A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (28 page)

I decided to have an early night, and made my way back upstairs. I was helpfully advised that every night the top floor of the residency was security-sealed by a thick alarmed metal door, so no intruder could reach the bedroom quarters.

It was my first night restored to freedom, and I was sure I would sleep soundly. In fact I didn’t sleep at all. Even as I undressed I had the strangest sensation that the bed was some uncanny replica of the one on which David and I had lain down to sleep in Kiwayu: huge, with white linen, shrouded by mosquito nets. A sash window had been left slightly ajar for fresh air: the mosquito net rippled in the breeze. And I began to be plagued by the recurrent feeling that someone else was in the room. I couldn’t reach the window to push it closed. And I didn’t want to wake anyone up. But I was afraid of triggering the alarm if I stepped out. I tried to make myself drop off, but I stirred
repeatedly
, looking about me, thinking frantically,
Is someone there?

By the time the sun rose, I saw no use in lying around in the bed. Once I was sure the house had stirred I crept downstairs. The front door was open, maids were scurrying about, a man was
sorting post on the sideboard and started at the sight of me. I assured him that I didn’t need any help, that all I wanted was to take a walk outside.

The sun was warm but a light and pleasant breeze was
blowing
. I was barefoot. I walked down the concrete steps onto the grass, damp with dew. The sensations were all welcome and pleasant. As strong as my sense of disorientation remained, I was starting to find my feet, alone and unobserved. I touched the hibiscus, watched a hummingbird, sat down on a low-cut tree stump, pulled my knees up to my chin and hugged them.
You’re out
, I told myself. And then, crazily, a thought bubbled up:
I wonder what the pirates are doing now? What’s Amina up to, not having them to cook for any more …?

It was a momentary drift, and I got hold of myself and diverted my mind as I’d become accustomed to doing. I went back to the front door, where one of the staff offered me tea. I asked if I could have it outside and he said, ‘Of course.’ It was served on best china, naturally.

Later in the morning a doctor called on me to give me a medical examination. I was surprised she hadn’t brought so much as a stethoscope. She asked if there was ‘anything I was worried about’, and I wasn’t sure where to start, or indeed finish. I spoke of my poor diet for six months and extreme emaciation, my sleeping on flea-infested mattresses, the bites all around my body, the debilitating illnesses I’d suffered in captivity … She
considered
this, and determined that, basically, I sounded all right.

‘You’ve been through a traumatic experience, and you are underweight. But my advice is to go home, see your doctor, and a nutritionist if you can. It’s going to take time.’

Ollie had stepped out of the room when the doctor arrived, but when he returned I told him he hadn’t missed much.

In the afternoon I received a phone call from the Prime
Minister
. Jim Collins had told me that my case had been discussed at meetings of the Government’s COBRA crisis committee, chaired by David Cameron himself and attended by William Hague, Secretary of Defence Philip Hammond, and the heads of MI6 and MI5. And now Mr Cameron was on the line, asking for ‘Mrs Tebbutt’. I asked him to call me ‘Jude’. In our short conversation he sounded concerned and genuine. I told him I had heard news in captivity of the big London conference on Somalia. I wished him well in any concerted endeavours to combat piracy, and told him I was sure it was clear to him as it had become to me that the issue called for a great deal more action than the simple allocation of aid monies.

Mr Cameron mentioned, too, that he was on his way to Ulverston for the announcement of a new investment by
GlaxoSmithKline
. This was no word of a lie, for when I spoke to my mother on the phone later that day she told me the Prime Minister had told local people that he ‘had never spoken to someone more courageous or brave’. My mum thought he was lovely, such a nice young man … For my part I couldn’t resist the feeling that I had stepped onto something of a political
bandwagon
. To the pirates I had been one sort of commodity. Now, my life seemed to be tending towards a kind of public-relations narrative. I felt ‘on show’, and I didn’t want to be.

My second night in the residency was more relaxed and easily enjoyable. The meal was a little more private, the setting just as opulent, the food just as good. But I was more than ready for home. The following morning Ollie and I were driven to
Kenyatta
Airport in a car with bulletproof windows, ambassadorial
flags flapping. In the back we linked hands, looking at each other now and again with smiles, glad to be on our way out of Africa.

The nine-hour flight home to England was happily
uneventful
, save for one disconcerting moment. I dropped off to sleep, but I awoke in great consternation, absolutely sure that my creaky bed frame was being kicked in order to rouse me for one more move, to another pirate compound … In fact the Virgin Atlantic airbus had simply run into a spot of turbulence: hence the bump in the night. But I was shaken, feeling that I had been served an unsettling notice of how the mental vestiges of captivity might dog my life for a while to come.

After our plane landed at Heathrow the captain announced over the tannoy: ‘We will have a short delay before everyone can
disembark
the aircraft, just because there is a passenger onboard who requires a police escort to the terminal …’

I wondered if my fellow travellers were imagining there was a serious criminal among them. But I made my way to the exit with Ollie’s assistance and at the top of the steps I saw a police cordon waiting on the tarmac. It was dark, the night air was cool, the airport lit up, and I was so happy to be back in England. I fought back a momentary urge to mimic the old papal routine of falling to my knees and kissing the ground.

At the foot of the steps a policewoman greeted me.

‘Welcome home, Mrs Tebbutt. It’s nice to see you. Would you please come this way?’

She set off rather faster than I could keep up with, but we entered the terminal by an exclusive side route, and went down and around various corridors, until we were met by a woman in a red Virgin Airlines uniform who showed us into a posh
hospitality lounge, with food and tea and cut flowers set out on a table. I had a cup of tea and was joined by three gentlemen who politely introduced themselves as John Lee, Sam Abangma, and Neil Hibberd from the Counter Terrorism Command at New Scotland Yard. Their manners were considerate and respectful. They also had something to ask of me. It was essential, they said, that I be debriefed by police and experts about my experience, in a carefully selected safe house, so that the maximum
information
could be gleaned. ‘Obviously we’d be really grateful to you for this,’ said John Lee. ‘We can do it at your pace, whenever you feel able, in a few weeks or a month …’ I told them the sooner we did it the better: I wanted to do it, but I also wanted to
conclude
that chapter promptly, the quicker to start trying to pick up the threads of my life.

The room was throwing up a lot of human faces and
information
for me to process. After six months in a barren and
near-solitary
confinement, stimuli of any sort felt overwhelming. I kept looking to Ollie for reassurance, still not certain that I wasn’t about to wake up once again to the
muezzin’
s calls and the walls of Horrible House. Ollie was being protective, trying to
orchestrate
things, asking me, ‘Have you had enough, Mum?’

The policemen left, and Jim Collins approached. ‘You can stay here as long as you want, but just so you know, your family are waiting for you at the house we’ve prepared near here. Cars are ready to take you any time.’ In Nairobi Jim had asked me who he should make arrangements for, and I had asked for Paul and Maxine, my sister Carol, my nephews Cameron and Callum and my niece Isobel. I knew my mum just couldn’t make the journey south at her age. These were the people I was closest to, most wanted to see, and yet I felt nervous, wondering if I could keep it together.

It was a short drive through countryside to the safe house. Then we were rolling up a long gravel drive to a huge mansion set in manicured lawns, housekeepers waiting by an open door to show us into an entrance hall in reds and golds and dark wood, portraits in oils pointing the way up the stairs. I could hear my family, chatting, laughing, before I saw them – and then Jim showed me into a sumptuous drawing room, and there they were, all squeezed onto two generous sofas, before a blazing fire in the hearth. They looked up and saw me, and suddenly there was hushed silence.

My sister Carol was first to rise and come to me. ‘Oh my god,’ she said, and I broke down in tears. She hugged me, stroked the back of my head, told me how sorry she was, for me, and about David. ‘You’re home now. Thank god you’re safe. We’re going to get through it.’ And then I greeted them one by one: my
sister-in
-law Maxine, a lovely big bear hug from my nephew Cameron that nearly winded me, and my niece Isobel, who wept.

The last person was Paul – taller and broader than his brother but otherwise so very much like David, in his looks, his
mannerisms
, his laughter and his character.

‘I’m so sorry for what happened to David,’ he said.

He enveloped me in a hug, and we stood there awhile, my face pressed to his T-shirt as the tears kept coming. Paul, too, was coping with the loss of a beloved brother. Like David, he had a gift for leavening a situation, lightly and gently. When at length he murmured to me, ‘My chest’s getting soaked, Jude’, we were both able to laugh.

I sat down on a deep wide velvet sofa, feeling as small as Alice in Wonderland. Carol sat next to me and held my hand. A gin and tonic was brought for me, but I just couldn’t hold the heavy crystal tumbler in my hand. I was conscious of being looked at, by Carol especially.

‘You’re so small,’ she said, her voice full of concern.

Conversation didn’t come easily, for lots of good reasons. For one, Carol hastened to explain to me that they had all been briefed by an FCO psychologist, whose line was: ‘Don’t ask her any questions, but if she wants to talk that’s fine.’

In truth I was feeling like an empty vessel with nothing to say. It felt strange even to hear my own voice aloud, after the
relentlessly
interior mental experience of captivity. What I could feel, though, and what gratified me, was the renewed freedom I had to construct proper sentences, relieved of hidden agendas, not designed to extract information from anyone without their realising it. Here, after six months among incorrigible and
unscrupulous
liars, I was with honest people, in kind and loving company. I could relax.

And so we muddled along. I made an easy quip about the posh room, and asked Isobel how she was getting on with her studies. She told me she hadn’t been able to concentrate at college, had been Googling me constantly for any news. I soon understood, though, that for security reasons the circle of confidentiality around the negotiations for my release had been kept ultra-tight: Ollie had been in charge, with Paul as the designated back-up just in case at any time it had all become too much for Ollie.

There was no denying the painfulness of feeling that lay behind our being gathered in this way. But we were glad of any chance to laugh, to share in something that relieved the sombre mood. My sister was brilliant in this respect, describing the fraught experience of having watched me in live BBC
News
pictures of the handover at Adado airport, as Jack coaxed me toward the small aircraft. ‘I was watching you stood here, Jude,’ she said, ‘and I wanted to shout at the screen, “Take them bloody flip-flops off and
run
!”’

The housekeeper entered discreetly to tell us that dinner was served, and we were shown into a majestic dining room, set with all of the splendour – bone china, crystal, silver, pressed
napkins
–
to
which I was becoming weirdly accustomed. We ate delicious lamb – Callum with particular relish, his keen appetite giving us something else to be fondly amused by. But I didn’t say much, only listened. There was an obvious joy in reunion, but it was also, inevitably, an evening of nervousness and overpowering emotions. I didn’t want my family to have to attend on me like mourners, but nor could I be really at ease and conversational. It was, to say the least, still too soon.

I went to bed early; Ollie and his girlfriend Saz and Paul and Maxine stayed up a while longer. In my bedroom I found a bag with toiletries and night clothes, and also two parcels sitting on the king-sized bed, wrapped up in pink tissue paper. These were gifts from Carol: she had bought me a kimono and knitted me a cushion. The gesture touched me to the heart.

I woke up early, in the common state of having forgotten momentarily where I was, waiting for reality gently to reassert itself. In my opulent surroundings, though, the process took a shade longer than usual. I spent some time staring out through the window at immaculate lawns and glorious oak trees in the pale light of early spring.
What just happened?
was the irresistible thought in my head. And the question seemed reasonable. How many people, after all, set off on a two-week holiday, only to be locked up by armed hoodlums for six months?

This is where it starts,
I told myself.
My life begins again from here because I have got to make a new life for myself, to get over what’s happened to me and to David.

I dressed and crept downstairs. The hall was silent, no one around. But in the hallway the daily paper lay face up on a
console
table. And there was I, on the front page:
HOSTAGE FREED
,
FULL STORY PAGE
5. I picked up the paper and paddled through it, stunned to see all that I had just been through turned into a series of splashy paragraphs, illustrated by news-agency
snapshots
. And then a detail jumped out that shocked me.