous—he’d taken longer than me to come around to the idea of adoption—but I knew, too, that he’d soon fall for Sophia. Families are built from love, not genes.

Only he and Sophia never seemed to bond. She was demanding, even as a baby, and wouldn’t be settled by either of us. Eventually, she allowed me to rock her to sleep, but if Adam tried to hold her, she’d stiffen, screaming till she went blue. As she got older, she became more possessive of my time, shutting Adam out. “Be patient,” I’d tell him. “One day, she’ll come to you, and you need to be ready.”

“Cheer up, love. It might never happen.” I’m jolted out of my thoughts by the man behind the Talbots, whose long legs are stretched out beneath his tray, on which rests a water bottle and a book.

When I was at university, I worked in a pub full of bankers and wankers and undergraduates. The second I stepped behind the bar, my educational peers would become intellectually superior, subjecting me to come on, loves, and alright, darlings, as if we were EastEnders extras. This job gets like that sometimes. I know all sorts of cabin crew, with all sorts of qualifications. I know former paramedics, and university lecturers, and a retired police officer with late-onset wanderlust. Most passengers don’t see that, though. They see the uniform, and they see a waitress. Never mind the emergency training, the water safety, the ability to put out a fire or cut a passenger free from their seat.

I paste a smile over gritted teeth. “Can I get you anything else, sir? Some wine?”

“Thank you, but I don’t drink.”

“Well, I’m here if you need anything.”

I’m grateful for this oasis of sobriety as the rest of the cabin gets progressively merry. I have a sudden yearning to be at home, cuddled with Sophia on the sofa, watching Peppa Pig. When I’m traveling, I remember all the good bits. Isn’t that always the way? I even remember the good bits about me and Adam—the laughter, the closeness, the feeling of his arms around me.

A hum of noise comes from the bar, and I go to see if they need help. It’s heaving, conversation rising in volume as more business-class passengers join the throng. Several customers are in their pajamas, the novelty still amusing them, hours into the flight. A couple stands at the bar, their body language flirtatious.

“Have you seen the corkscrew?” The barman—Hassan—looks harassed.

“No idea. It was there earlier. I’ll get you one from the galley.”

“This is why I only ever drink champagne. All you need is a glass. Or a straw!” The petite woman from 5J is at the bar. She has a deep, throaty laugh at odds with her appearance. She has long, blond hair and careful makeup, bloodred staining her lips. The man she’s with can’t take his eyes off her. He’s stocky, not much taller than the blond woman, but with biceps bigger than her waist. His dark hair looks as if it would curl if it weren’t clipped so short, and a thick beard covers half his face. The woman’s left thumb is hooked into the back pocket of the man’s trousers in that casual, automatic way two people learn to slot together. I feel a lump in my throat, remembering the years with Adam when our relationship was still new enough to be flirtatious yet familiar enough to be comfortable.

As I turn to go, there’s movement in the corner of my eye: a swish of the curtains between business class and economy. I look back to see a dark-haired woman approaching the bar. She looks around as she waits, taking in the wide-screen TV on the wall and the baskets of sweet treats laid out for passengers to help themselves.

“Champagne, please.”

Hassan glances at me. “I’m afraid the bar is for business-class passengers.” He sounds nervous, his hands hovering near the champagne as though he might still serve her.

“I only want one.”

It’s tempting to let her have a drink then pack her back to economy, but there’s something entitled in her manner that gets my hackles up. I step forward.

“I’m sorry. You’ll need to return to the economy cabin.”

“For fuck’s sake. All I want is a drink.”

I smile. “And all I want is not to be sworn at for doing my job, but I guess neither of us is getting what we want today.”

“How are your pajamas?” She wheels around, spitting the words at an identically clad couple taking selfies.

“Um, they’re very—”

“Do you know what we got in our ‘souvenir gift bag’?” She waggles her fingers in violent air quotes, then raises her voice into a shout. “Fucking shortbread!”

“Okay, that’s enough.” I take the woman by her elbow, and she shakes me off.

“Get your hands off me! That’s assault, that is.” She looks around. “Is anyone filming this? She just assaulted me.”

“Please return to your seat.” Everyone in the bar is staring now, the passengers in business class craning their necks to see what’s going on behind them. “This is for business-class passengers only.”

“So how come he gets to stay?” She jabs a finger toward the stocky man, who is doing his best to ignore her.

“Because he’s in—” I start, then I see the awkward flush that appears on the man’s neck and the way he pushes his glass away from him across the bar, half-drunk.

“Sorry,” he says, although it’s not clear if it’s directed at me or at his blond companion.

“For heaven’s sake!” I direct this at Hassan, who chews his lip.

“They’re together. It was quiet when they asked, and I thought…”

“Will everyone without a business-class ticket please return to your own seats,” I say loudly, “where cabin crew will be delighted to take your drinks orders.”

“Sorry,” mutters the stocky man again. He gives a last, lingering look at the blond girl before shuffling through the curtain and back to his seat. I fold my arms and stare down the drunk woman. We lock eyes for a full minute before she gives up.

“Snobs!” She delivers her parting shot at full volume, and I feel sorry for the economy crew, who will need to spend the next fifteen hours refusing her alcohol.

I let out a breath, coloring at the smattering of applause that breaks out from the passengers in the bar.

“You’ve got kids, haven’t you?” the pajama-clad woman says with a grin. “That was such a mum voice.”

I grin. I head back to the galley, and for the first time since I got to work, I feel myself relax, the uneasy feeling finally shifting. My instincts had been right: something was going to happen on this flight, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. I’ve been doing this job for twelve years—it would take a lot to throw me.

When I was a child, Mum would always stretch her arm toward the sky as a jumbo jet soared overhead.

“Quick! Send love to Manii and Baba sido!”

“That plane could be going anywhere,” I’d laugh. But I’d wave anyway, too superstitious not to. The habit became ingrained—like saluting single magpies—long after my grandparents had passed away and there was no longer a reason to visit Algeria or to send our love across the ocean. Even after I’d stopped going to the airport with Dad—far too cool, by my midteens, to be caught watching planes—I’d raise a self-conscious arm whenever I saw a plane. Hey, Manii and Baba. Love you guys.

Years later, we were traveling back from France, where my parents still kept a house. It had belonged to my dad’s parents, a ramshackle place full of memories. I was looking out the plane window, on to clouds that looked solid enough to stand on. We had spent every school holiday in France, continuing the tradition now I was at college. While my mother flitted about, catching up with her friends, I’d see my father relax, away from the rigors of London life.

“I’d love to be a pilot.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and it had felt audacious. Ridiculous.

“So be a pilot,” Dad said.

That was him all over. You want something? Make it happen.

Way down at the front of the plane, the door to the flight deck had opened, and I’d craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the instrument panel, of the vast curve of glass that looked out on that carpet of cloud. Excitement thrummed in my veins. “It’s really expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Like…eighty grand? At least.”

He didn’t say anything for ages, then he shrugged and rustled his paper and said, “Get the details.”

Six weeks later, they sold the house in France.

“Go be a pilot,” Dad said.

“But you loved that house!” I scoured my parents’ faces and found nothing but excitement. “It was supposed to be your pension.”

“Who needs a pension when your daughter’s a commercial pilot?” Dad winked. “You can keep us in our old age.”

My mother squeezed my arm. “We’ll be fine. We’re excited for you.”

She took a photograph the day I left for training college, as if it were my first day of school. I stood by the front door in my black trousers and packet-fresh shirt, a single gold bar on my epaulettes.

I look down at the skirt I’m in now, at my manicured nails and my flesh-colored tights. I love my job, but this wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

“Fancy a brew to take up?” Carmel holds a tea bag over an empty mug.

“Go on, then.” It feels weird to take a break now, just a few hours after starting, and even weirder to know that when we wake, we’ll still have hours to go. Below us, people will get up, go to work, come home, and go to bed, and all that time, we’ll be in the air. It feels impossible, almost otherworldly.

Unlike Erik, who hasn’t cracked a smile since we boarded, Carmel is lovely. Only twenty-two and about to move in with her boyfriend, who she clearly worships.

“He works in the City,” she’d told me proudly as we sat in the jump seats, ready for takeoff.

“What does he do?”

She blinked. “He works in the City.”

I’d tutted at myself. “Ah, yes, you said. Sorry.”

She makes the tea, and I reach into the hatbox next to the galley for the small paper bag Sophia made me promise to bring on board. “Don’t open it till you’re flying,” she’d told me. She’d come into my room as I was packing, used, now, to the sight of my case open on the bed.

I unfold the paper. It’s one of the flapjacks we baked together on the weekend, and the syrupy scent makes my mouth water. One of the corners has been nibbled, and I touch the ragged edge where my daughter’s pearly teeth have been.

Beneath the flapjack, spotted with grease, is a piece of paper. For my mummy, love from Sophia xoxox. I show Carmel, and she clasps her hands to her chest.

“Bless! Your daughter?”

I nod.

“Oh my God, cute or what? I can’t wait to be a mummy. Bet you do all sorts of stuff with her, don’t you? Painting and crafts and all sorts.”

“Mostly baking.” I hold up the flapjack. “Lots and lots of baking. She made these practically on her own. She’s only five.”

“Amazing.”

I pull off a piece of flapjack and put it in my mouth, putting the note in my pocket and wrapping up the rest to have upstairs. I start wiping down the galley, getting everything straight for the next team. Someone’s left an auto-injector pen lying on the counter in the galley, and I pick it up so it doesn’t get swept into the rubbish.

“Any idea who—” I stop, my attention caught by a slightly scuffed label on the pen. A small white rectangle with a hand-drawn smiley face and a printed name.

Sophia Holbrook.

“Milk and sugar?” Carmel asks.

What’s Sophia’s EpiPen doing here? The smiley face tells me it’s the one from her rucksack—Adam’s simple but effective solution for keeping track of which pen lives where—and the label is undoubtedly the same as those with which I painstakingly named her shoes, lunch box, and water bottle.

I think back to this morning, after I’d dropped Sophia at school. I changed into my uniform at home. Even if the pen had been in my jeans, there’s no logical way it could have transferred from one pocket to another. Did I put it in my work handbag when I got to the airport? Years of doing this job has made me a creature of habit; my passport and ID live in my work handbag, along with hand cream, lip balm, a purse full of currency. I don’t keep an EpiPen in my work bag; why would I? Sophia is never with me.

“Earth to Mina. Are you alright?”

“Sorry. Just milk. Thanks.”

I drop the blue plastic pen into my pocket. There’s no other explanation. I must have brought it on board.

How else could it have gotten here?