A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (30 page)

I stayed at our resplendent safe house for a few days, as I had been invited to and made welcome. But a couple of tasks loomed before me that felt like hurdles I had to surmount.

Already I was focused on the formal debriefing by the police to which I had consented, and was keen to get down to. I was determined to recall as much as I possibly could of what I’d stored away, wanting very much in my own way to improve the chances of bringing the pirates to justice.
They’re not going to get away with this,
I thought,
not if I can do anything about it
. I was aware that this commitment to the debrief meant more time spent under observation, in a safe location, my movements
circumscribed
– in other words, I would be ‘captive’ again, subject to a system. But the nature of the task, the discharging of my duties, was vital to me. I wanted to be done with it, and to resume my real life. I also had a sense the process might offer me some valuable catharsis. And while the police at first stipulated that for the duration of the debrief I couldn’t contact anyone, I
prevailed
on them to be allowed to see Ollie.

The other challenge I faced – ostensibly simpler, and yet far more daunting – was to return home to our house in Bishop’s Stortford. I wanted this, badly, and yet at the same time I simply didn’t know how I was going to feel about it. I was well aware that Ollie would have stayed with me, but my overriding feeling was that I needed to start to learn to live on my own.

I knew I would be driven there and escorted to my front door, that the inevitable media interest on my doorstep would be deftly handled and a way cleared for me. But after that, I would be on
my own. I had never feared change before, had always faced up to challenges, not wanting to postpone them. But to return to the home David and I had worked so hard to have, the home we’d made together – it was intensely difficult to imagine
crossing
that threshold and David not being there.

The house was strangely quiet and cold. The thought did cross my mind:
That was a bloody long holiday
… The cats came to greet me, and straight away I fell into the routine of feeding them – a funny kind of back-to-normal.

Then I went into each of the rooms, one by one – a natural thing to do, perhaps, but, in the back of my mind, I was conscious that it was as if I were looking for somebody. There was a low sound in my head, asking me:
Did it really happen? Have I just had a horrible dream and woken up in my house? Where is David?

I reached the spare room and it was there that I realised it wasn’t all just some nightmare imagining – there, I knew for sure that David wasn’t going to come home from work tonight. Because sitting on the bed were the holdalls we had taken away on holiday with us – bags we had bought expressly for the trip, because they were so capacious and lightweight. They had been flown back to the UK together with David’s body. The zips were undone. I could see the Masai blankets we were given on our last morning, lying neatly folded at the top of my bag. And I could see David’s walking shoes poking out of his. Tears welled up and out of me, and I didn’t fight them back.

I took his shirts from the bag, held them against my cheek. And then I noticed a sealed plastic bag, and recognised what was inside instantly – it was the postcard I had written to Ollie from Serian Camp, telling him what a great holiday we were having,
all the animals we had seen. I remembered sitting at the desk in our tent, writing, David lying on the bed behind me, my asking him, ‘What else did we see …?’ It told the story of that
wonderful
first week of a precious holiday. And we never did get to post it.

I looked at the card more closely: it had been stamped
NOT TO BE DISPOSED OF,
and the ink was smudged here and there, by swabbing for DNA. Thus a gift-shop keepsake had been turned into a
memento mori
, forensic evidence of how a catastrophe befell us. I came upon another exhibit from the investigation, a police inventory citing all the items they had examined and tested, notes of David’s DNA records obtained from his dentist,
references
to which articles were bloodstained. It was all set down in black and white, the facts of the case, altogether certifying how David’s life had ended.

I knelt on the floor and I hugged my husband’s
belongings
–
the
vestiges of him. Inside I had a burning urge to carry these bags back to Serian Camp, so that we’d be there as we were then, and we wouldn’t go to Kiwayu Island; we’d change the fates, go somewhere, anywhere, else instead … But there was no escape from the desolation in the room. I stayed there for some time.

At length I came around, my mind drew me back to the present. It was grief, I knew, that was working on me. For six months I had waited to begin my grieving: out there in the stony, unfeeling pit of my captivity, any such remembrance had been quite impossible. Now it had begun, and it was right and
proper
–
but
it wasn’t doing me any good. I had to turn my back on the room, literally close the door on it, go and sit down elsewhere, seek some sort of purposeful distraction.

That night I switched on the radio and the television, and I watched through a blur of tears. I poured myself a small glass of
whisky – not my thing normally, but David had taken a glass on occasion, and I thought it might help me sleep. Finally a moment of clarity came. I had been weeping for hours, my eyes were stinging, my nose was sore. And in my head I felt I could change the gears.
You’ve done enough of this for one night. This is when you stop.

And I did. I switched the television off. I knew that in the morning a police car would come to take me away to the debriefing. I knew I had to sleep, that tomorrow I had an important job to do, for which I needed a clear head. I didn’t know where we’d go or what the police questioning would entail, but I had no fear of it. I was going voluntarily – indeed I was looking forward to doing something constructive. Every
morning
I awoke in Somalia I had a clear goal, to make it to the end of another day. With the gift of freedom I needed new goals, and the debrief was the first one in front of me. This re-entry into my ‘old’ life, now so transformed by circumstances, was going to have to be gradual. But home would be waiting for me when I was done with the police; and now I looked forward to it.

In the morning I said goodbye to the cats, wrote a note for Ollie, packed a few things in a bag and closed the door behind me for another week.

When I returned home in early April I found that my house had become the focus of a deeply unwelcome media scrum.
Newspaper
reporters, I learned, had been trudging up and down my street, knocking on doors, trawling for information. I was anxious about how far journalistic persistence was going to be
pushed
–
whether
anyone would take no for an answer, or whether
intrusion
into my life would be a daily occurrence unless I relented.

The Metropolitan Police graciously arranged for a
rapid-summons
security system to be installed at the house, with a
box-set
in my bedroom and even a handheld call-button alarm for me to carry about, so that if I was pestered face to face by the press the local police could be alerted immediately. For some weeks officers patrolled my street as a special service, though reporters were still knocking and ringing at my door, and every morning I could observe them from my window, however hard they endeavoured to look ‘inconspicuous’.

Quite apart from this unnerving sense of being under siege, I found it difficult getting accustomed again to the four walls of the house. But of course there was so much to be grateful for. This place had been David’s and my haven, our sanctuary from the stresses of work, for twenty years – and I was glad of its comforts now.

I couldn’t wait to restock my fridge and larder at Waitrose, back among the aisles that I’d mapped precisely in my head and mentally revisited while I was starving in captivity. I realised very quickly that I would never again look at the sheer
groaning
plenitude of supermarket shelves without a sense of awe.
My eyes, though, were rather bigger than my stomach, as the saying goes.

I wanted to get back onto a normal diet and regain weight as soon as I could. Ollie was very keen that I do so too. He
confessed
to me how worried he’d been by our first embrace in Nairobi, his feeling that I was all skin and bone, ‘not like my mum’. And indeed my health concerned no one more acutely than me. My spine was giving me considerable pain, and when I sat I struggled to get comfortable, fearing sometimes that my bones might crack. I couldn’t sit down on my rear for very long in any case: it felt as though there were no padding, no muscle or fat there. Ever since my excruciating shower in Nairobi I had shrunk from revisiting that sensation, but bathing made for its own share of discomforts: even lowering myself into the water was a chore, owing to the sheer lack of strength in my arms; and any hard surface underneath me was agonising.

It took me a little longer than I had hoped to secure an appointment at my local doctor’s surgery, but once I got there I was treated very thoroughly: my blood was tested and I was sent for a bone scan, which revealed that all those jarring impacts on the skiff that bore me away from Kiwayu had managed to twist my coccyx, creating a scoliosis at the base of my spine. I was also diagnosed with osteoporosis, which came, sadly, as no great surprise. The doctor prescribed tablets for this but warned me of nausea. Indeed the pills began very quickly to make me feel awful, and so I stopped taking them, resolving instead to eat more cheese and to resume my Pilates classes.

The deleterious mental effects of my ordeal, naturally, also kept making themselves apparent. For days, into weeks, I kept pinching myself, banging and thumping on walls – not hard, but just to make totally sure of the physical reality of my
surroundings.
I could be standing at the sink washing up when the dread thought might crawl into my head:
Oh god, this is not a dream, is it
… ? Whereupon I would turn the water to scalding hot and hold my hand under it, until a red mark rose up on the skin. I had no surety unless I saw that. These odd habits persisted: I wanted them gone but, at the same time, I was truly terrified by the thought that I might wake up and find myself back in that room again.

The Victim Support charity, whose work I generally admired, had contacted and offered support to my family during my captivity. Through that channel, they extended an offer to me also, if I wished to get in touch. And yet I didn’t feel I was in need of their services. In spite of some lingering vulnerabilities, I genuinely felt that I had a perception of what had happened to me that was properly sorted in my head, not least after a week’s intensive debriefing with the Met. And I didn’t particularly want to discuss all of this with anyone else – certainly not another stranger. What could they say or do? I had the good fortune to number among my friends people who are trained counsellors and psychotherapists: speaking occasionally with them, and with Ollie, felt like therapy enough for me. I had a strong instinct, too, that writing my story down would be the most truly beneficial process I could undergo, and that intention was firming up in my mind.

As I began to feel a little stronger in myself, I decided to review the inventory of David’s personal effects which the police had deposited at our house along with our Kenyan travel bags. Almost immediately I realised that David’s items of jewellery were not listed.

On his left ring finger David had always worn his Turkish three-band wedding ring as well as his grandfather’s old wedding band; and always on his right hand was a signet ring that his mother and father gave him when he turned eighteen. He was wearing these rings when we went to bed that last night in Kiwayu, and also a gold necklace that I had bought for him (paid off in instalments) when we first moved to Andover. Because of an arthritic complaint in his knuckles David could not have removed his rings even if he’d cared to. And yet I was now to understand that they were not on his person by the time his body was conveyed from Kenya back to the UK.

Immediately I contacted my police family-liaison officer, who told me he would check up for me on this deeply disturbing omission. It then took a few weeks to establish the facts, but I wanted to know, and I would accept nothing less. It emerged without doubt that at some point between the transfer of David’s body from Kiwayu and arrival at a funeral home in Nairobi, his jewellery must have been stolen. The implications of this were utterly outrageous to me. I insisted that inquiries be vigorously pursued into how this had happened; and they were, albeit with continual frustrations and intimations that we were ‘not to know’. It became clear to me quite quickly that David’s jewellery would not be returned to me, which was deeply upsetting in itself. But I was not prepared to let the matter rest. I felt I was entitled to a formal acknowledgement of the theft and an apology from the party on whose watch it had occurred. And I am waiting still.

Kneesworth House had made contact with Ollie while I was still in Somalia, and now they wrote to me confirming that my job would remain open for me until September if I wanted it. This
was a dilemma for me, one that I discussed with Ollie. My job had felt hugely worthwhile to me, but also incredibly stressful. I had to ask myself if I had the energy, the focus, and the strong nerves to resume it. The honest answer, I knew, was that if I went back then I probably wouldn’t last a day.

The challenge was about far more than just my condition, mentally, emotionally, physically. The women there, some of them with psychopathic personality disorders, knew everything about me – and, whether they meant to or not, they would end up using that information in a way that would be a barrier to any prospect of my working with them successfully again. I could foresee their efforts to engage me about Somalia – to console me, or taunt me, or otherwise pussyfoot around the business we were there to accomplish.

My manager Linda came to visit me at home, and she was just as thoughtful and candid as I knew her to be. ‘I don’t really know how you
can
come back,’ she told me ruefully. She was only echoing my own thoughts.

I advised her verbally of my decision to resign without delay and wrote and sent my resignation letter, so that we could all move on. But in my heart I felt it to be a great shame. I had acquired such a lot of experience and knowledge in the job over the years. But owing to circumstances beyond my control, and to the demands of ‘best practice’, I was going to have to file all that professional expertise away for the foreseeable future.

Our Kenyan travel bags stayed on the spare bed for weeks and weeks. Finally I emptied my bag, put away my things, folded the bag and stashed it in the loft. But David’s bag stayed there for longer, and I would go in and look at it. I didn’t want to touch it,
knowing how I would feel. In myself I knew that eventually I would have to get rid of both bags, because of the memories that they embodied.

Once a little more dust had settled on my homecoming, I decided that I wanted to do one or two things for myself – things I had enjoyed in my ‘old’ life, the enjoyment of which I hoped had not receded for me in the interim. I took a short holiday to Cyprus with Ollie and Saz, where we spent our days picking our way through Roman ruins, eating together in the evenings.

On Monday, 25 June, I gave testimony under oath to the trial of Ali Babitu Kololo in Lamu, Kenya. Ollie was very aware of my fear of travelling to Lamu and so, following much negotiation between him and the Metropolitan Police, a video link was set up from London and my evidence was relayed to the court on a screen, while Senior Investigating Officer Neil Hibberd was present in person for the proceedings. It took me all of two hours to read out my prepared statement about the events in Kiwayu on 10 and 11 September, and everything I said was translated simultaneously into Swahili for the court.

In terms of Mr Kololo’s fate, the nub of my testimony was plain: having seen pictures of the man in custody, it was clear to me that I had never seen him before, though I could not say for sure that he had not been in our
banda
that night. However, I also advised the court of what Ali had told me in the Big House, about ‘the sixth man’ whom the pirates had left behind them on Kiwayu. I found the whole experience taxing – and I was so grateful to Ollie and Saz for accompanying me, sitting off camera and giving me looks of quiet support and
encouragement
whenever I faltered. But I was relieved to have discharged my responsibilities in difficult circumstances. (Neil Hibberd subsequently told me that he had encountered unprecedented
problems of his own out there in Lamu: at one stage as he stood outside the shed-like courthouse waiting to give his evidence, he had been forced to break up a fight between a pair of fractious donkeys, to avoid proceedings within being disturbed.)

With Mr Kololo having already spent nine months in custody, I hoped that the deliberations of the court would not be unduly tardy. However, there did seem to be an inherently stately pace to Kenyan court business, with hearings of only one or two days at a time routinely punctuated by breaks of four days or more. I knew I would have to summon all of my patience.

David’s funeral service had taken place early in my captivity, as was right and appropriate, and I was glad it had been arranged and conducted so well. But for me, having been unable to attend owing to circumstances far beyond my control, the need in me to pay my own respects to my husband was acute. Even during my captivity the thought had occurred to me that I would find something very precious in the organising of a proper celebration of his life. Having begun at last my true mourning for him, this need to rejoice in his life and the life we had shared was more powerful than ever before.

In fact Stephen Page, Faber and Faber’s Chief Executive and David’s close colleague and friend, had suggested to Ollie that it would be a fine and fitting thing to hold some form of
memorial
service for David. When I was advised as much, I signalled my wholehearted support and immediately we set down to planning it. In this I was especially glad of the help of Rachel Alexander, Faber’s Director of Communications, not only a hugely sympathetic and patient person to work with but also someone with the gift of making perfect suggestions. One such
was the proposal of the Wigmore Hall as a venue for the service: its main hall was beautifully decorated and generously sized, yet also somehow intimate. With Faber I drew up a considerable list of invitees: I approached David’s closest friends and colleagues, asking them in turn to pass on any suggestions to Rachel who collated the final list.

It all came to pass on Tuesday, 3 July, and it wasn’t long into proceedings that I felt sure things would go off just as I had hoped. If there was solemnity and deep feeling in the room, there were also the good, lively spirits that David’s memory naturally inspired. The Benyounes Quartet, four gifted young female musicians, gave exquisite performances of pieces by Mozart, Elgar and Puccini. Since David loved many and diverse forms of music, we also heard the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Ollie gave a terrific speech, assuredly and from the heart. There were warm and deeply felt addresses, too, from Stephen Page and from Phil Tanswell, David’s oldest friend since grammar school, who had shared so much history with him. Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis also spoke, on behalf of all of David’s colleagues at the firm, and gave a superb reading of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Apple Blossom’, a favourite of David’s and mine:

When my turn came to speak I felt very comfortable, gratified, and aware that, for all the emotions of the occasion, I was in
control
of my own. I was drawn in particular to hymn David’s great appetite for life, because it was also so often a source of humour
for us both – and his avid love of music was a very useful example in that way. I told the gathering about how keenly David had gone about purchasing new music that he’d discovered (quite where, I often knew not), and how excited he would get once the Amazon packets finally dropped through the letterbox – he would routinely resort to tearing and stabbing at those stiffly glued box-wrappers in frustration, with a paper knife or sharp scissors or whatever pointed implement was to hand. And after all these wrangles, what would drop out onto the floor would be a CD of Mongolian throat music – the bafflement on my face reversed exactly by the rapturous look on David’s.