From:
Date:
21 December
To:
Subject:
Captain Robert Matthews
My name is Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and I was engaged to a serving officer, Captain Robert Matthews, who was recently (21 November) posted as Missing in Action on the Operation Telic 2 website. Please can you help me. I desperately need to know:
how he died
where he died
why he died
Please can someone contact me as soon as possible?
From:
Date:
3 January
To:
Subject:
Re: Captain Robert Matthews
Owing to the volume of enquiries and current MoD budgetary constraints, this operation has recently been offshored to Hyderabad, India. Please call us on 08004008000 and you will be answered by one of our highly trained staff. All of our staff have taken the UK NVQ in bereavement counselling or a local equivalent of the same qualification. As this operation has only recently been transferred, you may experience some linguistic difficulties with some of our newer staff. Please be patient, they are seeking to do their best to help you.
All calls will be monitored for training and quality purposes. The counselling service is entirely free, but calls cost 50p per minute.
29
Interrogator:
When did you last meet the sheikh in the UK?
Dr Alfred Jones:
I met him in a hotel in London, in early July. We had dinner together, and Harriet joined us.
Interrogator:
What was the purpose of the dinner? Was Mr Peter Maxwell present?
Alfred Jones:
No, Peter Maxwell was not present then, although I met him that same day. It was a few days before I went out again to the Yemen for the final project launch. The sheikh had asked Harriet to dine with him at the Ritz. I had never been to the Ritz before. It was a beautiful, elegant room, with large round tables well apart from each other. I arrived first, of course; I am always too early for trains, planes and dinners. I spent ten minutes gazing at the expensively suited, smartly dressed inhabitants of the other tables. Have you ever dined at the Ritz?
Interrogator:
No, I have not dined at the Ritz.
Alfred Jones:
If you ever do, you’ll understand that I felt, even in my best dark suit, rather shabby, and I was glad when I saw the sheikh arriving, clad as usual in his white robes and followed by a respectful maître d’hotel.
‘Good evening, Dr Alfred,’ said the sheikh as I rose from my seat to greet him. ‘You are early. You must be hungry. Good.’ He sat in the chair the maître d’hotel had drawn out for him and ordered a whisky and soda for himself and a glass of champagne for me. I remember the sheikh turned to me and told me how good the food was there. I said I felt sure it was, and the sheikh nodded and said, ‘I know it is. The chef who now works here in the hotel used to work for me at my houses in London and Glen Tulloch, but I think he became bored with just cooking for me, and of course many weeks he was on his own when I was in the Yemen or elsewhere. So I understood when he accepted the offer of a job here, and of course I can still come and sample his cooking. I often do.’
The drinks arrived and, with them, Harriet. I had not seen her for weeks. She had gone back to work at Fitzharris & Price but then had experienced something that I think must have been close to a nervous breakdown. Now she spent most of her time living at home with her parents, working from a laptop in her father’s study. My first impression was how pale and thin she was. Then she smiled at us, and her smile brought a lump to my throat. She still looked very pretty, despite her worn out air. I felt a great wave of pity mixed with desire sweep across me. I remember thinking, Desire? I am fifteen years her senior, for God’s sake.
‘You are off to a good start,’ she said, looking at my glass. ‘Yes, please, the same for me, if it is what I think it is.’
‘The Krug ‘85,’ murmured the wine waiter who had handed us our drinks and was waiting for further orders. ‘His Excellency orders no other champagne.’
‘I didn’t know there was any other kind,’ said the sheikh. He smiled at us, and then there was the business of menus being handed round. Once this was done and orders had been taken, the sheikh raised his glass and said, ‘A toast!
To my friends, Dr Alfred and Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, who have worked without pause, who have set aside every difficulty both small and great-some difficulties, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, have been very great for you, very great indeed-and have succeeded against all odds in bringing my project to this point.’
He raised his glass and drank to us. I saw the people at the next table gazing at the unusual, but in that place perhaps not unknown, spectacle of a sheikh drinking from a large tumbler of whisky and soda. He may have been aware of such glances, but they meant nothing to him.
I, in turn, raised my glass and said, ‘To the project, Sheikh Muhammad, to its successful launch and its great future, and to the vision that inspired it!’
Harriet and I drank to the sheikh and he inclined his head in acknowledgement and smiled again. ‘To the project!’ he repeated.
This was our celebration dinner. The sheikh had suggested it a few days ago, after a project review meeting at Harriet’s office. Everything was now ready. I had been out on a final tour of inspection in June. The holding tanks had been built, as had the channels that led from them into the Wadi Aleyn. Water had been pumped from the aquifer into the holding tanks, and they had been leak tested. The sluice gates had been tested. The oxygenation equipment, which would keep the salmon alive when the temperature rose, also worked. The heat exchangers, designed to cool the water in the holding basins when the sunlight reached them, were fine. All the equipment had been checked and rechecked. We had run, and rerun, our computer models a hundred times. Nothing had been left to chance, except the great chance of the project itself.
And the wadi had been re-engineered too. There were ramps for the fish to swim up where before large boulders might have obstructed their passage. There was a graded track running alongside the wadi to allow safe access for spectators and anglers, when it was full. Concrete casting platforms had been built at fifty-yard intervals, to allow fishermen who did not want to wade the ability to cover the river with their flies.
Cases of equipment had been flown out to al-Shisr. Stacked in a room at the sheikh’s palace were dozens of fishing rods: fifteen-foot rods, twelve-foot rods, nine-foot rods. There were reels of floating line, sinking line; sink tips and leaders of all types. There were boxes and boxes of flies, of every different mixture of colour, size and shape. The selection had been made from flies which were known to catch fish on every imaginable salmon river, from the Spey to the Vistula, from the Oykel to the Ponoi, because no one really knew what fly a salmon in the Yemen would take, and what fly it would not take. The sheikh, I know, was looking forward to hours of experimentation.
The sheikh’s honour guard, who had received training in the arts of fly fishing from Colin McPherson, were all back in the Yemen, and would be kitted out with rods and tackle, and encouraged to keep their hand in until the great day. They had been ordered to find a flat bit of desert, and practise Spey casting for an hour every day. The guard to a man were competing to become the first man to catch a salmon in the Wadi Aleyn (and indeed in the whole Islamic world) and the sheikh had already made it known that the first man to catch a fish would receive privileges and riches beyond his dreams, sufficient for the rest of his days, and all the days of his children, and all the days of his children’s children.