2007 - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Read online

  Interrogator:

  It will be included in the evidence. Please describe your first meeting with Peter Maxwell.

  Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

  He didn’t exactly make a favourable first impression. He can’t be five foot six. He wears suits that are years too young for him, nipped in the waist, shoulder padding, scarlet silk lining peeking out everywhere, which obviously cost a fortune in tailor’s bills. Candy-striped shirts with huge cufflinks. And the ties! And what is that stuff he puts on his hair! It reeks! Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. It was funny, though, to see him mincing across the wet lawns at Glen Tulloch in his Gucci loafers. The sheikh made him do it. He had to go outside in the rain and inspect the sheikh’s honour guard, or whatever they are.

  Two dozen tall Yemeni tribesmen—skinny, hawk-nosed, fierce-eyed men who look as if they would kill you for the price of a goat. Or less. And Peter Maxwell had to walk past and pretend to inspect them while they stood to attention in their thobes, their long warm wraparound robes, with jackets over them, clutching their curved daggers in one hand and their fishing rods in the other. If only I had remembered to bring my digital camera. Couldn’t I have sold that photo to the Sun

  His loafers were wet through. Ruined.

  I remember wondering if the sheikh might not have rather a well-developed sense of fun. He never appeared to make jokes. But I wonder.

  We had the stickiest evening imaginable. Fred was down in the dumps. The sheikh told me before we came up on the plane that Fred’s wife had left him. Or not left him, exactly, but decided to go and work in Geneva. It sounded like much the same thing. I don’t know how the sheikh knew. But he always seemed to know everything.

  Poor Fred. Poor me, come to that. I hadn’t heard from Robert, my fiancé, for weeks. His letters stopped coming and then mine started being returned unopened, with the message that it had not been possible to forward them. So I was lonely and miserable and worrying to death about what might be happening to Robert. You can understand why.

  Oh, God.

  The witness became emotionally disturbed for a brief period. The interview resumed an hour later.

  Interrogator:

  Please continue, Ms Chetwode-Talbot.

  Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

  I was very stressed out by the project. It had become too big. I was seconded full-time by my firm to support it. There was an immense amount to do. Fred did a good job, don’t get me wrong. The science and the engineering studies and proposals that he produced, or had produced for him, were brilliant. No one will ever know the amount of work that man put in. But at the end of the day Fred was a scientist, not an administrator. So I was spending twelve hours a day talking to contractors, talking to auditors, running a project team, talking to bankers, talking to Peter Maxwell’s office, talking to Fred’s boss to keep him off Fred’s back, writing reports, writing letters, writing spreadsheets for my partners, who were hypnotised by the fees rolling in. Then at seven o’clock at night I’d get off the phone and start dealing with the hundred or so emails that had come in.

  Some of them were from other teams working on the project, but some were from fishing-rod manufacturers, and wader manufacturers, and fishing-wear manufacturers wanting us to use their products. Some were from people wanting work as consultants: retired oilmen from Saudi who knew a thing or two about wadis, indigent fisheries experts wanting to advise us on the science, an expert in ancient Arabian irrigation systems who believed that our project had been forecast and described in hieroglyphs on the interior walls of the Great Pyramid. I was emailed by people wanting to buy a week’s fishing on the Wadi Aleyn, people wanting to ask the sheikh to speak at their next flyfishing or angling association dinner, people wanting a timeshare in a villa in the Yemen. I received daily and hourly requests for donations from the Retired Drift Netsmen’s Association, the Retired Gillies Association, the North Atlantic Salmon Foundation, the Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Rivers Trusts—from just about everyone you could imagine except for Oxfam.

  Come to think of it, I think Oxfam asked for money too. Why not? We were spending it like water, to coin a phrase.

  The project had taken over every moment of my waking life. I was exhausted, and anxious about whether we would succeed. I was worried about what would happen to my job when it was all over; I had completely lost track of the rest of the business and someone else had been given all my other files. I had one client and one only: the sheikh. It was only his calm certainty that kept me sane.

  It wasn’t surprising that Fred and I were such poor company that evening. Fred’s workload was as enormous as mine, and as far as I knew he wasn’t getting paid any extra for it. He was on secondment from NCFE, still drawing the same miserable salary. At least I would bank my partner’s share of the profits. And Fred was more exposed than I was. If the project failed, his reputation would die with it; there would always be plenty of people to point out where he had gone wrong. If it succeeded, I didn’t know what would happen. For all I knew he might be created a life peer. Or made a freeman of the city of Sana’a.

  Interrogator:

  Can you focus your remarks on what was actually said that evening?

  Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

  I’ve got off the point, haven’t I? Yes, that was a dreadful evening. Peter Maxwell was either pompous or provocative. I don’t know which I found the most awful. He dominated the conversation, such as it was, and kept trying to goad the sheikh into saying things about the Middle East. He wanted the sheikh to say something unmeasured, incautious. Then Peter would have something on him. He wouldn’t use it. He’d file it and keep it as ammunition for some other day.

  Then he started making patronising remarks about how the prime minister wanted this photo opportunity and that photo opportunity. He actually turned to Fred at one point in the evening and told him to make sure the prime minister caught a fish, and to bear in mind he would only allow twenty minutes in his schedule to do so. I think he imagined that salmon could be driven to the fishermen, like grouse over guns.

  Of course the sheikh took no notice of him. He was endlessly polite, and also managed to deflect Fred from saying something he might have regretted afterwards. I could almost see steam coming out of Fred’s nostrils at one point in the evening. The sheikh is a very subtle, intelligent man. He won’t be manipulated by people like Peter Maxwell. He just lets them make fools of themselves.

  Eventually Peter took himself off—to go and play with his Blackberry, I expect. The sheikh then turned to Fred and told him, not quite in these words, to pull his finger out and get a grip of himself. And he said something else too, about faith, and love. I can’t remember the words he used then, either. It was a typical sheikhism. A mixture of down to earth and practical with a strong dash of the mystical.

  At any rate, it had the most extraordinary effect on Fred. He jerked upright in his chair as if he had been poked with an electric cattle prod. After a moment his expression began to change. He stopped looking so Eeyorish and sorry for himself. His face took on a distant look, as if he was seeing something he thought he rather liked, but a long way off, too far away to be certain of what he was looking at.

  When Fred wasn’t being gloomy, or pompous, I thought he looked rather nice. I walked upstairs with him and, on the landing, I kissed him goodnight, on the cheek. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done. Maybe that was less than professional, but I didn’t care. I felt a little sorry for him, and a little sorry for myself, so I kissed him on the cheek. He looked at me when I did that. He didn’t try to make anything of it, for which I was grateful. He just said, ‘Thanks,’ very quietly and as if he really meant it.

  When I first met Fred and we were still at the stage of calling each other Dr Jones and Ms Harriet I’m-not-quite-sure-how-to-pronounce-your-surname-so-I’ll-just-mumble-it, I think I would rather have kissed a salmon than Fred. Now, I was not so sure. I went to bed wondering what would have happened if I had kissed him properly, on the lips.

/>   The next morning we took a helicopter down to see the fish farm. Fred had told me about this and kept saying, ‘The sheikh will hate it. He’ll hate it.’

  But there was nowhere else to get the fish, you see. We needed so many and it seemed as if trying to rear fish from wild stock would meet with so many objections and obstacles that it would take for ever, perhaps never. I couldn’t see the difference—then. Salmon farms breed salmon. We needed salmon, and lots of them. What was the problem?

  So Fred gave me a long lecture about genetic integrity, and why wild salmon have it and farmed salmon don’t. I couldn’t see why it mattered. A fish is a fish, isn’t it? I had to pretend to be interested for half an hour. At the end of his speech I told him, ‘If this is the only way to get the salmon we need in the time we’ve got, let’s please just get on with it.’

  The sheikh did hate it. I hated it, too. I hated seeing those poor fish crowded together like that in those cages, swimming in their own dirt. I hated the way they leaped into the air all the time as if they were trying to escape from a vast prison camp, which is of course what it was. I know they were only fish. But still.

  Peter Maxwell took a few pictures; otherwise he said nothing until we were back in the helicopter. I think he thought that was how salmon always lived because he said how fascinating it was to see wild creatures so close, and what a marvellous tourist attraction they could be. Then he started to muse about whether one couldn’t sell tickets for people to row alongside the cages and hook fish out of them. He took out his Blackberry and wrote a note to himself to talk to the Scottish Executive about it. I saw Fred give him a look of such contempt and loathing it was lucky Peter did not see it.

  When we got back to Glen Tulloch the helicopter dropped us off and took Peter Maxwell on to Inverness airport, so he could fly back to Downing Street and tell his boss all about it. He said, ‘The PM will be very impressed by what I have to tell him.’ There was more about being ‘deeply gratified by the progress made’ and ‘how delighted the prime minister will be to share the moment of the launch’. Then he turned to Fred and me and instructed us to keep him posted. He wanted weekly updates by email; he wanted us to keep at our work on the project night and day. I must say I felt like giving him a piece of my mind. Fred was a civil servant, so perhaps that gave Peter the right to give him instructions although I don’t really see why. But he had no right to tell me what to do. I was working as a partner in a private firm, and the sheikh was my client and the sheikh was the only person who could tell me what to do.

  Then Peter Maxwell was gone. I saw later that he went straight back to London and gave that interview to the Sunday Telegraph Magazine about what a great salmon fisherman he was going to be.

  Interrogator:

  Please describe the events which followed Mr Maxwell’s departure.

  Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

  Well, Fred was almost incandescent with rage after Peter left. He turned to me as the helicopter headed for the airport and said, ‘That man…’ a little too loudly, because the sheikh overheard him and said, ‘I am so pleased your prime minister is interested enough to send such an important man as Mr Maxwell all the way to my modest home in Scotland to meet me. I am so glad he came. His contribution was very valuable.’

  Interrogator:

  Describe the alleged incident on the river.

  Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

  The sheikh decided that, as we had a few hours before we needed to get back to London, we would go and fish. I was invited to sit on the riverbank and watch. So that was how we came to be on the river that autumn afternoon, with the leaves turning buttery yellow on the rowans, and the clusters of gleaming red berries reminding one that winter was coming. There was enough warmth in the sun for it still to be pleasant to sit on the fine, soft grass. I knew I would be covered in pine needles and leaf mould when I stood up, but I didn’t care.

  The dark waters of the Tulloch flowed below me. On each bank were scrubby woodlands of birch, rowan, and Scots pine. A few rhododendrons provided some cover. I heard a pheasant sounding its alarm call, not far away. I watched the two men fishing.

  In his waders the sheikh lost some of his majesty. He was just a simple fisherman, at one with the river, his whole being concentrated on his next step and his next cast. I saw him form the double loop of his cast and heard the hiss of the line as, without apparent effort, a great length of it shot out silkily and the fly landed on the water with a kiss. Thirty or forty yards below him was Fred. On land, Fred was a little wooden in his movements at times. In the water he was graceful, moving easily, casting, as the sheikh did, with an economy and skill that were somehow surprising if you were used to seeing him behind a desk. They had both forgotten me, forgotten the project, forgotten everything except the immediate moment and the riddle of the dark waters that hid the fish they sought. Somewhere round a bend in the river was Colin, fishing as well, perhaps as recompense for a trying few days training the sheikh’s Yemeni future corps de Gillies, but I knew that if the sheikh so much as touched a fish with his fly, Colin would appear miraculously at his elbow with a landing net, ready to help bring the fish onto the bank.

  It was so peaceful. My eyelids felt heavy. I was tired: shattered from weeks of work, exhausted by weeks of worry about Robert. I could hear the musical sounds of the river, the hiss of the line as it went out, the occasional chirrup of some small dipper or other wading birds balancing somewhere on a stone, its tail going up and down. A sense of deep calm flowed through me, a feeling that everything would be all right: the sheikh would have his salmon river, Robert would ring me from an airport saying he was on his way home, and everything would be fine and I would be happy again. Then I heard the alarm call of the pheasant again. It made me look up.

  Coming between the trees towards us was a small, dark man in a kilt and stockings. His top half was encased in a bulky leather jacket. On his head was some kind of beret, perhaps more reminiscent of a French onion-seller than a Highland clansman. I heard his feet scrunching on the first fallen leaves of autumn, and I realised I had been half listening to that noise for a few moments before I saw him. Then I realised that the little man was not fat. He looked very thin, in fact half starved. What had made him look so big was some kind of pistol with a long barrel that he swept from underneath his jacket.

  Everything then took on the aspect of an underwater ballet. I had all the time in the world to watch him cock the gun, all the time in the world to scramble to my feet, and all the time in the world to shout a warning to the sheikh. Except my voice froze in my throat, and the first person to speak was the little dark man. ‘Allahu akhbar, ’ he said conversationally, in a clear high voice.

  The sheikh turned in the river at this sound and saw him, and without any sign of alarm replied, ‘Salaam alaikum, ’ raising the tips of his fingers to his brow and then opening his hand in a gesture of greeting. The little man raised his gun and sighted it on the sheikh, and the sheikh stood still in the river waiting to be shot.

  All this happened very slowly, it seemed to me at the time, and took perhaps five seconds. Then everything speeded up again. I found my voice and a shriek came out, not the words of warning I had wanted to shout. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Fred moving towards the bank, wading through the waist-deep water with the fluency of an otter. But he had no chance of reaching us in time. And if he did, the little man would most likely have shot him too, and me. That was probably the plan. There were no bodyguards around. The sheikh never allowed anyone near the river to disturb the tranquillity of his fishing. I closed my eyes and then opened them again as the first shots were fired.

  They went straight up into the air as the little man jerked inexplicably backwards, howling and grabbing at his face. The gun fell to the ground from his hand as he clutched at something invisible. Somewhere behind I glimpsed Colin straining on a big fishing rod bent nearly double. He had somehow cast and hooked the little man, and was now reeling him in.

  Then I f
ainted, or at least somehow disconnected from the proceedings. When I became aware of events again I was lying on the grass and Fred was bending over me, patting the back of my hand and saying, ‘Harriet, Harriet. Are you all right?’ Or was he saying, ‘It’s all right’? There was a buzzing in my ears and I couldn’t quite hear. Then things came slowly back into focus, and I was able to sit up and look around me while Fred supported me with his arm around my shoulders.

  The little man was now sitting on a bank some yards away, clutching his cheek with a bloodstained handkerchief. He was talking volubly to the sheikh in Arabic, and weeping at the same time. Four of the sheikh’s Yemeni guards stood nearby. They had abandoned their fishing rods, and stood with their hands on the hilts of the great, curved jambia daggers that they wore. I had no doubt they would cut the little man into shreds given the slightest encouragement to do so by the sheikh.

  I heard Colin say, ‘Aye, I seen him come up the glen on the other bank, but I had just had a tug on my line from a fish, so I didn’t take much notice for a wee minute. Then I knew he was wrong. His kilt was a Campbell tartan. There’s nae Campbells in this glen. They were all chased away many hundreds of years since. So I left my fish for another day and came and cast my hook at the wee man, instead.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘He didn’t put up as much of a fight as the fish would have. I had him on the grass in three minutes.’

  I never saw the little man again. I believe from what I heard from Malcolm later that a few days after that he was flown back to the Yemen inside a hamper marked ‘Harrods’, on the sheikh’s jet.

  The sheikh told us that evening on the plane to London, ‘Poor man! He was no assassin. He was a goatherd whose goats had died. He had been told his family would be killed if he did not do this thing, and that they would be given thirty goats as diyah, blood money, if he did. How he got this far is a mystery. He spoke little English, and he was wearing the most extraordinary clothes.’