The Last King of Scotland (1998)

by Giles Foden

  She’s got the looks

  She’s got the style

  She’s got the kind of skin

  That drives ‘em wild

  Hey what she got?

  SHE GOT ENVI!

  It had taken over an hour to get the Land Rover, however, and I didn’t know whether he had given up on me. I sat there at the wheel for a bit. Once again, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to wait or to drive off. Either way, I didn’t know whether I was being tempted by good or bad.

  In the end, after another hour, it was simply irritation with waiting that made me turn the key in the ignition. I followed the road out of the city and then down to the lake shore. I didn’t know quite where I was heading, and even though no one could see me, I felt foolish sitting there with the folds of my surgical gown about my knees.

  I drove on, past the marshes. Soon, I knew, I would come to State House, where there were more Tanzanians. And my bungalow. I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t go anywhere.

  I stopped the Land Rover and looked about. I was in a village by the lakeshore, deserted and almost totally destroyed. I slowly realized that it was the one where Marina and I had hired the boat.

  I got out and walked down to the pier. There were several dinghies moored there, a number with outboard motors. They were rocking gently, and the noise of the boats rubbing against the wood soothed me. Almost without thinking, I gathered some jerrycans of fuel from the boats and climbed down into the biggest one, untied the lanyard and pulled the starting cord.

  I could see lights across the dark expanse of the lake. Kisumu, Kenya. I trained my eye on them. NG seeking a light. The motor rattled away, and I glided like a phantom across the lonely vast-ness of Lake Victoria. For the first time in years, I felt free. At the stern, the algae bloom thrown up by my passage glowed red in the darkness – not just one red but a coral-scarlet-salmon-ruby-crimson host of incarnadine, incandescent shades.

  I don’t know how long it took me. Six hours? Seven? At one point, a triangle of geese flew across the moon high above. Their throaty noise, summoning some half-buried memory from the past, made me long for Scotland.

  In any case, it was almost dawn when I reached the port town. Climbing up the wall of the dock, I grazed my thighs and shins – badly, drawing blood – and also got myself covered in the brown slime that clung to the concrete.

  There was no one about. I sat at the top for a few minutes, breathless, and then, pulling myself together, went in search of the police station. I must have cut a curious figure, walking in there in my gown. The sergeant at the desk wrote down my name and promised to follow up my request for a telephone with which to call the British Ambassador in Nairobi. It was time to go home.

  ∗

  At least, that is what I thought. In the event, I was taken to Nairobi in a police car. There, rather than delivering me to the Embassy, they brought me to an ancient fort and locked me in a cell. No one would answer my questions when I shouted through the bars. Shocked and exhausted, I collapsed on the bed and started to sob.

  Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to look round the cell. There was no window there, only a ventilator high up in the walls. The latter were made of massive stone blocks, bigger and older than the ones at Nakasero. There was Kikuyu graffiti scratched on the blocks, which led me to believe this had been a place where the British had interviewed suspects during the Mau Mau emergency. But they could just have been written by more recent detainees…I knew that President Moi’s regime had its own complement of human rights abuses.

  As can well be imagined, I was extremely confused. I didn’t understand why I was being detained until later that day. At around four o’clock, I was taken from the cell into an interrogation room, where a senior police officer was seated with a folder of papers in front of him on the desk.

  “We are holding you on suspicion of murder,” he informed me. “We are considering charging you with planting a bomb on a light aircraft bound from Kampala to Nairobi. Do you have anything to say?”

  I explained about the lion’s head and my total ignorance of what it contained.

  “He was using me,” I protested. “I had absolutely no knowledge of a bomb. I even knew Swanepoel, the pilot, personally. I nearly got on that plane myself. I wish I had.”

  “That is a very tall story,” the police officer said. “How do you expect us to believe it? We know that you were closely involved with Amin.”

  “Amin put me in prison. You can check it.”

  He looked through the papers in the folder. I caught a glimpse of a photograph. My own face. I had no idea when the picture had been taken, or who had taken it.

  “But you were his doctor. We have intelligence on this matter.”

  “It was just a job, and one I regret ever taking. I was never involved in any criminal activity.”

  “In our view you were as close to Idi Amin as anybody was.”

  “I want to speak to the British Ambassador,” I said, horrified that I was once again in danger.

  He kept asking me questions. “Were you a member of the State Research Bureau? How much were you paid to plant the bomb? Is it correct that you were present at scenes of torture at SRB headquarters?”

  I replied, each time, that I was being held illegally, that I had nothing to say, and that I wanted to speak to the Ambassador. Eventually he stopped the barrage of questions and gathered up his papers.

  “Well, what’s going to happen?” I demanded, as he was leaving.

  “I am sorry, Doctor Garrigan,” he said. “The Kenyan government is of the opinion that you are part of the deposed dictator Amin’s apparatus of repression, and therefore guilty of crimes against humanity. And that you knowingly planted the bomb, on his instructions, on that plane. We will either be charging you to that effect – and we would aim to get a confession – or we will be sending you back to Uganda to face trial under the new government there.”

  They returned me to the cell. I lay on the bed again – in great distress, as I would remain all night. I remember muttering to myself, and rocking my body to and fro. I also dimly recall a muzungu in a suit standing in front of the bars of the cell at one point, speaking English to me. But by then I was too delirious to reply.

  The next morning a policeman came in and took hold of me roughly. For the second time in my life, I was dragged from a cell into a shower and afterwards given a set of clean clothes, in this case a safari suit made of thin black cotton.

  Once I was dressed (the material stuck unpleasantly to the weeping grazes on my legs), the policeman delivered me into the company of three armed guards. They handcuffed and blindfolded me. I felt myself being taken to a vehicle. We drove for a long while. I was very frightened, in some ways more frightened than I had ever been in the company of Amin. From the arrangement of the seats, I could tell it was a Land Rover. As we drove, I rehearsed the options in my mind: I was being taken to court, I was being returned to Uganda…

  They opened the back door of the Land Rover. One of the guards removed the blindfold, laughing cruelly as he did so. They pulled me out. The light hurt my eyes, and then I saw with relief that it was the airport. I knew, then, that they weren’t sending me back to Uganda: they would have just taken me to the border in a truck in that case, cheap and easy. I began to think the British must have intervened on my behalf – the man in the suit must have been from the Embassy.

  But before I had time to thank my luck, I found myself pulled along by the guards. They ran with me, the gang of helmets clustering around. They were almost lifting me bodily as we rushed through the departure lounge, my limbs all floppy in theirs and everyone turning – the officials in blue serge, a big Asian party with tin trunks and bunches of flowers, the Kenyan businessmen, the expat schoolkids with their blazers and comics – to see what was amiss.

  It all blurred out then, just the faces and the suitcases and the white walls passing, and suddenly I was in a canvas-top jeep, the hot air off the tarmac hitting m
y face.

  A jumbo was waiting there, its jets already roaring. More policemen were standing at the foot of the steps. I was pulled down, and they hustled me forward and on to the stairway. Climbing the steps, I got a chance to look behind me at the jeep reversing away. My guards sat shadowed under the flapping canopy, oddly formal and dignified as they gripped their guns between their knees. Above it all, the elephant ears of the radar spun round on the roof of the concourse. My last look at Africa.

  The Kenyans made me wear handcuffs right up until I entered the plane. The stewardesses, on the other hand, were exemplary, bringing me my meal and my drinks, once we were airborne, just as if I were an ordinary passenger. As soon as I had eaten, I had a severe bout of diarrhoea, spending over an hour in the toilet. I then returned to my seat and fell into a deep sleep – deep, yet poisoned by dreams of Amin and the things that I had seen.

  We were within a few hours of London when I woke up. The scrapes on my legs had dried off, but were still throbbing painfully. And yet, as we circled over Gatwick, I slowly began to feel a bit brighter about things. Assuming I was able to get up to Scotland without too much fuss, things didn’t seem that bad, I told myself. We landed, and they played a ridiculous sad song on the tannoy as we taxied and hung about – “What do I have to do to make you love me?” went the stupid chorus. I listened to it feeling sorry for myself, looking out at the flashing orange lights and painted yellow lines on the runway. Without any hand luggage to encumber me, I was quickly off the plane.

  No fuss? There was. As soon as I stepped into the customs hall, my eyes blinking from the bright airport lights and the bustle, an immigration official came up to me. He had the kind of paunchy face one associates with steak-houses and beer gardens.

  “Nicholas Garrigan?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said wearily.

  “Can you come with me, please?” he said, taking me by the arm. “There are some immigration queries concerning your arrival in Great Britain.”

  He led me to a small, windowless ante-room, furnished with plastic seats and a formica table. There was an automatic drinks dispenser in the corner and, sitting at the table, a familiar figure. It was Stone, the Embassy man. He had put on weight since leaving Uganda, but his straw-coloured fringe still flopped down in the same way.

  “Hello, Garrigan,” he said. “Long time no see.”

  “You,” I said, dumbfounded.

  “Yes, I arranged for your release.” He seemed very pleased with himself, and I suppose I ought to have been more grateful.

  “Well…thank you. But if it hadn’t been for you, I might not have been in that situation in the first place.”

  “Let me get to the point,” he said, coldly. “We are under no obligation to take you back into this country.”

  “What? You’re joking. I’m British. I have rights.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “Not true. When you took up Ugandan citizenship, you renounced your British rights.”

  “This is preposterous,” I said, standing up. “I refuse to be treated like – ” The immigration official, who had stood behind me, pressed me down back into my seat, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Stone said. “You can’t just arrive in this country, without a passport, without citizenship, and expect things. There are formalities to be gone through. We will have to process a reapplication for citizenship. There is the question, in any case, of whether you are now a fit person to be admitted to Great Britain at all.”

  “Why?” I said. “I have no blood on my hands.”

  Stone waved his own hand. “You may like to know that out there, behind the arrivals barrier, is a whole bunch of reporters waiting to hear your story. They might say otherwise.”

  I said nothing. I heard someone walk past outside, their tread heavy and bouncing on the insubstantial airport floor.

  “What I am concerned with,” Stone continued, “is that your activities in Uganda be seen for what they are: the actions of one man acting on his own. You have to understand that your return in these circumstances could be embarrassing for us.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  He signalled for the official to leave the room.

  “Look,” he said quietly, as the door shut, “your relationship with me, so far as it went, doesn’t exist in official terms. You were acting on your own. What we, as I say, are concerned about is that this information is not distorted by the press.”

  “I will just tell the truth,” I said.

  “Let me make it plain: your admittance to and residence in this country are conditional upon your silence on matters relating to the British Government’s activities in Uganda. If you are not prepared to agree to these conditions, and to live quietly once the initial interest in your arrival has died down, we will be putting you straight back on a plane to Uganda. Do you understand?”

  I was shocked. “Why…didn’t you just leave me in Kenya?”

  “The press was beginning to sniff around. And the Kenyans were preparing to have a public trial. We cut their aid last year and they planned to use you as a way of forcing our hand. Which is what has happened.”

  I said nothing. He pushed some papers across the formica towards me and held out a fountain pen. “These forms repeat the gist of what I’ve been saying to you. I strongly advise you to sign. Furthermore, that money…it is still in your bank account. It’s within our power to freeze the account if you do not comply. It’s as simple as that.”

  I became aware that I had no choice. I had set my mind on returning to Scotland, on some peace and quiet while I decided what to do with the rest of my life. If this was going to be the only way to achieve that, then so be it. I took the pen off him and signed, four times, at the bottom of each page, without reading a word of it.

  Stone was all sweetness and light after that, bringing me a plastic cup of tea from the machine in the corner.

  “I’m pleased you’ve seen sense, Nicholas,” he said, as I held the hot, soft cup. “There’s one other thing. We’ve arranged a publicity expert to help you deal with all the media interest. We wouldn’t want you to be caught off guard.”

  I shrugged, and stared at the stippled plastic wall behind him.

  “We’ve booked a room for you in a hotel. The publicity fellow – his name’s Ed Howarth – will drive you there. We’re going to take you out the back to his car to avoid the journalists. But they’re bound to track you down, so he’s going to organize some interviews to head them off.”

  “I don’t want that,” I said. “I haven’t done anything to warrant that.”

  “You don’t have any choice. Unless we’re able to control the situation, the newspapers will hound you and exploit you, and you may find yourself being in breach of the agreement” – he held up the sheaf of papers I had signed – “without having meant to be. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

  I shrugged again, angry inside that he should be able to do this to me. He put his head round the door and called the official. They took me back into customs and down a long, carpeted corridor towards one of the areas where the airlines dealt with cargo. We came out into a yard where lorries were parked or moving off.

  It was dark and raining. The lights of the lorries and the cargo hangars glistened, reflected in the wet tarmac. As I stepped outside, the night cold hit me; the British weather, those skies that I had forgotten, went deep into my bones. It was partly pleasant, though, the rainy air like something purgative in my lungs. I idly wondered, as we walked through the yard, how ironic it would be, once everything was said and done, if I died of a chill caught at Gatwick airport.

  “Well, Garrigan,” Stone said, interrupting my thoughts to point at a yellow Jaguar parked in front of the lorries. “Here we are.”

  He rapped on the car’s window. The door opened and a large man in a double-breasted suit got out, a cigarette between his lips.

  “Hi, Nick,” said the man, throwing the cigarette
like a dart into a puddle and shaking me by the hand. “You look like you could do with a bath, a drink, and a crash-out.”

  “Well, that’s me done,” said Stone, as I got into the car. He leaned in. “And don’t forget what I said. We’ll be keeping tabs.”

  We drove off. The car smelled of tobacco. Weir, I thought, where was he now? The wet black light of the road skidded by, and held no answer.

  “Don’t worry,” said Howarth, “they leave you alone if you follow the rules. I’ve had cases like this from them before. It’s just a matter of giving people what they want – the government, the media boys, everyone. He probably told you that I’m sorting out your press coverage. They’ll be livid that they didn’t get pictures of you on arrival, so we’ll have to handle things quite carefully. I thought, if you don’t mind” – he turned to look at me in the passenger seat – “we’d do the interviews tomorrow morning.”

  “I just want to be left alone.”

  “We’ll have to deal with the allegations first, I’m afraid,” he said. “Then you’ll be left in peace, I promise.”

  “What allegations?” I said, “I have been locked in prison, and I worked in a country run by a dictator. That’s it.”

  “They are saying that you helped him cut people up. That you helped with tortures in his gaols.”

  “That’s rubbish,” I said, horrified. “I was one of the ones who was locked up.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Howarth said. “I believe you. But you’ll have to explain why you were so close to the old bastard. He’s in Libya at the moment, by the way; no one quite knows how he got out. There’s a rumour that a Tanzanian officer who had been in the King’s African Rifles with him helped him escape.”

  “I don’t care where he is.”

  Howarth looked across at me. “Tell me something. Why did you stay? Why didn’t you just leave?”