The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began. Adrian Levy

their travellers’ cheques. The leader answered for him. The group’s commander was waiting in Aru to question them, he said. ‘Israeli spies are operating in the valley. Your husbands are now suspects. Bring some warm clothes.’ Spies? It sounded too ridiculous to be true. As the gunmen started to move away, Keith was still frantically searching for his jacket in their tent. They were not prepared to wait a moment longer, Bashir said. Julie took off her jacket and pushed it into Keith’s arms. ‘Take mine,’ she said, looking her husband in the eyes as he was pulled away. Then she locked eyes with the teenage gunman. ‘Leave him alone, he’s just an electrician from Teesside,’ she wanted to scream in his face.

      ‘No harm will come to your men,’ the leader said, as Julie and Cath began to cry. ‘After their passports are checked, they will return in the morning.’ Cath and Julie watched Paul, Keith and the silent John (whose name they still did not know) being frog-marched down the Meadow and into the dark. ‘I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,’ Julie said. ‘They just took off down the river, the ten armed men, and our three.’

      Julie and Cath huddled in silence as the rain drizzled. ‘I don’t think they’re coming back,’ Cath said finally. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Julie, fighting back her tears, ‘they are coming back.’ Outwardly confident, inwardly she was falling to pieces. ‘I wanted to believe they would come back,’ she recalled. Saying it out loud might make it come true. ‘“They will bring them back; of course they will bring them back,” I was saying to myself, while all the time what you’re really thinking is, “I bet they don’t.”’

      It was almost 8 p.m. by the time Jane and Don saw the armed party returning from the Upper Camp. They had been gone for more than two hours, and now they seemed to have other foreigners with them. As the party got closer, Jane recognised Keith. She caught his eye and he acknowledged her, but his previously happy-go-lucky face was now sober and worried. She did not recognise Paul Wells, with his straggly ponytail and goatee, or John Childs, a gaunt-looking man who refused to make eye contact with anyone, his face swivelled to the ground. Childs, she recalled, as she rewound this moment over and over again in her mind, was the one who most struck her. He looked a wreck. He would vividly remember the episode too. ‘My mind was absolutely clear. I knew what was going down. I understood at that instant that we were being marched to our deaths. I knew that I would never get out of this unless I took drastic action. I felt, instinctively, that I could trust no one, and that the only way to save myself was to take matters into my own hands. What everyone else deduced was not my concern.’

      Seconds later, before Jane could take in what was happening, one of the gunmen came over. Her guide Bashir translated. ‘He says that Don must dress warmly. He is going to Aru with the others. There is a senior commander waiting to question them about being Israeli spies.’ Jane’s head whirled with questions. ‘For the love of Pete, we had no idea what this was all about,’ she recalled, searching for meaning in the eyes of Don’s captors.