A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (31 page)

He took his music seriously, but there was some music he found seriously funny. To wit, the piece that I’d heard him
specifically
cite as ‘the one he’d want to have played at his funeral’ was ‘Big Shot’ by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and so this was the tune on which we played out the memorial: a very English pastiche of discordant modern jazz and spoken ‘tough guy’ vocals in the style of American pulp fiction. Vivian Stanshall’s ridiculous tale of a man named ‘Johnny Cool’ who meets a girl with ‘the hottest lips since Hiroshima’ ends on lines that always made David giggle:

The Bonzo music seemed to me the right note on which to close proceedings and allow the guests to thread their way out into the Wigmore Hall foyer. There they mingled, smiles on their faces: I heard laughter, and that was important to me. Laughter always came easily around David.

In July I took another holiday, with my sister Carol, to Australia for three and a half weeks. She and I had never holidayed together before, and now seemed to be the right time to share that experience. Australia was a place David and I had never thought of visiting together, and as such it was an ideal spot for me and my sister to discover.

The travel, the sights, the company were all good for me. It wasn’t that I was trying to ‘put things behind me’ by putting more miles between me and home. Reminders of my condition and the marks of my experience were, in any case, unavoidable. I had regained a little weight but less than I had hoped: I remained awfully thin to my eyes, and I didn’t feel that my old appetite had truly returned. Sitting down remained an awkward
negotiation
. Even in Australia, four months after my release, I couldn’t take a bath with any comfort. I had learned to tolerate showers, but the excruciating sensation of having a crate-load of pins emptied on top of me took a long time to recede.

Just as distressing to me, in a way, was the lingering effect of captivity on my sleeping habits, the shadow that still hung over my nights and mornings. At home I felt I had to keep the
windows
closed at all times. It was ridiculous and illogical to me, and yet I had been left with that trace of fear. In the night I needed to have the curtains open as I slept, for light and for transparency. But sleep didn’t come easily, and at times I had an unnerving sense of someone else in the room, slipping in silently through the door. It was a chilling sensation, and it made me catch my breath. To this day I sometimes think I feel my bed beneath me is being shaken by some intruder, and my heart lurches as I scan the room to make sure no one is there.

As the first anniversary of my kidnapping loomed, I could feel a certain desire mounting inside me, a wish to articulate my views on piracy – to contribute to the debate, and perhaps help to make a difference. These feelings crystallised when I received an invitation to travel to the Seychelles for a government-convened conference on piracy, to be attended by delegates from most of those small nations looking out to the Indian Ocean and having to confront this ongoing problem. It was no surprise that the Seychelles had placed itself at the forefront of counter-piracy efforts, given the damage wrought on its tourism industry and wider economy by Somali pirates in particular. (It wasn’t lost on me that Paul and Rachel Chandler had been taken from their boat in waters ninety miles off the Seychelles archipelago in October 2009.)

I discussed the invitation with Ollie: he was understandably wary of my revisiting the Indian Ocean. But I consulted with Jim Collins (who would be attending with me) about safety concerns, and he offered reassurance. It was what I needed to hear – because I had a strong instinct about the potential benefits in my being able to convey my story to an audience of people committed to combating piracy. And so I went. The experience was indeed enlightening and inspiring, and a useful test of my new resolve.

Preparing to give my talk, I was nervous, very worried that I might break down in tears. For I was desperately keen to be seen not as a fragile, quivering figure but, rather, as a credible and serious witness, a speaker to whom the conference could give a hearing, who would not become visibly upset and oblige the delegates to lower their eyes in sympathy. I did hold myself together and said my piece, and it seemed to be appreciated. I felt the risk had been worth it, for me to put a human face to my
story, to give the gathering a deeper appreciation of the toll taken by piracy.

On a personal level I was often ill at ease during my four-day stay, despite the unfailing courtesy of my hosts. I never left my hotel room unescorted, and Jim and Catherine Bray always saw me back there in the evenings. My windows were always firmly shut, my curtains open. And although the hotel was right on the beach with an ocean view, I never once set foot on the sand – not even in daylight, and no matter who accompanied me.

This instinctive wariness aside, everybody I met and every place I visited was impressive. I talked with Joel Morgan, government transport minister and chairman of a high-level committee on piracy, who was also acting as head of negotiation in efforts to free two Seychellois fishermen, Rolly Tambara and Marc Songoir, held in Somalia since November 2011. I visited the operations centre of the Seychelles Coastguard, and also their training base for drilling staff and new recruits in techniques of counter-piracy. And I met Will Thurbin, English governor of the Montagne Posse prison where a hundred or so Somali pirates were serving time. His attitude towards the inmates in his charge impressed me: he treated them as human beings,
understood
that they came from nothing, and that their punishment needed to include efforts at constructive rehabilitation in order to break the cycle of offending. In short I was full of admiration for the concerted efforts of the Seychelles, a small country
sending
out a clear message that it wouldn’t stand for this criminality in its waters.

In October 2012 I took up a second invitation, this to Seville, to speak at the annual international conference of the Serious
Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which took kidnap and abduction as its main topics of discussion. Jim Collins and Neil Hibberd accompanied me and we gave a joint presentation to an audience of 150 delegates, a lot of them top law-enforcement officers dealing with serious crime. I told my story; Neil outlined the police’s role and procedures, and Jim talked about the FCO’s general approach to hostage crises.

One thing that I was keen to impart to delegates was that I understand entirely just how life threatening a kidnap can be, but that I am also acutely conscious of the high risk of any effort to free hostages from captivity by force. I was truly grateful to be standing before this audience, alive and well, a full year on from my capture. But that had been possible only because of the paying of a ransom. There is, of course, often an emotive argument over whether criminals ought to profit by ill-gotten gains, whether crime flourishes if we permit it to ‘pay’. My challenge to the delegates was, essentially, this. Try for a moment to put
yourselves
in the shoes of people and their families who have suffered this ordeal, and ask yourself, honestly: what would you do?

Possibly as rewarding an experience for me as any other part of the conference was sharing a table in the hall with a fellow ex-hostage, Patrick Noonan, who had been taken in Sudan on 6 March while on his way to work at the offices of the World Food Programme. (In the twelve months prior to his kidnap he had helped to distribute tents and cooking equipment to a quarter of a million Sudanese.) He was held for eighty days in a tent of a family with whom he became ‘friendly’, in the effort to make himself appear human to them – an effort I well understood. Patrick’s release had been secured finally on 30 May.

There is something powerful in meeting a stranger with whom you share such a remarkable and harrowing experience.
After Patrick had delivered his own talk he came over to me, and I wasn’t sure quite what was ‘appropriate’, since we had only just met – but, really, I wanted to give him a hug, in consolation for his ordeal. However, being momentarily unsure whether this was ‘the thing to do’, I simply touched his shoulder and told him how well he had spoken, and how sorry I was that he had been through such an awful lot. ‘So have you,’ he said quietly. After that we talked a little more during intervals in the schedule.

It was clear to me that we shared concerns about the effects of being robbed of our liberty and held in isolation: how you lived with that afterwards, how you recovered your definition of self, the identity you know is rightfully yours. Neither of us wanted our respective ordeals to claim any more from us than they had already, so unjustly, managed to steal.

The other interesting lessons of Seville for me were low key but intensely personal, and arose from the time that I spent by myself. For one thing, having spent pretty much my entire
adulthood
as a married woman, this was the first time in my life that I had travelled somewhere carrying my own passport and bearing responsibility for all the logistics of getting from place to place. I accept that not to have managed this feat before might sound like oddly ‘dependent’ behaviour, not least from a professional woman in her fifties. It might have had something to do with the class and generation from which I come, and old habits never broken. But now, for the first time in my life, I went sightseeing around a city on my own. The mixture of emotions was often sharp and poignant. I missed David every second. And yet at the same time I told myself,
You’re managing this. You’re learning
something
else about how to cope.
So the sadness was twinned at least with some small but valuable sense of self-reliance.

One or two experiences during the trip were a little more
disconcerting
. Stepping inside a restaurant where I thought I might have lunch one afternoon, I found myself waiting to be seated in front of an older couple who were chatting away to one another keenly. Surveying the other diners I noticed quite a few couples, and began to mentally calculate their ages. A thought came unbidden:
Why couldn’t that be me and David?
Whereupon the maître d’ busied over, looked past me, and escorted the couple behind me to their table first. I was made to feel invisible; and it made me cross. I called the maître d’ back, asked him pointedly for a table for one, and he seemed at last to get the picture. Then I sat and had a salad, watching the couples,
thinking
:
That was once me
, us –
we used to do that. Is this how life is going to be from now on?
I realised I had to accept I had joined the ranks of single people, one among millions, and I would have to get used to it, learn how to function in that way.

I endured a rather more visceral shock to my system on our last evening in Seville when a number of us went out to a tapas bar intending a convivial end to the visit. It seemed a nice enough place, and as we stood by the bar with drinks I saw some people ordering food. Then, however, I noticed that an Irish police
officer
in our party was staring quite fixedly away from the group.

‘Would you look at that … ?’ he said in some wonderment.

And, though in the blink of an eye Neil Hibberd had moved himself smartly so as to shield my view, I did indeed catch sight of a notably large cockroach scuttling along the top of the bar. Instantly I could feel myself shake with revulsion at this creepy reminder of the company I had been forced to keep in the squalid rooms of my captivity. By now Neil had heard my accounts of those places, and so he knew exactly what was required.

‘Barman?’ he called out. ‘Large wine, please.’

The other setback to my spirits in Seville came upon me unawares at first. When I tried to make a purchase by bank card in a shop, my card was refused – and, little did I know, back home my bank’s fraud detectors went off, since they weren’t aware I was travelling abroad. David would have remembered to inform the bank before departure, without doubt. But when I went to settle my hotel bill I discovered a ‘stop’ had been placed on my card. I was on my own, and couldn’t reach anyone back home on the phone, and so I was thrown into a panic of illogical fear. Was this something I could be arrested or detained for? How could this have happened? Only yesterday I had been chatting on first-name terms with Seville’s Chief Police Commissioner …

Eventually the matter was sorted amicably, without my having to scrub pots and pans in the hotel kitchen to pay for my keep. But it was a stiff reminder that I would have to learn to sort things out by myself from now on; also that, however ‘well’ I was doing, there remained circumstances in which I was
desperately
fragile.

In Seville I was asked more than once a certain set of questions that, I knew, would keep on recurring: namely, what were my feelings now towards my captors? And what sort of punishment would I want for them, in the event that they are apprehended some day? There was no rote answer to give on that. My
feelings
were and are a little more complicated than people appeared to expect.

There is, of course, a hierarchy in the organisation of any group of Somali pirates, and I observed as much in the men who kidnapped me and killed my husband. The sum paid in ransom
for me had to be divided many ways: it’s quite likely that the first cut went to settle a loan with interest that the pirates took out to finance the operation in the first place. Keeping me captive was a pricey business: if I was cheaply fed I was expensively guarded, and those guards had to be kept in cooked food and
khat
and wages. Once those bills were all accounted for, the rest of the proceeds will have been divvied up from the top down, with the smallest shares no doubt going to the teenage ‘
runarounds
’ whose sole function was to guard me against escape or capture by a rival gang.