Perfect People

120

After take-off, the stewardess served them a meal in a pre-packed tray, of the kind they might have had on any airline. A Caesar salad with prawns, scalding-hot poached salmon beneath a foil lid; chocolate fudge cake; a triangle of soft cheese and biscuits. The steward brought them each a glass of Chardonnay, and mineral water.

John ate most of his food, but Naomi just picked at hers. Afterwards they tried to sleep for a while.

Naomi was thinking about the steward and stewardess. Their silent, hostile attitude reminded her so strongly of the way Luke and Phoebe behaved towards her and John. These two could almost be their older siblings.

After five hours, they were given another meal, this time sandwiches and fruit. And then, an hour later, John and Naomi both noticed that the plane was losing height, as if it was starting on a landing path.

The seat-belt light started flashing.

The steward and stewardess remained out of sight, somewhere beyond the galley, as they had all the time when they weren’t bringing John and Naomi water or serving the meals.

They were very definitely losing height.

Then, just as suddenly as they had whirred down, all those hours back, the shutters over the windows were rising back up. Daylight flooded in. Brilliant, dazzling, early-morning daylight.

John and Naomi stared out of their windows.

They were flying low, no more than three or four thousand feet, above hilly terrain, covered in lush, tropical vegetation. Through John’s window there was only a view of land, and the sun rising into a cloudless sky. But through Naomi’s they could see a wide, white sand beach, cobalt-blue sea. A sharp clunk echoed through the plane, followed by a series of thuds. The undercarriage going down.

Like a current of electricity, excitement suddenly coursed through Naomi, perking her up despite her tiredness. Going to see my children. Going to see Luke and Phoebe. They’re here, they’re here in this beautiful place! They are OK, they are not harmed. Going to see them, they’re going to come in this plane with us, back home.

‘Do you have any idea where we might be?’ she asked John.

He wished he had some knowledge of botany, then he might have been able to figure from the vegetation roughly where they were. He shook his head. ‘I have no real idea how fast we’ve been travelling, nor in what direction we’ve been going, or anything. I just know we’re nine hours’ flying time from Dubai. If this is the same plane Luke and Phoebe were taken on, I remember DI Pelham telling us it has a cruising speed of three hundred and fifty knots. So we’ve covered about three thousand, five hundred land miles. We could be bloody anywhere.’

He stared out of the window again. It looked like early morning, which meant they must have travelled west. If they were flying slower than he had calculated, it could be the west coast of Africa. Faster, and they could be off the east coast of South America.

‘We took off from Dubai at about seven thirty p.m. UK time. So our body clocks are now on about four thirty a.m.,’ he said. He needed a bath, a shave, a change of clothes. He felt grungy and exhausted. Naomi looked beat, too. It hurt him to see her suffering like this, hurt him almost as much as the pain of his missing children was hurting him. And he felt angry at himself, bitterly frustrated, that he wasn’t able to do anything to help her. All he could do was sit here like a lame duck, accepting graceless hospitality from these cold young people.

The hills suddenly dropped sheer away beneath them, as if they had surfed over a ledge, giving onto a flat valley that was a good two miles wide and several long. It was like a secret valley, he thought, as it if had been hewn out the centre of the hills. Probably formed by a volcanic explosion thousands of years ago.

As the plane dropped lower still, it was as if a lever on a lens had suddenly been rotated, turning a foggy blur into pin-sharp focus. One moment there had been a flat valley floor, just a mass of shimmering vegetation, the next it had suddenly become a complex of shapes rising from the ground. Buildings, mostly single-storey, interconnected, he could see now, by pathways, like a university campus stretching away into the distance in every direction, each of them camouflaged, to be invisible from the air, by vegetation on their roofs.

The plane was even lower now. Just a few hundred feet above the buildings. He was looking hard, trying to see people or vehicles, but there was no sign of any life.

It felt almost as if they were coming down to land in a ghost town.

‘What is this place?’ Naomi said.

‘Luke and Phoebe’s winter vacation resort. Bought from millions they’ve secretly made trading stocks on the internet?’

She did not smile.