A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (29 page)

I learned that a former groundsman at Kiwayu by the name of Ali Babitu Kololo had appeared in court in Kenya the day before, charged with having led my kidnappers to the
banda
where David and I were staying on the night of 10 September. Mr Kololo was pleading his innocence, claiming to have been coerced, and his trial would begin in a month – at which time, according to the reporter, ‘Mrs Tebbutt’ would have to return to Kenya to give evidence.

I heard myself scream, ‘No, no!’ Charlotte, one of the housekeepers, came running to me and must have seen that I was shaking uncontrollably.

‘It can’t happen,’ I cried out. ‘I can’t do this. They can’t make me do this.’

Charlotte shouted to her colleague to ‘Get Ollie, now!’ But the disturbance I had caused in the house had already woken Maxine, who was first down the stairs, where she found me in a chair, rocking myself, desperate for reassurance. The thought that I was still powerless, still hostage to some unbreakable sequence of events, was terrifying to me. I showed Maxine the paper. She cursed them in language she would never use ordinarily. ‘Why won’t they just leave you alone? Of course you’re not going back.’

Ollie came in and immediately put his arm round me.

‘Mum, you’re not going.’

‘Really?’

Ollie tore the newspaper up and stuffed it into the rubbish bin. Soon everybody was up, and apprised of the situation, and of the same mind. Paul found another copy of the paper, and he disposed smartly of that one. When Jim Collins arrived, having stayed the night near by, he appreciated my distress straight away and made a telephone call. I had forgotten I could say ‘No.’ It was so important to have that vital right restored to me.

After breakfast Ollie and I walked in the grounds. It was sunny out, and we sat together on the bench. I was just so happy to share this closeness, and to have been reminded again of how hard he had worked and how strong and resolute he had stayed in the teeth of dreadful circumstances, from the moment he got the news on the morning of 11 September.

‘You’re amazing,’ I kept telling him, though he steadfastly batted away the compliment. ‘How did you do it?’

‘I can’t tell you too much, Mum,’ he said quietly. ‘And what I do tell you, you can’t repeat.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I shot back. ‘I’ll forget anyway.’

But he smiled, and as we sat there in the sun he explained to me just a little of what he’d had to do.

The reader will understand that Ollie had co-ordinated my release with the assistance of a private security firm, through whom arrangements were made for the delivery of a sum in ransom to the pirates, and for my safe passage out of Somalia. Because of the multiple sensitivities involved in a process of this kind I can’t
disclose
within these pages too much of the information I learned sub sequently about my rescue – and some of it has had to remain secret even from me. Details about sums of money and methods of negotiation, for instance, are bound by professional confidentiality agreements. Yet more crucially – for reasons I know will be well understood and appreciated – some parts of the tale cannot be told until such time as the men who were responsible for David’s death and my kidnap have been brought before a court of law.

The security guards (
askaris
) at Kiwayu Safari Village were accustomed to having a cup of tea at midnight. Therefore they were off duty for a narrow window of time. Any intruders to the facilities had to be forearmed with knowledge of when that
lookout
was down. They also had to know how to steer a path through sand dunes in darkness, and, if they were planning to leave the island by boat within that same narrow window, they had to have a precise understanding of the local tides and the challenging coral reefs around the shore that could otherwise make navigation highly hazardous. By whatever means, the pirates who broke into our
banda
after midnight on 11 September came armed with all of that information.

Shoeprints later discovered in the sand suggested that the pirates did not head directly to Banda Zero, where David and I were sleeping; rather, that they first inspected Banda Seven, which is where George Moorhead had been staying with his wife, until that night, at which point he had moved next door to Banda Eight. The pirates, however, headed off in the opposite direction, down the row to Banda Zero.

Quite possibly they were getting desperate as their window of opportunity ticked away. Entering our
banda
, they must have disturbed David, leading to the struggle that I witnessed as I was woken and dragged outside. There were high seas around Kiwayu that night, and a strong wind, which meant that only one of the
askaris
heard the gunshot shortly after midnight. But when they hastened to Banda Zero they found David’s body, and realised that I was gone. My footprints, and those of my kidnappers, were visible in the sand for more than a kilometre up the shore to a cove. A search commenced immediately, but they were too far behind the pace to stop me being spirited away in the skiff.

George Moorhead immediately called the police, and navy and air searches were instigated, while he himself was tasked to secure the crime scene. In the early hours Ali Babitu Kololo was found by
askaris
in the vicinity, and they held him until police arrived, whereupon he was taken south to Lamu. (A week later he would appear in court there, where he pleaded not guilty to charges of robbery with violence and kidnapping. He did confess that he led the gang to Kiwayu, but claimed to have been under duress, at gunpoint, having been accosted by them in Boni Forest, forty miles north of Kiwayu, earlier on Saturday, 10 September.)

By 13:00 GMT on Sunday UK law enforcement had been informed of events through their Nairobi liaison officer. They
deployed swiftly to the crime scene in support of the Kenyan investigation, and were able to send out their very best people in the fields of counter-terrorism and murder-scene analysis, armed with an array of tools for meticulous forensic and ballistic
analysis
and interpretation. What followed was ten days of extremely close work, from dawn until dusk. But when I learned
subsequently
of the high calibre of police personnel involved I was gratified and comforted: this was an honourable effort, and no less than David deserved. (When his body was then flown back to the UK these senior Metropolitan Police officers made a point of travelling on the same plane and seeing that he was taken into safe hands on the ground in London: a gesture of respect that I also appreciated very much.)

What had happened to David seemed very clear, based on the physical evidence. There were rubbing marks, ‘defensive marks’, on his arm, confirming that he had wrestled with a gunman, and that the barrel of the gun had rubbed up against his skin. The police believed he had tried to wrest the gun from his attacker. I know as sure as I know anything that he would not have
surrendered
or gone willingly. He would have done anything to prevent them taking me. But the gun was fired, a deliberate act, and the bullet entered his chest, struck a rib and was deflected into his heart, killing him instantly. The fatal bullet was later found some distance out of doors, in the sand dunes.

Ollie was in Glasgow for his work, staying in a hotel, when police contacted him bearing the terrible news from Kenya. His boss drove him all the way from Glasgow to Watford, a incredibly kind act. He was then taken to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall and briefed by dedicated FCO personnel on
the state of affairs as they saw it. Their initial suspicion was that the kidnappers belonged to the militant Islamist group
al-Shabaab
– which, if true, made for a special predicament, since the policy of the British government is to have no dealings or negotiations with terrorist organisations, and al-Shabaab is considered to be a group who will take hostages not for ransom but as bargaining chips. Ollie was advised that if this were the case then I could be held for a matter of years, with very little that he or anyone else could do about it.

One thing the Foreign Office could do for us was to manage the media side of things, and from that day they did a brilliant job of ensuring that press and broadcasters observed a virtual silence on my captivity, thus giving the pirates nothing extra to work with.

For Ollie, the sum of what he had been told was that his father was dead, and that he would have to prepare himself for the same bad news about his mother, or at best an agonising, possibly interminable wait. And for ten days that was as much as anyone could hazard. What changed was the first communication from the pirates to the British High Commission in Nairobi, whose representatives asked the pirates for proof of life and of capture, leading to my phone call of 21 September with an employee of the High Commission. (Curiously, the video that the pirates took of me in the Big House was never seen by anybody
externally
–
and
nor was the one recorded days before my release.) However, from there, communications between Ollie and the pirates were opened quite quickly; likewise it was clear that my captors were not Islamic militants but common-or-garden extortionists whose sole interest was money.

Ollie’s point of contact was, of course, the man I knew as ‘the Negotiator’, who introduced himself to Ollie as Daoud. I can only guess how excruciating it must have been for my son to
enter into these business talks with the people responsible for his father’s murder and his mother’s incarceration. Daoud tried to insist to Ollie that David’s death ‘shouldn’t have happened’ and was so craven as to ask him not to break the news to me once he and I were permitted to speak on the phone. The pirates worried, as well they might, about what would be the effect on my morale to know the truth of what they had done. Clearly, too, they shrank from the realisation of how the serious violent crime that they had planned had become immeasurably more grave in the execution.

In the midst of this, it fell to Ollie, working in tandem with David’s family, to arrange for the funeral of his father. Ollie and Saz together made a heroic job of consulting assorted old address books to put together a list of invitations. And two months after his death David was cremated, per his express wishes, at Parndon Wood in Harlow. The service was humanist, in accordance with David’s atheist convictions. Ollie made a speech and selected the music – the exact same music, as it happened, that I would have chosen myself.

Once ransom negotiations were under way the phone calls between Ollie and Daoud were many, but the progress painfully slow. There was a great amount that had to be done
administratively
before Ollie could begin to address the pirates’ demands, which in any case were, at the outset, quite impossible. After the freeing of Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted by US Navy SEALs on 25 January, Daoud went silent for a full four weeks, rattled, but perhaps also hoping to apply pressure.

I marvelled all the more at how Ollie had managed to hold himself together through this terrible trial – his life becoming tied to this vulnerable process, making daily calls to Daoud,
waiting
for a call in return, rarely being allowed contact with me.

What Ollie told me, in his inimitably self-effacing way, was that in his mind he was largely ‘doing nothing’, in the sense that so much was simply out of his hands. There was everything to worry about and yet, in a special twist of fate, there was nothing – because his degree of control over events was so limited. He found it impossible to gauge the truth of what Daoud told him over the phone – a judgement I knew to be well founded from my face-to-face experience with the man. But he was able to accept the pragmatic advice of experts that Somalia was by no means the worst place in the world to be kidnapped, since the record showed that hostages were rarely hurt or killed there. Meanwhile he had people he trusted and loved who gave him the emotional succour he needed to keep going: his girlfriend, his own friends, his uncle Paul and the rest of the family.

But Ollie approached the negotiations in a businesslike manner, conscious that whenever he was speaking to Daoud he couldn’t afford to betray any true emotions – nothing that my captors could seize on for bargaining purposes. And with me, too, he had to uphold a strict inner discipline and reserve,
affection
kept at an absolute minimum: he had to hold all that at bay within himself, and not encourage it in me, until the bitter end of all the bargaining. Even on the morning of my release the professional security people were still cautioning him: ‘Don’t rely on your mum coming back. We can’t know for sure what’s going to happen. It could still go wrong.’ I know that he listened, and followed their advice; but I know too that in himself he always kept the faith.

A curious footnote to the events around my release on 21 March was the behaviour of ‘the man in the blue linen suit’. Although
I visited his house in Adado, and he drove the car that took me to the airstrip, and evidently spoke English with ease, he never introduced himself. His name, I learned later, is Mohammed Aden, and his story is interesting.

He fled Somalia as a young man in 1992, when the country descended into chaos, and made his way to the US where he got himself a college degree and ran a small healthcare company among the Somali diaspora in Minneapolis. In 2007 he returned to Somalia with aid for his clan – the Selaban – in the midst of a terrible drought. He stayed, and in 2009 became President of the Himan & Heeb Authority, a small start-up local
administration
, which prospered under his energetic leadership.

Mohammed Aden has a hand in everything that happens in Adado, from law and order to local enterprise and
development
–
things
of which, without doubt, all of Somalia stands in sore need. The airstrip at Adado, where the plane carrying Jack and his colleagues landed, was developed under Aden’s aegis and is a significant source of revenue for his administration. The pirates, too, were clearly respectful of this rare form of local
authority
–
hence
the distinct deference that I observed them showing towards Mohammed Aden as I waited in the back of the car in the clearing early that Wednesday morning.