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