Interrogator:

Describe your first meeting with Mr Peter Maxwell.

Harriet Chetwode-Talbot:

Yes, I remember that visit to Glen Tulloch with Fred and Peter Maxwell. It was horrendous.

Peter Maxwell:

– is this being recorded? Well, I don’t care-is the most ghastly little man. How people like that get into such positions of power is quite beyond me. Did you read that appalling interview in the Sunday Telegraph he gave when he returned to London from Glen Tulloch?

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.