A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (10 page)

In the early hours of the morning I’d taken to sneaking out to the toilet without asking, or donning my regulation headscarf, since the pirates slept so soundly overnight. But this came to an end on an occasion when I was tip-toeing back to the room and saw Scary Man, his eyes open and glaring at me from his recumbent position. Wordlessly he hefted up his machine-gun with one biceps-bulging arm, and pointed the muzzle at my head. I got the message.

I was nearing the end of my fifth day in the compound and was sitting on a plastic chair, trying to think hopeful thoughts, when a tall shadow crossed the threshold – followed by the unmistakable, rail-thin figure of the Navigator, a broad smile above his red-tinged goatee. I stood up to say hello. I hadn’t seen him since that moment I’d been brought ashore to the car on the headland, whereupon I’d assumed he and Money had been charged with getting rid of the skiff. I hadn’t expected to see him again, but here he was.

He took my hand between his and shook it – an unexpected formality, and I found his bony hands a bit off-putting. But given his politeness, and knowing he spoke my language, I had no shadow of a doubt that I ought to ‘play nice’ with him.

‘So sorry I had to tell you “Mombasa”, that you see David in Blue Room Hotel,’ he said. He was smiling, none the less, as if it had been a smart ruse. Still, it was good of him, I thought, to start off by owning up to the lie.

‘So why did you tell me that?’

‘I tell you so you don’t panic. But … I feel bad.’

‘Bad? Why bad?’

He did indeed look abashed. ‘Ah, I feel bad from when I give you trousers? On boat? I think, “This is not good …”’

Well, perhaps he has a heart
, I thought. It sounded like a fair stab at contrition for his part in my kidnap. And I certainly needed a sympathetic ear around this place, where my status seemed to be closer to meal ticket than human being.
I’m going to want this man in my corner,
I decided.
For however long I’m here.

‘Well, it’s done,’ I said. ‘And I’m here. And you’re a pirate, just like all the rest of these men, aren’t you?’

He shook his head, adamantly. ‘No, no, I, like you. I was
taken
by pirates.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he sat down and, falteringly, told me his story. He was a fisherman, and two days before I was kidnapped from Kiwayu he had been out at sea on his own boat, early in the morning, planning to dive for lobster, as was his usual practice, when the Leader’s pirate group sailed up alongside him, waved their
AK
47
S
and commanded him to get on board their boat. They had wanted his knowledge of the local conditions – the coastline, the tides and reefs – and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. In other words, he was a pirate conscript.

It sounded plausible enough. At close quarters his skin was as weathered as I imagined a fisherman’s to be. I was sorry for him. I asked if he had family, and he spoke of a wife and children. He
dug a mobile phone out of his pocket and showed me various photos on it, one of his wife, extravagantly framed by graphics of heart-shaped red roses. (The lady herself looked stern and unhappy.) Did he have any idea, I asked, how his family was managing without him?

‘My brother, sister, family – they take care.’

‘And you, how did you come to learn your English?’

He only smiled and shook his head. But I sensed that, given his language facility, he couldn’t have been a fisherman all his life.

Now that we were reacquainted, the Navigator looked in on me regularly. Sometimes it was no more than putting his head round the door with an ‘OK? How are you?’ At other times he came in and sat for longer: usually after the pirates’ ‘lunch hour’, and then again in the evenings. He would spend an hour or so talking in his stilted English, and I didn’t mind these idle chats. I was lonely, and our poor conversations were better than nothing. I found that I could ask him things, and he answered. I had been keen to know the time difference between Somalia and the UK, and he readily told me it was three hours. I also wanted a few basic words in Somali to ease my communications with the other pirates, and he advised me that ‘thank you’ was
mahadsanid
and ‘good morning’ was
subah wanaagsan
. (I duly tried these out on trips to the toilet, with any pirate who was awake, and was met with raised eyebrows.)

I had become conscious every night that there were men outside the compound, below my window. I could smell their cigarette smoke, hear them on their phones. I asked the Navigator what they were doing. ‘They guard you,’ he said, ‘in case other pirates come, try to take you away, for themselves.’ That was an
alarming prospect: without doubt I felt safer for the moment with the devil I knew.

There was an apartness to the Navigator that affirmed my belief in his account of his plight: he didn’t fraternise with the other pirates – except for Marvin, whom he would sit and eat with, usually at different times of day from the rest of the gang. I spotted them on guard together at night, too. So I wasn’t surprised when one afternoon they came in together to see me.

‘My friend, he, like me,’ the Navigator said. ‘We are both like you.’ And they both crossed their wrists as if they were handcuffed or tied. The Navigator explained that Marvin was the cap tain of a fishing boat that had been captured by the pirates six months before him. ‘Good man,’ he insisted. ‘He good man, my friend.’

They came in again the next day. I had been walking, and the pirates had been munching away outside on what seemed to be their early-afternoon snacks of bread, melon and bananas. But then I picked up on something different through the doorway: laughter and kerfuffle, the pirates gathered in a bit of a huddle and having a chat that sounded argumentative and purposeful.

When the Navigator and Marvin then entered they were giggling together and waving about something that looked to me like a bunch of watercress. On closer inspection it was a lot of wilted green leaves. At first I hoped they were for me.

‘These leaves come from Kenya,’ the Navigator explained. ‘We say
khat?
Somali men like to chew
khat
from Kenya.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you just grow it here?’

‘Ah, no, no, can’t do that. These
special
leaves …’

It seemed so, for they popped a few leaves into their mouths and began to chew, vigorously, cheerfully. I was offered a leaf of my own, but I couldn’t see the appeal and declined politely.

As the days dragged by and I heard no news nor saw sight of the Negotiator, unease crept over me. Wasn’t anything happening about the video, about communications and negotiations? I’d expected a greater urgency. One morning at dawn as I crept back from the toilet I made sure to glance to the doorway of Room 4 – ‘Pirate HQ’ – and with a start I recognised the Negotiator’s sandals were sitting outside.
He’s here! Has he got news?
I couldn’t imagine any other reason for his presence.
If he doesn’t come to me I’ll ask to see him.

Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long before he entered my room, clad a bit more casually than before in a white vest and green sarong. We exchanged good mornings. Then he smiled.

‘You have a young man in Nairobi, asking for you?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A young man is in Nairobi. He fly out, for you, he waiting for you. Your … nephew?’

I was baffled. The idea that my sister Carol’s teenage son Cameron might have flown to Kenya on a mercy mission for me was massively implausible.

‘Sorry … do you mean
Ollie?
Is it my son?’

The Negotiator shrugged, looked non-committal.

‘How did you hear this? Who told you?’

‘I just know this. I hear.’

And he got up and left. My mind was in a tumult, I desperately wanted to believe the scrap I had been fed – and it seemed plausible. After all, David surely wouldn’t have stayed on Kiwayu, he needed to be somewhere with good telecommunications and the internet, which would be Nairobi. Ideally he would be working with the British Consulate there. And it was natural that
Ollie would have flown out to be with him. But why couldn’t I know more? I was left in the dark to wonder.

Later on the Navigator appeared, looking as if he had news he was happy to share with me.

‘Your husband is in Nairobi, with your son. I hear this. He tries to get money for your release.’

‘The Negotiator told me that too. But how do you know this?’

He, too, could give me no grounds for belief. But in my excitement I took this to be a corroborated account, and hung my hopes on it.
My god, that’s it. Wheels are turning. Negotiations are open between David and the pirates. They’ve said they want x-much money. David’s with Ollie and he’s arranging it
. And I was pleased to think they were together, helping each other through what had to be a terrible, nerve-straining struggle. But now I had the happiest imagining in my head: once I was released the three of us would be reunited in Nairobi, and we would travel home to England together. That was a joyous thought.

And that was where I intended to keep my focus, so steering clear of a particular mental pathway I didn’t wish to go down. It was to do with David, with the last image I had of him, his tussle in the dark with the armed pirate – the Leader, as I assumed. Anxiety shadowed my mind over whether David might have been hurt or incapacitated before the pirates fled the
banda
. What if they had hit him too hard, bashed him about the head with a rifle butt, left him unconscious and bleeding, maybe even semi-comatose?

What I told myself – what made sense – was that the Leader had seen David last, and had there been any problem of that sort he would have surely told his masters/superiors, Fat Man and the Negotiator – because they had to know that if David came to any harm then their chances of extracting a ransom for me
were severely impaired. But ever since Kiwayu the pirates had made clear David was the person they wanted to contact. And so David had to be OK.

There was another factor – call it a superstition. But after all our years together, the close marriage we shared, some inner part of me was sure that if any harm befell David, even if he and I were apart at the time, then I would feel it, sense it. I would know in my bones, somehow. And I didn’t have that feeling now. I believed with every fibre of my being that he was out there, working for my release.

It was Wednesday, 21 September, when the Navigator loped into my room carrying a mobile phone and a piece of paper.

‘Phone call! Is for you! You listen …’

In haste I took the phone, clamped it to my ear, and the first voice I heard was the Negotiator.

‘You speak to this Englishman. You tell him what it says on the paper.’

The Navigator gave me the handwritten note: I scanned it quickly. A new voice came on the line, clipped English tones.

‘Hello, Judith. Are you there?’ Immediately I assumed this could only be the British Embassy calling.

‘Yes, this is Jude Tebbutt.’ I read out what I’d been told to. ‘I am alive, I am in Somalia, and I need help please.’

‘Judith, is there anything you are allowed to tell me about yourself from your past?’

Racking my brain for the basic forms of self-identification, I told him my date of birth.

‘Yes, but is there anything you can tell me from your family history, something that only your family would know about you?’

‘My husband will know I was born with a hole in my heart? And I’m partially deaf.’

‘But that only your family will know – the name of a pet you once had, say?’

His repetition of ‘family’ was confusing me, since the automatic thoughts that word evoked for me were of David and Ollie.
They just have to ask David
, I thought. Finally it twigged with me that he wanted some detail from childhood, something only my mother and my siblings would know.

‘We used to have a black-and-tan terrier,’ I volunteered. ‘His name was McGill …’ That seemed to suffice.

‘Thank you. Are you being treated well, Judith?’

‘Yes, but I’m desperate to go home and see my husband and my son, who I believe are in Nairobi? I don’t know where …’

The man didn’t address my implied question, only moved on to ask me for the addresses of the houses where I’d grown up in Ulverston, then for the names and ages of my siblings. I had no difficulty recalling any of that.

‘How are you getting on without your hearing aids?’

‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’

‘We’re looking out for you, Judith …’

Then the Negotiator’s voice butted back on the line. ‘OK, thank you, that’s enough for you, my friend.’

The line went dead and the Navigator relieved me of the phone. I was perplexed but basically glad to have done something to contribute to my own release effort.
At least that’s settled. Someone in officialdom knows for sure that I’m here – that I’m alive.

Later that day I had a visit from the woman I had met on my first day in the compound, accompanied by the Navigator. She
was wearing funereal black robes from head to toe but in her hands she was carrying, freshly washed and folded, the
grey-pink
-silvery number she’d worn – and on which I’d complimented her – when first we met. Smiling, she proffered the garments to me. ‘You wear,’ the Navigator prompted.

I accepted them with a nod and a ‘
mahatsanid
’. I was moved to ask the Navigator, ‘What is this lady’s name?’

The Navigator spoke to the woman and she smiled at me and said, clearly, ‘Amina.’

I shook out the folded dress. Then Amina gently took it from me and helped me get into it. I soon realised she’d made some alterations to the cut, taken it in a little to fit me. She was a big lady with a big chest, which she patted as she gestured to me, helpfully pointing out the disparities in
décolletage
between us. I could only smile, in the midst of my grim situation, to be having this quintessentially female ‘changing-room moment’. Once I was into the
jilbab
dress, Amina pulled the cape-like
khimar
over my head, though I was rather less keen on assuming full Islamic regalia. And then Hungry Man strolled into the room, and seeing me in the new ensemble he grinned and cried, ‘Ah, beauty Somali!’