A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (6 page)

I’d never known a more grim awakening than the one that began my third day in captivity, as I came to on a dirty mattress sandwiched between four male strangers, so heavily asleep as to appear lifeless. Their unwelcome physical proximity, on top of every thing else they were inflicting on me, felt repulsive and violating. It was as if I were frozen to the ground, wanting to be anywhere else yet unable to move a muscle. How long would I have to lie there? Finally the pain in my back caused me to shift somewhat, and more or less instantly the Navigator stirred awake at my side. Then his cohorts, too, came alive – except for Money, who seemed to have the teenage skill of staying sound asleep in his pit.

The Navigator began to brew tea, which had the effect of rousing Money. Then Marvin took me by the wrist and urged me up the incline to where the gang had made camp on the previous day. Once I had struggled upwards, my feet slipping out of Marvin’s own oversized sandals, I saw the Leader was already ensconced there. He didn’t look at me and I averted my eyes from him. As ever his very presence made me anxious, for the simple reason that as far as I could tell my life was in his hands.

Still, I sat, as Marvin indicated I should. And I was glad to be free from the confines of the thorny shrubs, albeit worried about the sun blazing down directly overhead.

Presently I felt the unpleasant sensation of a nosebleed, which caused great consternation to my captors. The Leader signalled to Marvin to do something, anything: he produced a piece of cardboard and clumsily rubbed it around my face, scratching me in the process. Left to myself, not especially glad of the ‘help’, I
wiped away some more blood with my hand; and in touching my face I became abruptly conscious of more than one other injury. I could feel a swelling over my right eye, and a scab forming on the cut I had sustained when I was first thrown into the skiff. I felt I should extend the examination – know the worst – and looking about I realised that many of the small insect bites to my body, some even in the webbing between my toes and fingers, were turning into blood blisters where I must have scratched at them. Spotted bloodstains on my vest top I knew had come not from my nosebleed but as a result of said scratching.

The nosebleed, at least, had coagulated by now but I had no means to wash myself and so I sat there in my dirty, bloody state, finding the heat even more than usually hateful. The Leader then issued some further instruction to Marvin, who proceeded to rig a sheet between the branches of two small trees to make a shade. I settled down there at their invitation, and I was glad of the respite from the beating sun, as well as the space and the change of scenery, such as it was.

We stayed there for, again, what seemed like hours. The Leader picked his now customary moment to get up and walk away out of sight. Marvin dozed off near to me, the Navigator and Money did likewise beneath a tree. I began to feel a cooling breeze, for which I was grateful, and I unzipped the black jacket far enough for the breeze to work its way around my body. Such was the improvement, I decided to risk incurring the usual wrath by untying the cord around the jacket’s hood and pulling it down – all the time keeping a wary eye out for any stirring among my captors. There was none, and so I sat, mercifully bareheaded for the first time in days.

There was a limit to the consolation I felt. My body was wet with sweat, my hair plastered to my head. My face was caked in
blood from the nosebleed and the cut above my eye. I was sure I was a wretched sight. And I had to begun to worry seriously about septicaemia, given the various cuts to my feet and the rash of bleeding bites around my body, now most exquisitely sore on the rubbed skin around the waistband of my trousers.

My mind began to wander. This time, should I – could I – attempt an escape? I started to shift my leg along the ground from left to right, making a rustling noise in order to gauge how deeply my captors were sleeping. Nobody stirred. From lying down I sat up, carefully zipped up the jacket and replaced the hood, then leaned my back against the tree trunk – and coughed sharply. Again, no reaction. They seemed to be sleeping soundly.

I got to my feet, stepped out from the shade and began to walk down the incline towards the winding path, which would lead, I was sure, to a village. My plan, swiftly formed, was to find and don a
burka
as soon as I reached the village, so that every part of me save for my eyes would be cloaked from view, and I could remain undetected while pondering my next move. I was quite sure, though, that this would involve my locating a car or truck with its keys conveniently left in the ignition – whereupon I would drive to the capital, Mogadishu. As I understood it there were UN camps there, places where I would be greeted, welcomed, given food and clean clothes. Tomorrow’s headlines would read
ENGLISH WOMAN MAKES DARING ESCAPE FROM KIDNAPPERS: FULL STORY, PAGE
5. By which time I would be reunited with my beloved husband and son …

‘You eat!’

I jerked my head up sharply. Marvin stood over me, his frame occluding the sun and casting a long shadow. His hands were proffering to me the makeshift beaker of sweet tea and the packet of revolting Encore biscuits.

It was probably a fortunate thing that he had propelled me back to reality – to the fact that, far from hastening away from the scene, I hadn’t even got to my feet. I accepted the unappetising offerings, much more concerned by how quickly and deceptively my imagination had raced away from me.

I spent the rest of the day brooding over my escape plan, realising the chance was lost and that, in any case, I had no idea where I would go, or whether the effort might not expose me to even greater danger. It was such a struggle to rationalise what was happening to me while I felt myself to be on the edge of existence, unsure what the next day or hour or minute would hold – whether, even, it could be my last. The grim feeling persisted that the only way out of this nightmare was one that would, in time, be dictated to me.

Around dusk my attentiveness had waned, for when Marvin and the Navigator began to dismantle the camp – packing things away, folding up tarpaulin, carting items down the incline to where the boat was moored – I realised that Money and the Leader were nowhere to be seen. Marvin approached me, pulled down the sheet that had hung over my head, and folded it up. The procedure was swift and silent and soon it had erased any sign that we had been there.

My stomach began to churn: something, clearly, was going to happen but I’d no idea what. The Navigator came up to me.

‘We move.’

‘Where are we going?’

He gave no reply other than ‘Come now.’

My best guess had been that we would get back in the boat, so I was surprised when we began to walk in the opposite direction
towards open grassland. I followed, stumbling and tripping over the uneven ground, the grass coarse against my bare feet. Marvin, again, gave me his sandals. He and the Navigator were laden with bulging black bags, blankets, and provisions.

As we trudged along I found my mind returning to the long walk David and I had taken for pleasure less than a week earlier, up the Siria escarpment. It was a memory so fresh and fond that I wished I could reach out and touch it, return to it, relive it. Instead I was trekking through darkness to a destination unknown, blindly following the footsteps of hostile and hateful strangers.

We walked for maybe half an hour until we approached a wooded area where, once again, I was pressed under a shrub. It was a big rambling growth, with a dome like a blackberry shrub, its trunk and thick roots twisted round each other, and the ground underneath was quite soft, so that by carefully positioning myself I could get comfortable. But I was left there, and couldn’t see my captors. I recoiled to see a huge centipede, as thick as my middle finger, crawling down a branch towards me. The Navigator must have heard my gasp of surprise because he pushed through the shrubbery, gently removed the insect onto a stick and whisked it away.

Eventually I was brought the first food I’d had in two days. I couldn’t tell how they’d prepared it, but it was dollops of rice, steaming hot, in the bottom half of a plastic Castrol GTX container. Marvin showed me a tin of tuna with an enquiring look on his face. When I nodded he dumped the contents out onto the rice and tossed the tin aside, like the rubbish I’d seen earlier.

I ate tiny bits with my fingers – the rice tasted awful, petroleum-flavoured, inevitably. But I knew that I had to eat, and to try not to be sick. They were eating too, forming rice into balls
with their fingers and pushing these into their mouths. I tried to imitate the style, without success, and they laughed. Then the Navigator, wordlessly, took the machete, hacked a shard of yellow plastic from an oil container and fashioned a kind of spoon for me. It was a prisoner’s meal, for sure, but I took some reassurance in knowing after all that it wasn’t their plan to starve me.

I slept awhile. When I was shaken awake it was dark, the moon was out and I was beckoned from the shrub by torchlight. Marvin and the Navigator were loaded up once more with bags, and clearly we were on the move again. I was filled with foreboding. Marvin held on to the sleeve of my jacket and guided me through the bush, down a shallow dip, over a grassy plain and up the other side. The stars in the night sky were vividly bright: I could see the hazy glowing arc of the Milky Way, and pick out the seven stars of the Plough. I felt a pang in my heart to think that David, were he with me, could have named all the various constellations. He had learned to navigate by the stars as a Sea Cadet, the same knowledge that got him through his Outward Bound course in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia.

We walked on through long, dry grass, me struggling in the dark to make out what lay before us beyond the shapes of trees. Marvin was trying to hurry me, tugging me, but I struggled. I was conscious that we were moving down a slope, and then we made a definite turn and came over a headland – all this in utter silence, no one speaking a word.

Down below us I could see a horseshoe bay and houses, faintly lit, dotted around the shoreline. It was civilisation of a sort, and I wondered whether this was the place they had come to procure their food and water.

We got onto a pathway heading down, which led us past a house – a small single-storey structure with two little windows shedding yellowish light. The thought of people inside, so close to us now, was so strong that I had a sudden impulse to do something, to shout out for help. Marvin clearly read this, for he looked hard at me, made the cut-throat gesture with his index finger straight across his neck, then pressed the finger to his lips. The message was unmistakable, and menacing. I put my head down and pressed on. We continued on the track at a steady pace, onto softer sand and down to the shoreline. I began to feel my feet sinking into what felt like wet, spongy seaweed, the cuffs of my pyjama bottoms getting soggy again. The Navigator had moved on ahead and I couldn’t see where he was going, the darkness just enveloped him. Then Marvin dropped sharply to a crouching position and pulled me with him, holding onto me tightly. We stayed like that, in silence, for fifteen long minutes.

Something in me was sick at heart to see the lights in the little houses dotted round the bay – the evidence of other lives, of ordinary people going about their daily business, oblivious to the stranger in their midst. I thought of families who perhaps had just put their children to bed, of women sewing or cooking, safe and assured in the ordinary world. And here was I in the dark outside, a hostage, crouched and shivering, waiting for god knows what.

I made out the shape of a boat slipping silently into view, and then three torch flashes in quick succession, blink–blink–blink. That was the awaited signal, for Marvin hauled me up and led me into the shallow water. I could see the Navigator ahead. Then Marvin beckoned me to climb onto his back and bore me in this way up to the skiff. It was clear to me now: Leader and Money must have sailed the boat around to this cove earlier in the day,
then most likely waited under cover of darkness for Marvin and the Navigator to bring me here at an appointed hour.

I was manhandled back aboard. Money was manning the rudder, the Leader in his customary place at the prow. As ever I hated the sight of him, the silent keeper of whatever was the plan for me. Where were we going now? The engine was started and we lurched off and away out to sea.

For a time in the darkness it had seemed as though we were just ploughing the open waters of the ocean, with no land in sight anywhere – until I became aware of coastline, on my left and perhaps half a mile away in the distance. Gradually I could make out the lights of a large coastal town – bright, numerous, and uniform, like a string of street lamps running along a promenade. I turned to the Navigator (who had, of course, now handed navigating duties on to Money).

‘Those lights, where is that?’

‘Malindi,’ he replied.

I knew that Malindi was on the Kenyan coast. But had we really turned round and headed back into Kenyan waters? I didn’t know what to believe, but the idea was exciting. We passed by the town’s lights and ploughed on. I was sitting up amid my captors, but only because I had flatly refused to remain hidden on the sodden mattress under the usual coverings, since the combination of the skiff’s breakneck speed and the pervasive stink of petrol had left me nauseated and battered about on the floor of the boat. My protest had earned me a seat on a yellow container, but there was little relief from the boat’s turbulent progress, and the pain and nausea persisted.

We travelled through the night. I wearied, my head began to droop, yet I was doggedly determined to hold on to some sense of where we were going.

As dawn light broke we were sailing at a gentler pace on a calmer sea, and the coastline in the distance had changed to one of pristine white-sand beaches, completely deserted. If this had
been Kenya, I was almost sure we would have seen sun beds and swimmers.

The boat began to slow, and I saw ahead of us a bizarre sight: an oil tanker, run aground on a sandbank in shallow water, its hull rusted, its prow jutting out into the sea, evidently abandoned to its fate. It leaned slightly to the right, water lapping its sides. Money cut the engine and we drifted to a standstill, in line with the tanker. Again I had to consult the Navigator.

‘Why are we stopping?’

He pointed a bony finger to the sky. ‘Planes.’

He seemed anxious. I, of course, was inwardly encouraged.

‘What sort of planes?’

‘Al-Shabaab.’

His tone implied that ‘al-Shabaab’ was a thing to be feared and avoided, but I was none the wiser.

‘How long are we going to be here?’

‘Until night. Then, tomorrow? We take you to Mombasa. You meet David, in the Blue Room Hotel? You’ve heard of it?’

I shook my head, comprehending nothing, but lifted by a sudden tide of euphoria. It was just as I hoped. This horror was going to be over; the end was suddenly in sight. I was going to see David. He must have sorted everything out, just as I’d known he would.

I couldn’t keep my imagination at bay, thinking now about this ‘Blue Room Hotel’, how I would be conveyed there, how the ‘drop’ or handover would be arranged. Whatever the logistics, I saw myself walking free, and I saw David coming towards me, arms wide, our reunion, the joy of that – strong enough, I knew, to erase everything I’d been put through.

The joyful prospect, though, couldn’t counteract the physical effect on me of having sailed through the night, thirsty and unfed in filthy conditions. This had exacted a toll and, as we sat bobbing under the heat of the day I was gripped by seasickness. I had to retch repeatedly over the side of the boat. My captors looked on, scornful, displeased. There was nothing I could do: my stomach churned, my throat began to burn with the constant bringing up of bile.

As the morning wore on, in our stationary, unshaded position the sun’s heat grew more fierce. I was still in my heavy jacket, two pairs of wet trousers adhered to my body, unbearably clammy and itchy. My head throbbing, my back aching, I didn’t know how much more discomfort I could tolerate. The thought of David was the one solace.

My captors had resumed their sleep rota, but the Leader was alert and muttering into his mobile phone. I had a bottle of water from which I took small sips. They didn’t seem to drink a drop, as if they had trained their bodies out of the need. I’d begun to feel some control over my innards once more when all of a sudden I was seized by the neck from behind, pushed down on top of the canisters and a tarpaulin thrown over me. Stunned, I tried to stand, only to fall against the side of the boat, head first, reopening the cut I had sustained on the first night. I felt blood trickle down my temple again. Then the tarpaulin was back over me.

I guessed they had heard a plane overhead. But their aggression towards me – as though I were an object, with a price on my head but disposable none the less – made me newly afraid. I tried to keep calm, swallow my indignation. I was on the brink of tears but I fought them.
Keep it together
, I urged myself.
Tomorrow night you could be with David. This will be over. You have to hang on until then.

After a while I knew I just couldn’t endure another bout of being covered on the floor of the boat – not the sickening motion nor the clammy heat nor the foul commingled smells. Slowly I pushed my head out from under the tarpaulin and retched over the side of the boat. Some of what I brought up spattered back in my face and down my clothes as a result of the boat’s ceaseless bobbing. The indignity of it was total, and yet by now I was past caring. I just felt that physically things could not get any worse. And so I looked to the Navigator. ‘Me sit now,’ I croaked.

He and the Leader conferred, and with a nod of the head I was permitted to sit up again. I saw we had drifted a little from the tanker. Money slept in a foetal curl by the engine. Mercifully my stomach began to settle, and when the gang shared a big flat piece of unleavened bread between them and offered me a small chunk I accepted and ate it, knowing it was probably all I would get before we reached Mombasa.

Gradually I was aware of the sun sinking and the heat going out of the day. I started to let myself feel the thrilling prospect of release. The Leader had made phone calls constantly but now his phone rang. He had a quick conversation and at last we began to move again, albeit slowly. As it got darker the engine roared back to life and we set off, hugging the coastline. What followed, though, was a succession of intermittent stops, and at each of them the Leader would have an anxious phone conversation before we could resume. By the second such occasion I was fairly sure they were hunting for a specific place at which to bring the boat ashore, but were having great difficulty finding it. After each stop and phone call, our progress was slow, seemingly cautious, the gang scanning the shoreline with fretful eyes – obviously looking for a landmark or beacon of some sort. The procedure came to consume hours.
They’re lost
, I thought. And the worst of
it was that for the first time since my ordeal began, I had a measure of hopefulness over where we could be heading.

The ‘beacon’, when it presented itself, turned out to be the flashing headlamps of a four-wheel-drive car, parked up on a headland over a cove and facing full out to sea. Satisfied at last, my captors sailed us into the shallows of the cove and cut the engine. Money hopped from the boat and began to pull it by the prow towards shore. Marvin helped me out into warmish water. The moon was bright and up ahead I saw the driver-side door of the car open. A tall, slender, smartly dressed man climbed out. The Leader had splashed out of the skiff and strode directly up the shore towards this driver, who came down the incline onto the beach to greet him.

I was struggling to recover my land legs and needed to answer the call of nature. With niceties long since made redundant, I just squatted in the water to pee. The gang left me to it, and I was able to observe how they were greeted by the driver – warmly in the case of the Leader, stiffly in the case of Marvin, who then trooped back with a pair of yellow rubber flip-flops meant for me,
HAPPY NEW YEAR
printed on their insoles.

Marvin led me on an awkward scramble up the incline to the waiting car, a big beige Compact SUV. There I was pushed into the middle of the back seat, and for a moment I felt oddly uncomfortable to be dripping wet inside a dry vehicle that had sheepskin-covered seats. Still, I was sitting in relative luxury after hours spent perched atop a petrol canister.

I noticed an elderly man, tall and lean, in the passenger seat. He didn’t give me so much as a glance. The dashboard, I saw, was covered in the same sheepskin as the car seats, and a clock
set in the dash read 11:30. The driver climbed in: straight away I smelled aftershave, and the view from close quarters confirmed that he was well dressed, clean-shaven, like a young businessman in pressed trousers and open-necked short-sleeved shirt, the rectangle of a phone visible in his top pocket. Marvin got into the car at my right, the Leader at my left, both toting their
AK
47
S
, and the engine was started. I looked back out through the rear window to the cove, but the skiff had vanished from view; and since Money and the Navigator were no longer with us, I had to assume they were continuing their journey by water.

We drove off at high speed, over sand dunes that caused the vehicle to bounce madly up and down. I was jostled between my captors, thrown from side to side, at one point bashing my head on the roof.

‘Can you bloody well
slow down?
’ I shouted at the Driver.

He only laughed. However reckless his speed he seemed highly alert. But when the car jumped right over the crest of one dune and landed with a jarring thump I really believed we were going to have an accident. I was as frightened as I’d felt up to this point in my ordeal.

Finally we got off sand and now the headlights illuminated through the pitch darkness a path that appeared to be strewn with shrubs and boulders. The Driver made some sharp turns of the wheel so as to hurtle by them, throwing us all around a bit more in the process. I was holding on tenaciously to just one thought: Mombasa, meaning David. My whole being was clenched in the hope that where we were headed was this ‘Blue Room Hotel’ the Navigator had promised. Still it began to concern me that out of the car window I kept seeing the same things, shrubs, bushes, as if we were travelling haphazardly, without direction – or, worse, round in circles.

But nothing seemed to bother the Driver and the Leader, who bantered easily with one another between front and back seat. The car stereo was turned on to Arabic music, loud enough to sound blaring even to my ears. The Passenger flew into a kind of seated dance, his arms flailing around as he wailed along to the music. Once again, the menace of my situation was taking on an edge of derangement.

It came as a mild relief when I saw that the terrain had turned to a harder track stretching out with visible tyre marks ahead in the light of the SUV’s high beams. After a while I was aware that Marvin and the Leader had nodded off to sleep. They had relaxed their grip on the guns, which now pressed hard into my legs, barrels pointing up. The Passenger pushed his seat back, clearly ready to sleep too. Crushed in the middle of the back, my feet astride the central ridge, legs aching, I knew that I wouldn’t be getting any sleep for myself. And indeed I stayed awake through this horrible journey in near-total darkness.

The car’s clock read 05:00 and, though the flat desert landscape all around us was darkened still, there was a coral-orange glow on the horizon that signalled the dawn. The Driver brought us to a halt, and my captors climbed out and commenced the ritual of their morning prayer as the sun struggled up. While they indulged their pieties, I got out of the car only to relieve my bladder. The terrain surrounding us had a stark, forbidding form of beauty. The air was cool and the view, for miles on all sides, was of a kind I had never seen.

But my hopes of being reunited with David in Mombasa had begun to feel thin, deluded, supplanted in my head by a slow-growing fear that some new and awful unknown was about to
be visited on me. Whatever the Navigator had said, whatever his intentions, how could I depend on a promise passed down from what, clearly, was a band of unscrupulous money-hungry crooks? My welfare meant nothing to them other than to the degree that it affected my exchange value. I began to feel terribly small, insignificant, alone, as I’d never felt before – desperate to be redeemed from this.

When our journey recommenced, and we came out of desert into scrubland, part of me still looked out of the window in vain for any sign of coast or sea that would suggest Mombasa. But the only sights to see – intermittently, amid the far-reaching aridity of the landscape – were sights that spoke of the desert. At first I thought I was experiencing a mirage when, in the distance, I saw a camel train – a lone herder leading one tethered camel and, behind them, maybe fifty more. But it was real, and bizarrely breathtaking. Then, as if from nowhere, there came into view a house made out of branches and tarpaulin, rounded like a dome. A man stood outside, and he waved to us as we sped past. Later, no less surreal in my eyes, we drove by a set of dormitory-like buildings, concrete, long and single-storey with corrugated-iron roofs, surrounded by high chain-link fencing. Three children came up to the fence, and held on to it as they watched us speed off.

After that, the terrain became tough once again, until we latched onto a well-defined dirt track. I saw a huge black-
and-white
four-wheel-drive approaching from the other direction, and Marvin and the Leader exchanged looks, glancing too at their rifles. I let myself imagine this car would be my rescuer, who had been tracking us since we came on land, ready now to make an arrest … But when our car veered aside the other vehicle sped by.

It wasn’t long before another car was heading our way – a beige Toyota Land Cruiser, no licence plate, two men in front – and this car pulled over, as did we. From out of the Land Cruiser came a corpulent and strikingly ugly man, poorly dressed, who lumbered towards us. A diminutive sidekick emerged from the passenger side and ran along at his heel.

Our Driver got out and went to shake the Fat Man’s hand. In short order everyone but me was out and greeting one another with smiles and hardy handshakes. The Leader appeared especially relieved to me – cheerful, as if by this rendezvous he had accomplished something significant. I sat in the back seat, where I’d sat for six or seven hours, nonplussed, the confusion in my head much exacerbated by hunger, thirst and fatigue. I only wanted to know if these men would take me to David. Any other prospect was unthinkable.