Terminal Tackle

Henderson was standing waist deep in the reservoir with his back to me, but I was certain that he knew I was there on the bank the whole time.  

It was a grey and bitter December day and the chances of catching a fish would be slight in my view. My assistant, Sanjoy Shah, simply could not believe that a man would choose to spend a day in this way; half immersed in chilled drinking-water, in order to catch a fish that you could buy in the supermarket for less than the cost of a permit. 

In response, I asked him;  “If you were about to spend 12 years or more in prison, what would you be doing now?”

He thought on this for only a moment and said that he would be with his family, which seemed a good answer to me. But in my own mind I was unsure. What would I do in Henderson’s place?  There was nothing and no-one at home for him now, and no career either. He was finished. With retirement round the corner, I felt pretty near the same way.

Shah and I were dressed in standard-issue black, hooded jackets and we both wore gloves but after an hour we felt frozen through. We took it in turns to go back to the car and warm up. I didn’t expect trouble but we put on our stab vests for the extra layer of insulation. 

Out in the water, Henderson was wearing ancient, baggy PVC chest waders and a short wax jacket, but I guessed he had a few layers underneath and he wore fingerless mittens so he could work his line and reel until the cold got too much. He was topped-out in a balaclava with a baseball cap on top of that and the hood of his jacket over that. All the same, he must have been half frozen.

I’m a keen angler myself, but even I was getting bored with watching him casting and slowly retrieving his line without any sign of a fish that we could see. He came ashore once for pee but didn’t look up at us. At that point my radio crackled and our boat-crew came on to say they couldn’t see him; was everything OK? I told them to hold position and signed off. There was no way he would run for it, but he might just try to drown himself: Hence the boat. 

I went back to the car for a warm up and a tea from my flask but Shah called me back. He sounded excited. 

“My God! Henderson’s hooked a whopper! You’ll want to see this.”

The rod was bowed over and beating up and down at the same time, while Henderson was reversing into the shallows. For the first time, he looked over his shoulder for me. Our eyes briefly met and he gave me a nod, then he resumed playing the fish until he could net it. We got a good view of it when he lifted his net clear of the water and we were impressed. It looked like a salmon but was a rainbow trout, probably weighing about 8 pounds. 'Not a monster, but bigger than any I had ever caught. He patted it on the head like a puppy and released it straight from the net without handling it.

And that was it! He started packing his gear and we walked to down to meet him. All he said when I arrested him was “Thanks.”

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