One of them flashed an ID, too quickly for her to read. It looked official enough that she followed them, one on either side of her, as if she could be thinking of running away, down this narrow passage full of tired, jetlagged people trying to ignore them.

“I didn’t get your names,” she said, trying to be friendly, but they said nothing, like actors who’ve spoken all their lines and just want to get to the end of the scene. Both were in their thirties, she guessed. Bad haircuts and thuggish faces. She wondered who they worked for, the police or something else.

At customs, they were met by a man in uniform who escorted them through a side gate. Stella thought, Well, this looks official, at least that means I’m not being kidnapped. Then, irrelevantly: I won’t get a stamp in my passport. They waited patiently as she picked her suitcase off the carousel, and one of the men even carried it to the boot of the car they ushered her into.

“What’s this about?”

Instead of answering, one of them said, almost apologetically, “You’ll have to put these on.” He removed her cat’s-eye glasses and stuck on plastic ones with something, maybe foam rubber, where the lenses should be. Was she being arrested? They were supposed to read out her rights. Had she done anything?

“Where are you taking me?” She was ignored. What was the point of the goggles? Singapore was too small for
secret prisons.

The car thrummed along the road. She tried to work out where they were. There was only one road from the airport. She normally enjoyed it, straight and wide with blossoming shrubs on either side. For the tourists, of course, but that didn’t make it any less pretty. They turned, and then again, until she lost all sense of direction.

To calm herself, she thought about the things she would do when she got home. First, call her father, he would be expecting her. Unpack, put winter clothes into storage, sort through the mail that had arrived while she was away. But first, food. She’d slept through all the meal services on the plane and was now ravenous.

The journey seemed extraordinarily long, but then she had no sense of time any more. There was just the motion of the car, the loud breathing of the men beside her, and occasionally a garbled sound from the relay radio mounted on the dashboard. We could be underwater, she thought, we could be driving into the past. She was woozy from the long flight, and this seemed like a waking dream.

She’d dozed off when the car braked, and one of the men grabbed her elbow to get her out. She was walked across what felt like grass, and then—“Steps,” said the man in warning—into a building. This was ridiculous, she felt like ripping the opaque glasses off to see where she was going, but didn’t want to make them angry.