‘Thanks,’ I said to her, as she walked down the corridor to her room. I don’t know if she heard me.

I thought for a while about my life as I undressed in my bedroom. It was warm, and a fire still burned low in the grate. I hung my borrowed evening clothes in the wardrobe and changed into my borrowed pyjamas and, having brushed my teeth, climbed between the white linen sheets of the enormous, soft bed.

What a strange evening it had been.

I remember thinking as I lay in bed that everything about my life is strange now. I am sailing in uncharted waters and my old life is a distant shore, still visible through the haze of retrospection, but receding to a grey line on the horizon. What lies ahead, I do not know. What had the sheikh said? I could feel sleep coming upon me fast, and the words that came into my mind, my last waking thought, were his but also seemed to come from somewhere else: ‘Faith comes before hope, and before love.’

I slept better that night than I had done for a long time.

Interrogator:

Describe how you found the salmon?

Alfred Jones:

It is not my happiest memory. The chartered helicopter came to pick us up after breakfast the next morning and the sheikh, Harriet, Peter Maxwell and I climbed in and buckled our straps. The blades started turning and then, in a moment, the grey roofs and soft green lawns of Glen Tulloch were slipping sideways below us. We flew amongst the scurrying rain clouds and over the brown moors beyond the house, which sloped gradually upwards to become craggy mountains.

Then the helicopter found a line of lochs heading southwest. I think it must have been the Great Glen. Low clouds brushed against the helicopter and obscured the view from time to time until suddenly the sky cleared and it seemed as if we were flying straight into a brilliant sun. Below us now, sheets of water alternated with the spongy greens and browns of headlands, and I saw we were losing height and approaching the shore of a sea loch. I glimpsed the structures I expected to see below us.

We landed in an empty car park next to some Portakabins. Beyond them was a jetty with a couple of boats tied up, and beyond that, metal structures in the loch glinted in the sunlight. As the rotors stopped spinning, a door in one of the Portakabins opened, and two figures in oilskins and hard hats came out to greet us.

When we were on the ground the first of them shouted above the engine noise, ‘Dr Jones? Dr Alfred Jones?’

The pilot cut the engines and I said, ‘That’s me. Archie Campbell?’

‘Aye, that’s me. Welcome to McSalmon Aqua Farms, Dr Jones.’

I presented Peter Maxwell and Harriet and the sheikh to him. The sheikh was wearing a beret and a military-looking pullover with epaulettes, and khaki drill trousers. Harriet and I were in waxed jackets and jeans. Peter Maxwell was wearing a white trench coat over his suit and looked, I thought, like a private detective from a bad film.

Archie Campbell gestured behind him to the cages moored in the loch.

‘You want a tour?’

‘That was rather the idea.’

We went into the Portakabin and were handed cups of hot Nescafe. Then Archie Campbell said, ‘Well, now. Let me tell you what we do here. We raise the finest, freshest salmon that money can buy. Don’t believe what they tell you. There’s nothing wrong with farmed salmon. And at least you know where they’ve been, not like the wild ones which could have swum through anything!’

He roared with laughter to show it was a joke. On the wall of the cabin was a laminated chart showing the different stages of rearing farmed salmon: the freshwater hatchery where the broodstock was reared to become alevins, then fry; the cages where the salmon parr were released and grown to smolts; the big cages further out in the saltwater of the loch where the smolts were ranched to become mature salmon. Archie led us through all this and then, when it was obvious we had had enough, suggested a tour by boat.

There was a converted fishing boat tied up to a jetty; we climbed in and slowly chugged out into the middle of the loch. Now that we were close we could see the metal structures were a series of booms which formed the tops of deep cages moored to the bed of the loch. The water inside these booms was frantic with movement, boiling with the desperate churning of tens of thousands of fish which all wanted to be somewhere else. Every few seconds a fish would leap out of the water as if it was attempting to escape or climb some fish ladder or run up some waterfall that its instincts or its race memory told it should be there. I could hardly bear to look. Here was a creature whose most profound instincts urged it to swim downriver until it could smell the saltwater of the ocean and then find the feeding grounds of its ancestors in the far north of the Atlantic, where it would live for the next two or three years. And then, by an even greater miracle, it would return south, travelling past the mouths of all of the rivers where it might have been born until something made it turn north again, searching the coastal waters until it smelt or sensed in some other way the river waters that led to the place where it had been spawned. But these salmon spent their whole lives in a cage a few metres deep and a few metres wide. ‘Look at the little darlings,’ said Archie Campbell fondly. ‘Look at all the exercise they get. Don’t tell me they aren’t every bit as fit as wild salmon.’

The water around the cages was cloudy with effluent, debris of all sorts floating past. The sheikh looked around him with growing dismay. Then he turned to me and said, ‘This is the only way? The only way?’

‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘The only way.’

‘And how many was it you will be wanting, Dr Jones?’ asked Archie Campbell.

‘We’re still working on numbers. Think along the lines of five thousand, if you can.’

‘It’s a big order. We’ll need notice.’

‘I know,’ I said.

On the flight back to Glen Tulloch the sheikh said nothing for a while. I knew this was not what he had envisaged. He had imagined silver fish which had run home from the storm-tossed waters of the North Atlantic, fresh as paint, surging miraculously up the waters of the Wadi Aleyn. He had not imagined these sea lice-infested creatures, born and raised in the equivalent of a gigantic prison.

But that was what we were going to have to use; there was no other solution. Eventually, the sheikh smiled a bitter smile, turned to Peter Maxwell and said, ‘You see, Mr Maxwell, how our project answers to the wishes of your government? How well it matches your policies? We will liberate these salmon from captivity. We will give them freedom. And we will give them a choice. We will release them into the waters of the wadi, and they can vote to turn one way to the sea, or the other way to the mountains. I think that is very democratic, is it not?’

Peter Maxwell, I remember, chewed his lip and said nothing.