Chapter 3

I had to sit down and catch my breath. I said “That can’t be right; I don’t look girly, do I?” He said that it was not that I looked girly now, it was the fact that some small adjustments to my facial bones, that any competent cosmetic surgeon could do, would give me the look he had drawn.

He then got me to look at the other boy’s pictures again and pointed out the similar procedure that could be carried out on the four, and was definitely carried out on Albert. He then said that it was not the look that counted, though, the person would have to be fundamentally changed in order to appear totally female. I said that no-one had picked Betty as Albert except his friend Julian, who was besotted with both him and then her. If anyone would see through it I thought that Julian would.

Back at my desk I put the picture of me in a drawer and fanned out the others so I could look at them and memorise the new looks. I then went out to my car and went to see each of the four sets of parents. Except for the two brothers, the boys had nothing in common. They hung out in different places, with different crowds and I could see no link, until I searched each ones rooms. In the rooms of the two brothers I found that they had been attending a drama class put on by the local council and that they had taken part in a play just two weeks before they disappeared. It was part of a week-long festival of arts that had been held in Salisbury.

With the other two boys I found out that they, also, had been taking drama lessons and had been in a comedy sketch at the same festival. On a hunch I sent emails out to all of the big police stations between Bristol and London, asking them if they had been looking into any cases of missing teenage boys. An hour later I got a reply from Southampton that they were, indeed, looking at a spate of missing boys, about twenty, all told, over the past three or four years. Reading came back saying that they had a dozen open cases on their books as well. I opened up the search area and sent out more emails but the only replies I got were about the usual cases of runaways, no sudden disappearances. I got back to Reading and Southampton to ask if they could send me pictures of their boys as they may be linked to a similar case here. I told them that they would be brought up to speed should my investigations pan out.

When I got emails with all of the pictures, I took it them down to our artist who said that 90% fitted the mould of our cases and would email me the drawings when he had done them. I was moving forward on this so asked if I could have a meeting with the DI and DS with our Chief Inspector. In that meeting I took them through my investigations so far and they were happy that I had drawn a link with other areas. We decided that the culprits must be based in southern England and it must be a substantial building as they seemed to take groups of about four, every three to four months. Gwen and I were tasked with bringing the other stations up to date with our own findings and we did that over a couple of days, going in her car and having meetings. I must say that the other detectives were a bit disbelieving until I showed them the drawings of our cases and then the drawings of their own. Nearly all from Southampton fitted the mould and they would now be looking for girls.

I put a call in to the SAS headquarters and asked if the officer that conducted the brainwashing courses could ring me. When he did call I told him of the basics of our cases and he said that one of the basic conditions of someone going under cover was to be given a name that was similar to their own, so that they would react to it as they would normally. The case with Albert was clear, he may have been called Bert or Bertie and the move to Bett or Betty was just right, even going from Ward to Wade fitted the pattern. I gave him the Christian names of the most recent four and he immediately came back with Terri, Toni, Geri and Michelle. He said that Julian was an easy one and Julie, Julia or Juliette would fit. He then said that this was also basic in brainwashing; you give the victim a set of facts that were close enough to reality that they accepted them as truth after a period.

This was interesting but did not really move my investigation forward. It would be no good for me to be looking for Teri and Toni Smith, or Smythe, as they did not exist. I had to admit that it was a very clever way of creating an army of willing slaves as the only reality they knew was the one you presented to them. If they thought that they had been crooked in the past life you presented to them, then it was very likely they would be crooked into the future. I could see from my investigations that some of the girls retained portions of their memory, maybe this was an accident or it could be on purpose. My only problem was that I could not imagine what all of these late-teen girls would be good for unless it was prostitution and my enquiries to the Met had not come back with any sudden influx of fresh girls on the game.

I still had my usual case-load to follow and it left the evenings for me to start looking for the four new girls. This generally consisted of visiting pubs and clubs where they may feel safe to be in public. It may seem like heaven to some lads to be on an endless pub-crawl with a warrant card but it is sheer boredom most of the time and the only time you actually get to have a drink is the last call of the night. It was not this activity that brought a small break-through, but something that happened in my usual daily duties.

Gwen and I were following up leads on a B&E case where a country house had been pillaged. We had a short list of locations where we knew that stolen goods were offered and had just walked into a particularly shady pub near Glastonbury when Gwen told me to hold on while she went to the toilet. As she got to the door, it opened and another girl walked out. It took me a second or two to make the connection but I was sure that this was the feminised Leslie Johnson from the list of missing boys. She was certainly no longer a boy and she walked past me with a waft of perfume and that gait that says “I have it all and I know you want it’.

She walked outside and looked out into the car park as if she was looking for someone. I walked out of the pub and called “Lesley!” She turned to me with a smile that quickly vanished to a look of surprise and shock. It was then that I felt a blow to my head and my world went black.

The next thing I knew was waking up in a hospital bed with a worried looking Gwen beside me. I had a splitting headache and a pain in my arm. As I opened my eyes Gwen smiled and said “Thank God you are awake, at last!” I had the sudden hope that she may give me a hug but all she did was pat my arm and said “I’ll go and get the doctor.” By the time that my eyesight and reflexes were measured and I was allowed to leave, I had found out that when Gwen didn’t see me as she left the toilet she came outside and found me lying on the ground with blood pouring from my scalp. She had called an ambulance and had stayed with me for the six hours it took for me to be stabilised and stitched up. I told her that I had seen Leslie Johnson and had just called out when I had been hit from behind. She took me home and told me to stay there for the next couple of days and she would organise meals for me while I recovered.

Back at home I took to my bed and went off to sleep for about twelve hours. It may have been the effects of the painkillers I had been injected with. Next morning my phone rang and one of the female PC’s I worked with asked me whether I wanted Chinese, Indian or pizza for lunch. I opted for pizza as I thought I may be a bit too shaky to handle the others without a mess. About one there was a knock on my door and Gwen stood there with a pizza box in her hands. She asked me how I felt and I told her that I felt like I had gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson. We shared the pizza at the kitchen table and she told me that she had gone back to the pub this morning and had found out that the girl I saw was really known as Lesley and the barman thought that she worked at a big office in London. He had said that she spoke about being a secretary and the shit she had to put up with. When asked about her companion he had said that it was a biggish bloke who acted more like a minder than a boyfriend but that the bloke was always tight-lipped.

We surmised on the economics of converting boys into wage-slaves and decided that it really did not stack up. Even if you took all of their income it would not fund an operation of this size. Gwen then told me that a finance officer in London had just absconded with over two million pounds from the company he worked for and disappeared into thin air. Now that would begin to fund the organisation but could also be pure co-incidence. We would need to look at his staff records.

After a couple of days at home I was fit enough to go back to work but had to spend a week in the office before I had my stitches taken out and then needed to see the police doctor before I was able to resume normal duties. It was a couple of weeks before I felt able to resume my search for the new girls. In the meantime I got the staff records for the missing finance officer I saw that a couple of the names on it were very close to names we had of missing boys but further enquiries found that the girls in question had left and I then found their addresses were fiction.

When I did resume my evening search I spread my net a bit wider. I figured that if the Bristol house was now compromised they may have others elsewhere. I pondered the locations and decided that I would have a look around Swindon as being within our likely area but big enough to hide strangers in plain sight. I struck lucky on the fourth evening. I was in the saloon section of a rather up-market hotel and, through a space behind the bar, I saw a table in the lounge section where four girls where sitting. They all looked lovely and very feminine but I was certain that I was looking at Terry, Tony, Michael and Jerry.

I got my phone out and, trying to look like I was checking my messages; I took a couple of pictures of the group and then sent them to my computer in the office. I deleted the pictures and left the hotel to call Gwen. As I was standing on the pavement outside a couple of drunks rolled out of the hotel door, singing loudly. I turned away from them as they passed and then felt something sharp in my side. They stopped singing as I fell down and one pulled out his phone and called for the ambulance. I was unable to move a muscle as they told the gathering crowd that I had been a bit too much into the hard stuff and that they had called for help.

When the ambulance arrived I was lifted onto a gurney and put inside. A very pretty paramedic sat next to me as we pulled away and prepared a syringe to give me an injection. As she pushed the needle into the back of my hand she said “You got too close this time, constable, you will now get to meet the surgeon. I know she is very keen to work her magic on you.”

As I lost consciousness my last thought were that I would never see Gwen again and there was so much I wanted to tell her.

Marianne G 2020