Stories of revenge are not as common in Crime Fiction as many would think. The bog-standard fare of Criminal commits a crime and the cops solve it (aka a 'WhoDunnit') and bring the bag guys to court are where it is at be it Sherlock, Rumpole, Taggart or {insert TV/Film name here}

This story is told from the point of view of one of the victims.

For many readers, this will not be an easy read. The crimes that were committed before this tale starts are not for the faint-hearted as it involves Child Trafficking, Paedophilia, rape, sodomy and sexual exploitation of children and corruption in society at the highest level. None of these crimes are described any great detail in the text other than one assault. Most of them happened before the story began.

It you suffer from PTSD then it might be advisable to stop reading now.

The tale is split into five ‘books’ and has a total of 46 chapters. It is not a short novel so please take your time, and I am sure that it will grow on you.

---

The late May Bank Holiday had been a good day for John Proudfoot. He’d won 3rd prize at a rally for classic Ford Vehicles that had been held at the Old Warden Collection in Bedfordshire. His newly restored Cortina Mk2 1600E in black and gold had gone down well with other 'old guys' as he put it, who were there with their cars. He didn't know of a better way to spend the day than with a group of other old fogeys talking cars and watching even older aircraft take to the cloudless blue sky.

On his way home, he stopped at a supermarket to buy a few groceries, including a bottle of his favourite wine for his meal that night to celebrate his success at the rally. He wasn’t sad that he’d only been placed 3rd because professional restorers entered the two cars that beat him. John was just an amateur tinkering in his retirement. It beat playing golf like most of his former colleagues did, hands down.

John’s good mood disappeared in a flash when he saw someone trying to break into his car as he emerged from the supermarket with his shopping.

His first instinct was to rush over and try to put a stop to it, but for some reason, he didn't. Instead, he watched for almost a minute as a young person struggled to open the passenger door. She seemed oblivious to other shoppers glaring at her. After the third admonishment from a fellow shopper, he decided that it was time to act.

“Just what do you think you are doing, young lady!” said John as he arrived at his car.

The young lady in question was trying to break into a car using a 'slim-jim' device.
His words temporarily startled her. Her first impulse was to flee, but the device that she was using to open the passenger door was stuck in place. After a second or so of hesitation, it became clear that she wasn't going to leave without it and a large rucksack that was stuffed into a shopping cart. From her appearance and the shopping cart, it was more than likely that she was homeless.

“What’s it to you what I am trying or not trying to do?”

John smiled at the retort. At least she had not replied with a string of expletives.

“Well… for starters, that is my car that you are trying to break into. There is nothing worth stealing inside, and because you are not trying the driver’s door, I guess that you were not intending to steal it. As I fitted it with an immobiliser, you would have trouble doing that… So, what is it that you are after?”

“Who the ‘F’ are you? Some sort of pig?”

He smiled.
“I was, as you so eloquently say, a ‘pig’. I’m retired now. Former Detective Chief Superintendent John Proudfoot at your service.”

“Are you going to nick me? You’d have to catch me first.”

John laughed.
"No, I'm not going to nick you. As I said, I am retired."

“So? What the hell do you want?”

This young woman intrigued John, so he tried a different approach.
"Why don't I show you how to open the door?"

“Why the hell would you want to do that? I don’t give head, you know.”

"That is the last thing I would ever want from you. As to why, isn't it better to know how to use the tools you have at your disposal more effectively?"

“Isn’t that committing a crime?”

“That is where you are wrong, young lady. As this is my car, then, I can’t be committing a crime, can I? I don't have any intent to steal the vehicle. Once you know how to do it quickly and efficiently, then there is less chance of you being caught in the future. Then you will avoid getting nicked, as you so crudely put it."

“Man… you are mental, but as it is your car… please go ahead?”

John put down the two shopping bags and stepped forward. The young woman moved away. Her body language told him that she was very suspicious of him.

With a simple, deft motion, John moved the device and the lock clicked open.

He removed the tool and handed it to the woman.

“Want to try for yourself?”

It was her turn to smile.
John locked the door and moved away.

This time, she unlocked the door in seconds.

“It pays to know how the internal mechanism is constructed.”

“Ummm, thanks.”

There was a period of silence between them before she said,
“Are you really not going to nick me?”

“I’m not going to nick you. But, if you don’t mind me saying, you whiff to high heaven. Could I offer you a place to get clean?”

“I don’t give head…”

"You said that already, and I don't want any 'head' as you put it. I have an annexe at my home. There is a shower and a place to wash your clothes. If I am not mistaken, you are a lady of the road, but even the queens of the highway need to have the occasional wash and brush up. How about it? I could even fire up the BBQ and cook the steaks that I just bought?"

To reinforce his words, he held up the shopping bag that contained the wine and the steaks.

As if by some magic, her stomach let out a loud belch.
"When was the last time you had a good meal?" he asked with a smile.

“I ain’t getting in that car with you?”

“I would not think of asking you in your current state of cleanliness. I live about a mile from here. Straight down the main road for half of that,” he said, pointing to his right.
“Then turn right into Elm Lane. My house is at the top of the hill. It is called ‘Suncrest’. If you want a chance to get clean and have a good meal with no strings attached and a night in a bed, then you are more than welcome.”

She didn’t answer.

With a shrug of his shoulders, John put his shopping into his car and drove off. As he exited the car park, he could see her standing there. She hadn’t moved. He shook his head and concentrated on driving home.

For some reason, this young woman had piqued his interest. There was something about her that didn't quite make sense. In his years on the force, he'd encountered a good number of people on the street who were homeless, often for no fault of their own. He could identify those who were permanently homeless from those who had hit rock bottom and were trying to fight back. She didn't exactly fit neatly into either category. The long-dormant investigative juices in him began to rise to the surface once more. He wanted to know more if only to satisfy his curiosity. If that meant feeding her and giving her a bed for the night, then it would be well worth the investment.

John, as he had promised the girl, had gotten the BBQ out and was in the final stages of getting it going when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. At first, he ignored it. If it was her, then he didn't want to scare her off as soon as she arrived.

With the charcoal well alight, he turned towards where he had seen a movement.

“Hello. You made it then?”

She didn’t respond. Her body language told him that she was still very uneasy.

“There is a small apartment above the garage. The door is open, and there is a bolt on the inside of the door. There should be plenty of hot water, and I have put some shampoo and towels out just in case you would come. I have also left some old clothes on the bed. If you don’t know how to use the washer, just ask, and I’ll put it on for you, but I did leave some instructions.”

She didn’t react but stood still, her eyes fixed on the containers of food that were on the table next to the BBQ.

John thought that she was about to leg it. If she did, then he'd cook just one of the pieces of rump steak that he'd bought earlier.

When he looked up again, she had gone. Her now empty shopping trolley was outside the garage, and the door to the upstairs apartment was closed.

More than half an hour passed before she emerged from the apartment. She was wearing his old clothes, which hung loosely on her small frame. Everything was a good number of sizes too big for her, but it would do for now. Her now clean hair glistened in the late afternoon sun.

As she came closer, he suddenly knew what it was that had intrigued him about her. That in itself presented a problem for John, but it could wait. Food should come first.

“Feeling better?” he asked as she gingerly approached the BBQ area.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Did you get your clothes into the washer?”

“I did. Thanks for leaving some instructions.”

“What do I call you?”

She thought for a second before saying.
“Dido.”

“Like the singer then?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, Dido, welcome to my home. How do you like your steak?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had any before.”

Her response momentarily threw John. The mystery deepened.

“There is a first time for everything. There is a salad in the bowl. Help yourself to that and some juice, and take a seat.”

"Thanks… John," she said with a lot of hesitation in her voice.

As John attended to the grill, he said,
“I meant what I said before. I don’t want sex from you. You aren’t my type. I am just a former cop trying to lend a hand to someone who I think needs at least a bit of help, if only for one day.”

Dido didn’t answer. She was too busy enjoying the freshly baked and still warm French bread that he’d put in the oven as soon as he’d arrived home. She’d spread some butter on it. The sight of her licking her lips pleased him. There was a lot of mystery about her, and it was up to him to try to pry it from Dido without spooking her.

“Everyone I have ever met who was like you, living on the streets, has a story to tell. If you feel like telling me yours, then I’ll listen and try my hardest not to pass any judgement unless you want it, but as with many problems, just talking about them can help.”

“If I told you the truth, you would not believe me, so I should say nothing.”

John smiled. He knew a canned answer when he heard one.

“Here you are. This should just fall apart,” said John as he handed Dido a plate with her steak and a baked potato wrapped in foil with a helping of baked beans on the side.

“Thanks. It looks good.”

John sat down with his plate and put some tomato relish on the side. Dido looked on as if she did not know what to do next.

“Please, help yourself.”

Dido watched John carefully carve his steak into slices. She tried to copy him but failed. She pushed the plate away more out of frustration than anything. The way she held the fork suggested that she had the mental age of an eight-year-old, but she wasn't backwards by any means. Another clue to the deepening mystery of who she was and why she was homeless.

John smiled and cut up her steak.
“Why don’t you put some of the meat in what is left of that French stick and add a bit of relish?”

The sight of Dido munching away at her meal made him happy. It had given him another clue about her past. The picture that was forming in his mind was not a good one.

When she’d finished, Dido looked over at the grill.
“Would you like some more?”

“Please, but I don’t want to impose.”

“You are not imposing on me it is nice to have some company. I’ll get some sausages from the fridge.

While the sausages were cooking, John took his chance.

“Dido, I want to say something that might offend you, but ever since we met in the car park, there has been something about you that troubled me. I think I know what it is. Would you like me to tell you why I think that you are on the street?”

“Do I have any choice?”

“You do. Say no, and I’ll shut up.”

“Go ahead. I want to see just how wrong this former pig will be.”

“Dido, please. I am not a pig. I was a Police Officer for thirty-two years.”

“Ok, cop it is then.”

John smiled progress was being made.

“Here goes. I think that you are about sixteen years old. You have not had a chance to grow up like a normal child. The way you held the knife and fork is much like a child aged about 7 or 8 would do. Then,”
John swallowed before adding,
“While you give the appearance of being a female, you were born male.”

Dido sat motionless. She began to cry. It was as if the wall that she had carefully built around herself had just been blown sky-high.

“How? How did you know?”

“That is for later, Dido. Your reaction tells me that I was right.”

“So? What is it to you… cop!”

“Dido, if you would like someone to listen and not be judgmental, then I might be able to help. If not now, but in the future…when you are ready to talk, then I’m ready to listen.”

“What’s in it for you? Apart from laughing about me when you talk to your pals at the golf club?”

John smiled. She must have found the set of clubs that he kept in a cupboard in the apartment.

“I used to have the odd round, but I don’t any more. I found restoring the car that you tried to break into earlier far more satisfying mentally. Most of my former colleagues could win gold medals for boring people to death when talking about golf. That’s why I rarely play these days.”

She looked at him with one eyebrow cocked. It was as if she was saying… ‘pull the other one…’

“I mean it, Dido. There is a reason you are on the streets and not with your family.”

The merest mention of ‘family’ had caused her to visibly shrink. It was as if someone had sucked her dry of what little confidence she had managed to build up.

“I won’t mention the ‘F’ word again. Some bad things have happened to you in the past. That much is clear. I can’t offer you much in the way of help if I don’t know what wrongs have been done to you, but I can offer you a safe place to stay if you want it?”

John dished up a plate of sausages with some more tomato relish on the side. Dido hesitated.

“No strings, Dido. You don’t have to talk now or in the future if you don’t want to. Please eat.”

Again, she raised one eyebrow.

John moved away and went into the house. He hoped that his next move would start the process of getting her to trust him.

When he returned carrying a framed photo, the plate of sausages was empty. John smiled.

“This might interest you,” he said as he put the photo down on the table in front of Dido.

“That is of me and my partner of just over twenty-five years.”

Dido picked up the photo. Her sticky fingers marked the frame. He knew that they’d wash off.

“She is very beautiful, but why are you showing me this?”

“Because Dido, she was like you. She was born male, and because of cancer, she had to have her male parts removed before puberty.”

Dido's grip on the frame tightened.

“Was?”

“Dorothy died two and a half years ago. She went into hospital with a prostrate problem… well, she never recovered. I miss her every day.”

“And you want me to be her?”

“No, Dido. You are very much your own person. One who is trying their best to fight society. Something happened to you that stopped you from experiencing your teenage years. If, at some point in the future, you want to talk about it, then I am here, ready and able to listen.”

Dido sat there for nearly ten minutes looking at the photo. It was clear to John that she was fighting to hold back the tears.

John took out a handkerchief from his pocket.
“If you want to cry, please wipe your eyes on this. You can keep it.”

“Thank you.”

“No, Dido. Thank you.”

“Me? What have I done to need to have your thanks?”

“You have trusted me enough to come to a stranger’s home and eat my food. For that, I want to thank you. It is but the first step in a long road. One day, I have to hope that you will trust me enough for you to tell me what happened to you. Until then, you can come here and use the apartment over the garage. For that, you will need this.”

John put down a key on the table in front of Dido.

“That is the key to the apartment. I’m trusting you with it.”

“You don’t know me from anyone else who lives on the street,” blurted out Dido.

“True. So, prove me right and begin to trust me. Perhaps one day I can help you begin to help you start to sort out your problems?”

John immediately felt foolish for restating the point about trust.

Dido was nowhere to be seen the next morning. Her shopping trolley was gone when John looked out of the window just before 07:00.

It was with some trepidation that he went into the apartment after breakfast. To his huge surprise, he found the place immaculate. Not a thing was out of place. Even the bed had been remade with ‘hospital corners’. That both impressed and worried John. Impressed in that she should have spent the time, but worried because the way it was done indicated that Dido had probably been institutionalised, but he guessed that the only institution that she'd seen the inside of was not of her choosing and certainly not an official one.

John sat on the bed and thought back to a case that he'd investigated almost twenty years before. A young girl of South Asian heritage had been imprisoned by her parents because she had attacked the man to whom she had been promised to in marriage a day after she was born. He was already thirty years old at the time. It was their first meeting, and only a week before, she was due to go to Pakistan to get married. She stabbed him twice with a pair of scissors. The potential snub to the reputation of their family made them hide the girl from the age of ten until she managed to sound the alarm almost six years later. Dido was exhibiting many of the same behaviours as that girl. The worst part of that case was that the girl took her own life before her parents were brought to trial. He did not want that to happen to Dido.

******

Dido did not return to John’s home for nearly two weeks. For a while, John thought about looking for her but decided against it. Nevertheless, he regretted leaving things so open with Dido despite knowing how fragile she was emotionally.

When she did return, Dido had a black eye. John didn't pass judgment or ask how she had come by the injury. He knew that Dido would tell him in her own time.

That time came the next morning.
“I was panhandling outside Mansion House tube when another homeless guy accused me of stealing his jacket. I bought it at East Ham Market a few days before, but he would not budge. Then he hit me right in the eye and angrily tore it off my back. The last I saw of him, he was heading towards Blackfriars Bridge Road.”

John thought for a moment.
“Perhaps you should go back to the market and buy another jacket? This time, mess it up so that it does not appear new.”

“Yeah. You are right. It looked too clean. I wasn’t getting any ‘donations’ anyway.”

“A lesson learned, I guess?”

Dido said nothing for a bit. Then she said,

“Thanks for not tearing me off a strip for failing like that.”

This time, John smiled.
“No need to admonish you, Dido. It was clear to me that you had learned a valuable lesson about fitting in. But why are you panhandling, as you put it?”

“I’m looking for the man who kept me prisoner for more than five years. By appearing to be a homeless person, most people don’t even give you a second glance.”

John’s opinion of Dido had just gone up considerably. He tried desperately not to nod his head. There was no way he could even begin to visualise what sort of hell that had been, so he reverted to some general advice.

“That is a great idea, but just be extra careful. If this man sees you and realises who you are, then your life could be in danger. No one is going to miss another homeless person turning up dead in the river. I am assuming that you have some information that leads you to the city. I don’t want to know unless you want to tell me.”

John’s words startled Dido.

“You make it like you care what happens to me? I’m nothing to you…”

John shook his head.

“I care about you as a person. You deserve to not only get even with the man who abused you but about your future beyond that.”

“Bollocks.”

“Not bollocks, as you put it. Why else did I give you the key to the apartment? I care about you as a person.”

“You just said that.”

“I did, and it is true.”

“Why? Why do you care about me? I’m not worth the trouble.”

“Dido… That is where you are wrong. You have just told me about a terrible wrong that was done to you. It is clear to me that someone robbed you of literally years of your life. Your inability to use a knife and fork and never had any steak before gave me some clues. Then you say that someone kept you prisoner, added to the bits of information you had given me since your first visit. Those clues, when combined, made it easy to say that I care about you. When you trust me enough to tell me all about it, then I’ll be in your corner if you want to get justice for those wrongs. Bringing people who commit crimes to justice is what being a copper for all those years was all about.”

“You would not believe me if I told you what happened to me,” retorted Dido.

“Why not tell me and find out? Remember, I spent a lifetime in the Met Police. A lot of that was clearing up after scumbag criminals left a disaster scene in their wake. People, places and especially families were destroyed by a criminal act or acts and without a second thought to the consequences.”

Dido remained silent.

“If you are not ready, then don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. When you are ready, I’ll be here.”

Dido just answered with a small nod of her head.

“As for your future, I was involved in a case many years ago where the parents of a young girl kept her locked up because she refused to take part in an arranged marriage. She escaped and raised the alarm, but her mental state was so bad that she could not see a future for her, so he committed suicide. I don’t see that in you… yet. At some point, it is highly likely that you will suffer from a period of depression because your search has not gone anywhere. Please come and talk to me. As I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

*****

Dido came to John in late August and said,
“I’m ready to speak.”

John just nodded his head and directed Dido to go into the garage, where he had set up a video recorder and some lights. Dido sat in a single chair and waited. She nervously fiddled with the cuff on her sweatshirt.

“Just let me introduce the recording with the date, time and place,” said John.
“After that, it is over to you. Speak until you have nothing more to say today. I will not interrupt you. When you are done, just say, ‘I’m done for now’. Do you understand?”

Dido looked scared but nodded her head. John started the recorder and made sure that it was focused on her.

“This is the first video statement of Dido. No surname was given. It is taking place at the home of retired Chief Superintendent John Proudfoot, on the twenty-sixth of August, 2012 at 13:45.”

“Hello…” said Dido.

“Dido is not my given name. I was born Thomas Charles Day. We lived in Southend on Sea. When I was eight, something happened, and suddenly, I found myself a prisoner of a man called Martin Schneider. He kept me locked up in a cupboard for what seemed like days. I knew that it was Schneider because he came to my house a few times and spent hours deep in conversation with my father. I went to sleep one night only to wake up in terrible pain and found that my hands were handcuffed to a bed. A medic told me that the pain was down to my male parts being surgically removed. I remember being told that from now on, I was a girl and like all girls, I had to sit down to pee. They’d done something to my throat. It was so sore, and I could not speak. I cried for days. I did not know why my parents left me or who could have been so cruel to… to do that to me.”

Dido started to cry. John felt rotten. Rotten because he had encouraged Dido to speak. He had no idea that her secret was anything remotely like this.
John kept the recording going while Dido wiped her eyes with the now grubby handkerchief that he’d given her and recovered her composure.

“Every day, someone would feed me what was like baby food, and I would get injected with something. I was only released from the cuffs after what seemed an eternity, but at least I was not in pain any more. This woman with a foreign accent gave me a dress. She said, ‘This is how you will dress from now on’. Then she gave me boots with small heels that were locked on my feet. I wore them all day and night for what seemed like weeks. I was told to walk up and down in my room. It was very small. Just three steps up and three steps back. Every day, this woman would come into my room and give me an injection in my bum. I counted the days, and every ten days, she would change the boots to ones with higher heels. She would show me how to apply makeup, which made me look a lot older. If I failed, I would get no food and double injections. They made me very sick, so I didn’t refuse her instructions after that.”

Dido buried her head in her hands. After a few minutes, she continued.

“I have no idea how long I was held there, but one day, a strange man came into my room and took out his thing. Suck me off, he said. I had no idea what he meant. Then he forced me to allow him to put his thing into my mouth. He told me what to do. Eventually, something came out of his thing, and I was made to swallow it. It tasted salty, and I almost choked that first time.”

John desperately wanted to give Dido a big hug.

“The man came back every day until I obeyed him and sucked him off. If I resisted, he would just stick his huge thing down my throat and pee. I nearly choked more than once.”

Dido fought back the tears.

“Then another man came and put some slimy liquid up my bum. I had to go to the toilet right away. When I was done, he made me sit on his thing until he went inside me. It hurt.”

This time, she cried. When she had recovered, she continued. All the time, the video recorder was going.

“I went to sleep one night, and when I woke up, I was somewhere else. The room I was in had all these bars on the door, and on the other side were two men. They told me that this was my home and, that I was to look beautiful every day, and that I was to entertain them and their guests. If I failed to satisfy them, I would not get anything to eat for three days and double injections.”

“The older man would let me out of what I now know as a cell every three or four days so that I could have a shower. I was told to grow my hair long and always wear makeup. Failure to dress prettily or be made up would result in a punishment. That was at least three days without food. He… the older man, made it clear that if I repeatedly failed to perform, then I would be replaced. When he said that, he drew his hand across his throat. There are hundreds more like you just waiting to fill your lovely high-heeled boots.”

After those words, Dido moved out of the camera shot and cowered in the corner of the garage. John switched off the recorder before going and putting his arms around Dido. At first, she froze at his touch, but slowly, she relaxed. He sat with her for more than an hour while Dido slowly recovered from her ordeal. Dido was showing all the classic symptoms of PTSD and probably worse.

John said nothing but held her tight. Words had failed him. He had known that something had robbed Dido of her adolescence, but even in his wildest dreams, could he have ever imagined that it was as bad as what he’d just heard?

Daylight was fading fast before either of them spoke. It was Dido who broke the silence.

“Thank you, John.”

“I didn’t do much.”

“Holding me was all that I wanted. You make me feel safe. Thank you.”

John could not answer that. Even trying to imagine what mental and physical torture she had brought to the surface in her statement was an impossible task.

What made it worse was that her words to the camera made it clear that today was just the tip of the iceberg. John knew that there would be many more days like this before either of them could begin to move on with their lives.

John watched the video that evening and made a transcript of Dido’s exact words. He had to grit his teeth several times just to get the job done. He did not sleep at all well that night. All he could think about was giving the people responsible for hurting Dido a good kicking in their male parts before cutting them off without the benefit of anaesthetic and then making them eat their penis… raw. After a few hours, he calmed down.

The idea of helping Dido get justice began to form in his mind. His problem was that he’d never worked on a case even remotely like Dido’s in all his years in the Met Police. Getting to a point where Dido was even in some small way able to get some closure for all the hurt that had been piled on her over the years would not be an easy job. The people responsible for mutilating her and then sexually abusing her for years deserved redress for what they had done. If he could help that happen in some small way, then he’d do it.

Dido left early the next morning to avoid speaking with John. She did leave a scrawled note on her neatly made bed that just said,

“Thank you for being there yesterday. Dido.”

John, for his part, could not help worrying about Dido. He knew just how fragile she was emotionally after her ordeal the previous day, but she was gone, and there wasn't a lot he could do about it. She was her own person. All he could do was be there for her when her PTSD returned. His years of dealing with officers with it had taught him that it was one of the most unpredictable ailments to befall the human race.

Later that day, John packaged up the tape of her statement and one copy of the transcript and took it into London and delivered it to a solicitor whom he had used in the past. One of the lawyers in the practice was also a certified notary. John had the package notarised by the man for a small fee. Then he went to a private bank in Mayfair, where he left the recording in the vault after opening a safe deposit box account. He was sure that there would be more packages to follow before they got anywhere near an arrest, let alone a conviction. Having these unedited and notarised statements would satisfy most requirements for a ‘chain of custody’. He kept one copy of each for himself. They would be deposited with a friend for safekeeping.

After a quick bite to eat in Holborn, he went in search of an old friend of his from the Met Police, former DCI Gary Shaw. Gary had been retired a lot longer than John, down to the injuries he had received in a bad road traffic accident while in pursuit of a man who had raped a woman in broad daylight. Since his retirement, he'd run a Private Detective Agency.

“This is a surprise, John. I thought that you were tinkering with that car of yours?” said Gary when John was shown into his office.

“She’s all done. I have shown her at a couple of events this summer. That wasn’t what I came to see you about. Here, take a gander at this….”

John passed over a copy of the transcript of Dido’s video recording from the previous day.

Almost immediately, Gary’s good mood disappeared. He read it through twice. The shaking of his head grew more profound during the second reading.

“Is this for real?”

“It is, I’m afraid.”

“Fuck. These people need to be hung, drawn, and quartered twice.”

“Very much my feelings. I had no idea what she was going to say when we started. If I had… I might have tried to stop her.”

Gary shook his head.
“You did right by not stopping her. This is dynamite,” then Gary hesitated.

“But there is no proof other than her body? Is that what you were trying to say?”

John nodded.
“You know me too well, John. What do you need me to do?”

“I’d like you to do a bit of gentle digging into the Southend connection. Discretion is the name of the game. I’d start with public records just to see if what Dido says has any credence.”

“Credence? Come on, John… you can do better than that?”

John smiled.
“Ok, perhaps credence was the wrong word. I just want to check out her family and what happened to them between 2000 and spring 2006.”

John reached into his pocket and took out an envelope, and put it on the desk in front of Gary.
“There is £500 in there as a retainer.”

“Put that back in your pocket, John. I owe you this for sorting out the debacle of my finances when Debs left me when I was laid up in the Hospital. I could easily have topped myself when I found out that she’d done a runner with all our savings and left me minus a right foot in the hospital, struggling to walk even two steps.”

John smiled.
“Then take the money for paying informants should the need arise. Something was going on between her family and at least one organised crime gang. I just need to know what happened to her parents. Extreme caution is the name of the game here.”

“Fair enough. I will take extra care with this job. If they did traffic Dido, as she said, there could be some well-connected bad guys in the loop here, and they won’t take kindly to someone like me coming in and upsetting their apple cart if you know what I mean?”

“I do, Gary. There is no rush. Dido is nowhere to be seen, but I expect that she is somewhere in the city searching for the man who had kept her prisoner. I did tell her that it was dangerous, but you know young people…”

Gary chuckled and smiled.
“At that age, they think that they know everything but know nothing. We were like that once, weren’t we, John?”
“We were, and we were lucky to have a Sergeant to beat it out of us before we did some damage. Dido is on her own. In time… and perhaps one day, she will let me inside the walls that she has built around her. Until then, I can just do what I can to help.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that she has become the daughter that you and Dorothy never had…”

“As you say, Gary,” replied John, smiling.
“But in truth, she is, and I owe it to her to try as best I can to make her as whole a person as I can and then, eventually, a valuable member of society. Yes, there is a long way to go, but now that the Cortina is done, I need a new project to keep me sane, don’t I?”

John didn’t wait for an answer. He took the transcript from Gary but left the envelope on the table. He had placed a single sheet of paper inside the envelope. Written on it were all the details that Gary would need for his investigation.

Once John was back on the street, he almost went in search of Dido but decided against it. There were more things he could do in the background that might help her in the long run.

Dido spent two fruitless weeks outside Moorgate tube station without seeing her target. Finally, she had to admit to herself that John was right about small bits of information all needing to come together to create the big picture.

After she'd come clean to John, he just smiled. He had several different smiles. This one didn't say 'I told you so', but 'well done for learning that lesson'.

"My thirty-odd years in the force taught me that investigations are not like they are presented to us on TV. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, we don't crack a crime in under an hour. It normally takes weeks, months, and even years of painstaking and often soul-destroying work before you even get a whiff of a solution. There was a series of murders that were only solved almost thirty years after the last victim had been discovered. I know that is not the sort of information that you were expecting, but it does give credence to the saying, ‘Rome was not built in a day’.”

John smiled. Dido didn’t seem convinced.
“It is the job of the lead officer to keep morale in those under them up despite setbacks just like the one you have just admitted to. Keep this up, Dido, and we’ll make a cop-out of you yet.”

“Now, who’s telling porkies?”

“Not me. I mean it, Dido. It is already clear to me that you are an extraordinarily smart young lady. Plus, you are very streetwise, and Operation ‘Redress’ will be a nice addition to your CV when we get him and his friends sent down for a large number of years.”

“What’s with this ‘Operation Redress’?”
John could tell that she wasn’t impressed.

“All major investigations are given names. I thought that ‘Redress’ would be a good name for this one.”

“Redress? What’s wrong with ‘Retribution’ or ‘Revenge’?”

John shook his head.
“There is a dictionary on the shelf in the library. It should be right by my desk. Look up the definitions of all three and think about what your ultimate goal is. Revenge or Retribution is, in my mind, too immediate. He, whoever he is, needs to pay for what he did to you in public.”

“I don’t know who he is,” countered Dido.

“You will find him. Then again, and again, and again until you get a handle on how he moves around the city, where he works, what his job is and even where he likes to get his lunch. Remember that every time you encounter him, that is one of your nine lives down the drain. Sooner or later, he will recognise something about you, and your number will be up. There is no doubt that he has connections to some bad people. How else did he procure you? Those people would only be too glad to dispose of this homeless woman for a suitable sum of money. To them, it is just business.”

Dido was frustrated but understood his reasoning.

[the next morning]
Dido came into the kitchen carrying the dictionary.
“I did as you wanted me to do, and ‘Redress’ is a good name. Not as obvious as the others.”

“Thank you, Dido. Coffee or Tea?”

Dido gave him a stern look for all of two seconds. After a brief shake of her head, she said,
“Tea, please. Some of that Darjeeling that you have in the green tin.”

Dido was starting to learn how John would say ‘we are cool’.

December that year.

Dido had become something of a regular visitor to John’s home. He tried his best to get Dido interested in some sort of education, but her search for the man who had imprisoned her always got in the way. John didn’t mind that much. He was content to sow a few seeds here and there and wait for them to germinate. He was playing the long game.

Dido had taken John’s words of caution about her nine lives and the risk of being recognised. She had coloured her hair blonde badly. Her roots were very obvious, but it seemed to change how she appeared to people in the street.

On one visit, Dido confessed that she survived on the streets by not relying on the results of her panhandling but from a little ‘dipping’.

“My father taught me from an early age. Then he’d send me to the Pier in Southend on busy weekends, and I’d come home most days with a few hundred quid. Now, I only take the cash. Any wallets I lift are put through the letterboxes of banks or solicitors. There are still plenty of blind spots in the City of London where the CCTV cameras can’t see you drop them off. Outside the square mile and especially to the north in Hoxton or around Old Street or the Angel, it is even easier.”

“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that, especially as you only took the cash. I hope that the rest of the wallet gets reunited with their owner. At least you are trying.”

“But…” said John, smiling.
“As you seem intent upon a little bit of crime, it might come in useful when you find where he lives to be able to, shall we say, investigate a little further if you get my meaning.”

Dido looked at John and raised an eyebrow.
“You mean lock picking as a way to break in?”

John’s smile and nod of the head gave her the answer.
“I know how to pick some locks. My rat of a father had started to teach me before he got in way too deep with the wrong people.”

“Didn’t you try to pick the lock on your cell?”

“If I had something to use as a pick, then I would have. They never even let me have anything sharper than a plastic knife, and then, I was watched while I ate the crap that they called food. I know now that it was little more than baby food. Then they added all the hormones to it. I only found out about them by accident. That’s why I have these beauties.”

Dido cupped her ample breasts.

“How about I set up some locks for you to pick when you are here?”

“Why? Why should I learn to commit a crime when my goal is to bring a criminal to justice?”

“As you say, he is a criminal. As a Police Officer, I found that in many cases, I had to think like a criminal to catch them. Picking pockets is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. A few steps up the ladder is the ability to pick a lock quickly and quietly, which is a great tool to have in your pocket. Then there were the jobs that we did where it was advantageous to make a silent entry to the premises that we were going to search, legally, of course. Picking a lock or two made that possible. Going in with a heavy door opener was not always the best course of action. In my mind, catching them in the act rather than trying to escape or destroy evidence was always more satisfying.”

Dido frowned.
“Besides, a little look-see to confirm that we have found the right house before calling the cavalry to make an arrest would save an awful lot of egg on an awful lot of faces should the police raid the wrong address. And… such a raid could give him the heads-up and allow him to dispose of any evidence and skip the country. That is something that we don’t want to happen now, do we?’

Dido had learned to read John's facial expressions.
“What aren’t you telling me?”

John chuckled.
“Ok, there is something else, but one step at a time, ok? You have poo-pooed my attempts to get you back into some form of education… Think of this as crime school.”

“John… sometimes you are the most frustrating person I know.”

“How many people do you know… besides me, that is?”

“Ok, you win. Lock picking it is.”

John didn’t move.
“What else?” asked very impatiently.

“I have something for you. It is on the shelf behind you…”

Dido turned around and found a phone, two spare batteries and a charger.

“I know that it is not the latest model, but it will allow you to call me, and its battery lasts days. I took the liberty of putting my mobile and home numbers into the directory. It is a Pay-As-You-Go device, and as you come into cash, a top-up can be bought for ready money from many convenience stores. It has a camera, so if you see him, be careful, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Just knowing who he is would be a huge step forward, but possibly some steps backwards.

“Backwards? Why?”

“If what you said about the people who came to visit you, he is probably a person with influence and/or contacts. At the moment, Dido, just be extra careful, ok?”

Dido sat looking at the phone for almost a minute.
“Thank you, John. I don’t know what to say.”

“Er… You said ‘thank you’. That is all I need.”

Dido blew John a kiss. He went red in the face.

“Lock picking, Dido…”

“Yes Boss.”

Dido went back to the apartment over the garage while John went off to do the weekly grocery shopping.

A week later, Dido was helping John wash the dishes after lunch.

“How is the lock picking going on?”

"Nice try, John. You know very well that I have not had time today to try those new five-lever locks that you have set up for me in the garage."

She had already learned the basics of lock identification, which pleased John. It confirmed his view that Dido was a smart cookie and someone willing to learn new skills.

“Well? There is no time like the present now, is there? While I cook dinner, you can try them and, at the same time, think about your plan to find out where he travels from each day. If you want to involve that little gang of dippers, then even better.”

Dido stood in front of John with her hands on her hips.

“Sometimes, John Proudfoot, you are the most frustrating person I know. Can I do nothing to surprise you? How did you know about them?”

"That’s the second time you have said that to me recently. I will take that as a compliment. As for the dippers, anyone with a trained eye could see you direct them as they worked Oxford Street.”

Dido glared at John.
“Dido, I'm here to keep you as honest as possible. The way that you have whipped that bunch of misfits into shape is admirable. Before you came along, they were just a bunch of chancers. Now? You have forged them into a formidable team."

“You know this how?”

"Constable Patek, whom you seem to know quite well from the conversations that he told me about. His father was my driver before I retired, and I spoke at his son's passing out event at Hendon Police College. I ran into his father at a reunion two weeks ago. He mentioned this young woman who seemed to be picking pockets right under the noses of the local bobbies on the beat. He described you perfectly.”

Dido shook her head.

“I put two and two together and followed you one day last week. Once the rush hour was over, you headed for the west end and met up with your team in a room over at a garment wholesaler in Great Portland Street just south of New Cavendish Street. I saw you move effortlessly from a panhandling homeless person to a small-time crime boss. Dido, you are far more talented than I could have ever imagined."

"Retired? Sometimes, John, I don't think that you are."

“I was fully retired until you came into my life. You have given this old dog a new lease of life. Just remember that I’m here to help you in any way I can. Just keep yourself safe… for me. I want this man and anyone else who abused you put away for the rest of their natural, but it has to be done properly understood.”

“I know. Evidence has to be properly obtained, or some scumbag lawyer will make a song and a dance of it and get it thrown out when it comes to trial.”

“Exactly.”

“Then why am I learning all those dark arts… other than to make sure that we get the right house?”

John sighed.
"Sometimes a case will get to a point where it stalls. You know 'who did it', but you don't have the legal proof to make an arrest and then charge the culprits. As I have said before, a little off-the-books look and see can help a case no end. I mean, look, but don't touch. Then, an anonymous tip-off and we… as in the Police, would go before a magistrate and get a warrant to search the premises. The most important thing is that you leave no trace of your visit that could come back to cause the case to be thrown out later. As long as the 'visit' was not sanctioned by the police, it is just one criminal who, in the act of committing a crime, found the Crown Jewels and told the cops. I'm not a cop any longer, so? Besides, a huge number of tips get phoned into Crimestoppers by criminals. Those calls are not traced or recorded. Those crooks often discover nasty things about other crooks that make their stomachs churn. Paedophilia and child exploitation are just two of the crimes that get reported that way.”

“And that is highly illegal, is it not?”

“It is, but if we can put the real bad bastards away, then we are doing society a favour. Besides, more often than not, those little look-and-see operations end up with nothing. As I said earlier, that, in turn, saves the embarrassment of an Inspector going through all the trouble of obtaining a warrant and finding nothing at all. Failed warrants don’t look good on the Chief Super’s desk on a Monday morning if you get my drift. A warrant that fails to turn up anything makes the magistrate less likely to grant that Inspector or Chief Inspector a warrant in future if the supporting evidence is even the slightest bit flimsy. Human nature aligns perfectly with the saying, ‘Once bitten, twice shy’ besides, undies do that all the time.”

“Undies?” asked Dido.

"Undercover officers. They have to ignore crimes going on around them to get the real dirt on the top dogs. Sometimes, they even have to take part in a crime just to gain the trust of the real bad guys."

“I think I am starting to understand this crime-fighting malarkey!”

“Dido, malarkey is not what I would use to describe the job of keeping the public safe from the likes of ‘him’.”

“Have it your way, John.”

Then she disappeared towards the garage, leaving John to prepare dinner. He watched her go and wondered how much of this lesson would stick.

His observations of her on the streets of Westminster had impressed him. When he added in the information that Constable Patek had given him strictly off the record, his opinion of her had risen considerably. At least some of his words had stuck in her memory. John was under no illusion that a lot of water would have to flow under a lot of bridges before she could rest easy.

Dido stayed the night with John and left in time to get the first Central Line train into Liverpool St. She travelled as far as Stratford, where she followed John’s hints and changed onto the first of three busses that would take her to Moorgate or a spot between the Tube station and bus terminus at Finsbury Circus.

Her early departure allowed her to avoid giving John an answer to the series of questions that he'd asked her over dinner the previous evening. John’s words about covering her tracks had struck a chord with her. Even though it was a PITA, she knew that it was the right thing to do. That wasn’t the only thing on her mind.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to give him an answer about her future. She’d made up her mind by the time she had finished doing the washing up. She’d gone to bed mulling over her initial decision and used some of the arguments that John had used against her to try to pull it apart. She had failed. That didn’t mean that she would tell John immediately. Dido wanted to do some more research of her own, before telling John. She was going to use some of his words against him but in a nice way. He’d often say to her, ‘Think before you act, or you may have to repent from here to eternity’. It had taken her a while to understand what he meant by those words, but when she did, she took them to heart.

The mere fact that someone was thinking about her future beyond getting even with ‘him’ was not lost on Dido. It was a new experience for her and not one that she was comfortable with at the moment.

Dido spent the following week alternating between Moorgate and the nearby Finsbury Circus. The latter was the terminus of several bus routes. On the days when the weather was too cold to stay outside for long periods, Dido sought the sanctuary of Islington Public Library. That was when she did her research into Criminology and the entrance requirements. Getting three top-grade A-levels scared the life out of her. That was way outside her comfort zone. Then, the little matter of the cost of the courses added to her level of disbelief. There was no way that she could even begin to cover the cost of a degree with the proceeds of her dipping alone.

A third day of rain forced her to abandon her usual spot on the pavement. The lure of the warm and dry library had been her refuge in the past. It was once more, but this time, she had a different purpose for her visit.

Dido sat in the library, trying to think about John. There was no way that she was going to accept his charity without at least some argument or pushback. Despite his help with her cause, she was not going to become dependent on anyone, let alone a man. Then she thought about conversations that she overheard while sitting on the cold pavements. A plan began to form in her mind. It was still very early days, but it was something that was not for John to know about because it was probably slightly illegal.

While Dido was held prisoner, she had no option other than to depend on 'him' and his son for everything for so long to survive that there was no way in hell that she was going to repeat that ever again. John had made it clear that Dido was not his type, but he was a man, and men were the enemy. It had been men who had robbed her of a life. John would have to earn her full trust. At that moment, he provided a useful ‘safe space’ for her and someone to talk to. While she trusted him not to want sexual favours from her, she was unsure about his long-term plans for her other than his suggestion about studying criminology.

In a coffee shop near City University, she found a discarded undergraduate student guide which talked in more detail about the cost of a degree. The figures began to add up. Accommodation, food, clothing and transport were just the bad icing on the top of a rancid cake. Dido knew very well how much a good day dipping for cash brought in. People were not carrying the same amount of cash they had when she first went dipping on Southend pier. Since Dido had resumed ‘dipping’, she had resisted selling credit and debit card details up to now. It looked like she would have to ‘dip’ into that. Thanks to some street gossip with other ‘dippers’, she knew of a device that could sniff out credit card details without needing to gain access to the card. That looked like a way to obtain the numbers. She had heard of something called the ‘Dark Web’ from another panhandler and that there were markets where the numbers could be sold. That was not something that could be researched in a Public Library. Dido returned to the city with a few dozen more questions that needed answers.

The arrival of the weekend had not resulted in her seeing her target. She didn’t go back to John’s home because she wanted to tell him more than her outline agreement to his plan for her future. She would add a few ‘buts’ to that agreement when she did see him again.

'The Future' was something that she had never thought possible during her years of captivity. 'He' and his son had gone out of their way to ensure that she never knew what day it was, let alone the time of the year. The ever-changing length of daylight that had come through a very dirty window high above her head had been her only clue about what time of year it was, apart from the middle of winter when the limited heating in the cellar failed to keep it warm. ‘He’ only turned it up when ‘guests’ were expected.

Since meeting John, she had come to understand that keeping a captive ignorant of the world was SOP for people like ‘him’. It made the captive even more dependent on the will of the captor than that of a prisoner in jail. Do it long enough, and something called 'Stockholm Syndrome' could kick in, and the prisoner becomes a captor. Dido had been given free rein to use John’s library of law and policing books. It had been hard going at first, but things had gradually gotten easier over the summer.

Her reading age was improving, but it was just one of the mountains she would have to climb. Since she had been panhandling, weekends were her time to think about the way forward.

Because she decided not to visit John for the weekend, Dido ventured onto the concourse of Liverpool St Station during the evening rush hour on Friday night. Twenty minutes of 'dipping' provided her with enough cash to stay in a cheap hotel in Bayswater and for some clean clothes from a fast fashion outlet at the western end of Oxford Street.

After a nice meal, a good night’s sleep and a long hot shower, Dido went into the city on Saturday and acted just like any other tourist. She walked along the south bank from Waterloo to Tower Bridge. As it was a fine day, there were a lot of people about. For some reason, she felt safe in the crowds. She marvelled at the skill of the skateboarders and the myriad of street performers, especially the mime artists.

As she approached Tate Modern, she found a group of street performers on their unicycles strutting their stuff outside. The audience was very appreciative of their skills. Dido admired the talent on show. She even took a few photos of the action on the phone that John had given her before continuing on her walk in the general direction of Tower Bridge.

Feeling a lot better, she went for an early meal at Borough Market before heading back to her hotel. Being able to act like a real person every so often was beginning to become an addictive habit. A habit that cost money that she didn’t have most of the time.

On Sunday, Dido continued posing as a tourist. She started at Speakers Corner. While a few of the speakers were interesting, it was hard to resist the odd ‘dip’. She resisted partly because of the six officers from the Royal Parks Police who were keeping the onlookers safe from people like her. She allowed herself to smile when they nabbed a small girl who could not have been more than 7 or 8 years old. Her facial features indicated that she came from either Romania or Bulgaria. Then, Dido spotted the girl’s handler in the crowd, looking very angry. The girl had not palmed off any wallets since she began watching.

For a moment, Dido thought about having a quiet word with one of the Parks Police Officers. It was only a moment. Then she moved away before temptation got the better of her, although Dido had seen the handler around the western end of Oxford Street, between Selfridges and Marble Arch, in recent weeks. After a shake of her head, she watched three of the officers take the young girl away. Her handler looked like he wanted to kill someone. The look on his face told Dido what to do.

Because of that look, and on her way out of the park, she did something that was totally out of character for her: she gave an officer a very good description of the handler.

“Consider it a free tip from someone trying to stop a young girl from a life of crime. As he is a handler, there may be more like her operating in the Regent Street area. She might be a victim of Child Trafficking.”

The officer tried hard to get a name from her, but Dido just shook her head and walked away. If they described her to any of the Met Officers who patrolled Oxford Street, they’d know who it was; otherwise, she was just another concerned citizen.

After an hour of window shopping and fighting the tourists who seemed to be ambling around even more aimlessly than usual and fighting the urge to dip a few pockets, she gave up and after grabbing a coffee from a café on Marylebone High Street, she walked north towards Regents Park and London Zoo. Dido vaguely remembered being taken to a wildlife park in Essex by her parents the summer before… before it happened.

Wandering around the Zoo brought out Dido’s inner child. It had been suppressed for far too long. For a while, she felt happy and contented. It didn’t last very long.

As soon as she saw the Mountain Gorilla’s enclosure, it was as if she was back in her cell. The thick steel bars on the den door brought it all back to her. Her emotions got the better of her, and she began to cry and shake with fear as it all came back to her with a vengeance.

The act of showing any emotion had been physically beaten out of her early on in her captivity. She’d been expected to dress like a doll to please her visitors and remain passive even if the clients hurt her. When she failed to show enough pleasure in servicing her visitors, 'he' would punish her by not feeding her for up to a week. The injections of her 'vitamins' did continue. Without food, they would make her ill.

Dido fled from the Zoo and found a seat on the towpath of the nearby 'Regents Canal' where she cried her eyes out even though they were screwed shut. Slowly, the shaking stopped, and she opened her eyes.

Dido sat there just gazing into space with watery eyes for more than an hour. The memories of her years behind bars had all come back to her at once when she saw the bars on the inner den of the Gorillas. For only the second time since her escape from ‘him’ had she felt like this… alone in the world.

The lure of her safe space at John’s home eventually dragged her off the bench and back to her hotel. After checking out, she took the tube from Lancaster Gate station to Epping. When the train reached the surface at Stratford, she sent a text to John.

“Need help. At Stratford, but coming to Epping.”

John replied.
“I’ll be there.”

True to his word, John was waiting for her at the station. His gold-coloured Cortina was easy to spot amongst a sea of predominantly grey, white and black cars.

Dido got in and put on her seatbelt. John looked like he was going to say something, but the way she stared straight ahead made him stop. Instead, he drove her to his house in silence all the time, wondering if she had found him by literally bumping into her on a bus or something.

John let Dido sort herself out in her own time once they had arrived at his home. All he said was,
“When you feel like talking, you know where I’ll be.”

Dido responded with a small nod of her head.

John could see that she had been crying and that it would not take much to start them off again. His late partner had days like this when her emotions, coupled with the hormones that she took, simply got on top of her. He knew not to force the issue but to be there when they needed him. Dido was very much the same.

More than two hours later, Dido came into his kitchen. She had washed her face and even put on a little makeup.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice hardly above a whisper.

“I didn’t do much.”

“You did… just by being here and giving me a place to stay.”

“Ready for something to eat? We can talk while we eat… if you are up to it, that is?”

“I’d love something to eat.”

“Good,” said John, smiling.
“I made some French Onion Soup yesterday. I was going to freeze some of it, but there is more than enough for us. I also made some bread.”

“You will make a great wife someday,” joked Dido.

“Too late for that. It keeps me busy and away from the Golf Course and the bores of the clubhouse bar.”

Dido didn’t have much clue about golf. All she did know was that many men who were retired seemed to spend all their time on the course. It was a good place to nick things from their cars. That was why she had obtained the ‘slim jim’ device that she was trying to use when they met for the first time.

“That would be great. Thanks.”

“How can I help you?” asked John after he’d dished up the food.

“I was ok until earlier. I went to the zoo and… saw the bars on the gorilla’s cage. The one they use to separate them when the female is in heat.”

“Did everything nasty that had happened to you all come back with a vengeance?”

She nodded.

“I think… I think that you may be suffering from PTSD.”

“What is that?”

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Lots of former military get it. The same applies to anyone who witnesses a tragedy or has spent a long time in a traumatic situation”

“So, it is normal then?”

John shook his head.

“No, it isn’t. I think that you should see someone. They can help you get through these incidents.”

“Not a cure, then?”

Again, he shook his head.
“There isn’t a real cure for PTSD, but getting revenge for what he and his buddies did to you will certainly help. For most, it is more of a question of being able to manage the PTSD, its early signs and how to manage while you are experiencing an event.”

Dido looked sad.
“It isn’t your fault. None of this is your fault,” said John, trying to reassure her.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she began to eat the soup. John knew that this was not a slight on him but her way of not wanting to say anything else for the time being.

“Who is this person you want me to see?” asked Dido more than twenty minutes later.

“Doctor Nichole White. She treats a lot of people with PTSD.”

“Can you trust her?”

“Why?”

“Because… in case you had forgotten, I’m not eighteen. If I go and see a doctor, don’t they have a legal duty to turn me into Social Services?”

John smiled. Dido was starting to think for herself again.

“Nicole will not turn you over to the authorities. She is not like that.”

Dido sat silently again for several minutes.
“Ok. I’ll see her. Can you set it up?”

“I will. All it will take is one phone call. She knows a little about you. When I gave her a heads-up, she told me not to press you about it and to wait for you to seek help. That you have just done.”

“Like a junkie then?”

“Very similar. They have to want to kick the habit. That is the first step on the road to recovery. You needed to want help. You asked me for help. I have not done very much.”

Dido looked at John and managed a small smile. Then, she did something very much out of character for her. She stood up, came around to his side of the table, and hugged him. This was the first time that they had really touched since the episode of the first video recording. Then, it was he who had initiated contact. This time, it was Dido who trusted him.

To John, this was a huge step forward in her willingness to trust him.

For Dido, this was the moment when she decided that John was looking out for her in a good way and was not the enemy. She could trust him. It wasn’t an easy decision, but to her, the way that he’d talked to her as an adult and an equal was the deciding factor.

Dido saw Dr White a few days later. She had come to John’s house for the first meeting just to keep the distractions down to a minimum. John disappeared to see a mechanic friend of his, apparently to talk about a new cylinder head for the Cortina. Dido guessed that it was just an excuse to let the Doctor feel no pressure from him.

Dido was understandably nervous at the prospect of baring all to a stranger. After thinking about it for a bit, it was really no different to what she had done on that day with John when her bravado got the better of her.

Nicole began by introducing herself and then stating what she knew about Dido. This was an attempt to put Dido at ease.

In return, Dido tried to talk, but what came out of her mouth was almost gibberish. Dido was struggling to bring some sense to her problems, but Nicole was not John.

Nicole tried another way through her defences.

“John told me that you had an episode while you were at the Zoo?”

Dido looked down at the table but did return a slight nod of the head.

“He said that the sight of the bars on the Gorilla enclosure was the cause?”

“Suddenly, I was back in the cell where he kept me for years.”
“Dido began to cry.

Nicole was very patient. That was her job… to listen.

Dido sat talking with Nicole for almost four hours. Both of them were tired at the end, so it was good when John turned up with a Chinese takeaway for lunch.

During the meal, Nicole outlined the plan that she and Dido had agreed on. John would be playing a small yet essential part in the treatment of Dido's PTSD.

Dido was quite downbeat after her session with Nicole. John didn’t press her except to reassure her that he would always be there for her when she had episodes in the future.

The next day, Dido seemed a lot happier with life. Now that she knew why she had reacted as she did and had some tips on how to combat a PTSD event, she was almost ready to return to her search for the man who had abused her for so long.

John took her to Epping Tube station early that afternoon. His parting words were,

“Now that you know at least one of the triggers you have to be careful of, just don’t get nicked, or you could end up in a cell again. While you might have an event, the people in the Police Station won’t know that you have PTSD and think that you are just acting up. I will get some cards printed for you that explains what you have, and I’ll add Dr White’s contact details. If you ever get picked up, be sure to give the custody officer one of the cards. They should know how to handle someone with PTSD. The job of the custody officer is solely to look after the welfare of people in custody and not to investigate crimes. Helping you prevent a PTSD event falls right into their job description.”

Dido took a few seconds to digest what he was saying.

She didn’t answer him but gave him a big hug. Then she was gone.

Dido had always been a person of few words, but since her bad experience at the Zoo, she had been even more introverted than ever when she was in the presence of people she did not trust. John was worried about this, but he had a plan in his mind that could help her be more comfortable interacting with people.

Dido returned to John’s late the following Friday evening. She briefly said hello to John before going to the apartment and bed.

John did not argue. Dido looked like shit. It was more than likely down to a lack of sleep.

She appeared for a late breakfast, looking a lot better.

“Tea?” asked John.

“Please. Two bags, please.”

“Rough week?”

Dido nodded.

“Then just relax and let me do all the chores.”

“I can’t let you do that. I have done my bit ever since I came here, and I’m not stopping now.”

“You can and will just for this weekend. I insist.”

Dido, to her credit, didn't fight John's position. She just looked weary.

After breakfast, John said,
“Last weekend, what did you do on Saturday? You never said?”

Dido managed a smile.
“Other things rather got in the way, didn’t they?”

“Well?”

“I went to the South Bank. I even visited Tate Modern. A bit weird but different. All part of your grand plan to broaden my knowledge of the world. I have to admit, I liked the National Gallery more…”

“What were the highlights? If the Tate Modern was a bit of a bust, what did you do then?”
“I wandered along the embankment back towards the London Eye. It was very enlightening.”

“Enlightening? In what way?” asked John, who seemed to be genuinely interested in her experiences.

“A real melting pot of people doing their thing and just enjoying life. Some of the tricks those skateboarders were doing were crazy. A few crashed, but they just got up and tried again.”

“There is a message there, isn’t there?”

“I suppose so.”

“What else?”

“This guy on a Unicycle. Doing leaps and spins. I think I managed to get him using the camera on my phone, just like you said.”

“Can I see them?”

“I don’t think that they are any good.”

“Ok. I promise not to criticise, but I will give you a few hints about improving your camera skills.”

“I’ll go and get the phone.”

Dido returned a few minutes later.

“I got that cable we talked about when I gave you the phone. You can connect the phone up to my TV,” said John.

“And see every blemish and cut-off head?”

“No, Dido. It just makes it easier for two of us to view them.”

Dido just handed John the phone.

“Here we are. Dido’s masterpieces volume 1”, said John, trying to get her interested in the whole thing.

John put the first picture of the performers on the screen.
“Impressive. And his head wasn’t cut off!” he remarked.

When he put the third image of the Unicycle rider up on the screen, Dido let out a yelp.

“What’s wrong?” asked John.

“It… it’s him. That’s the man,” she said with a definite tinge of panic in her voice.

John came and put his arms around Dido. It had taken months of gentle work to get her to even let him touch her. Slowly, the level of trust between them grew, and now he could hug her.

“Which one is it?” when he let her go.

“That one. The guy with the bald head and moustache.”

John went over to the screen and pointed to one of the bystanders.
“This one?”

“Yes. That is him. That is the man who kept me prisoner and… “
Then she broke down and cried…

John comforted her once again. All the time, his eyes were on the image of the man that she had identified.

John Proudfoot knew the man very well. They had crossed swords more than once over the years while he was a serving Police Officer. The task of getting redress had suddenly got several orders of magnitude harder.

“Do you know him?”

“The face seems familiar, but I can’t place it. Let me take a photo of him.”

She didn’t react other than to glare at the man with pure hatred. John could see that this was real hate. It's not some pretend feeling. If she got hold of him, he’d be lucky to escape with only his manhood shoved down his throat. That was something to work on for the future.

John took the photo feeling awful for not letting on that he knew a lot about her captor. All he could do was prepare her for the reveal, and that was not for that day nor the next. She had to be in the right mental state to take in the enormity of what he tell her about the man who had kept her captive for so long.

Dido went back to her 'panhandling' early the next morning. This time, she settled down outside the entrance to Farringdon Thameslink Station.

Her chosen spot was not that far as the crow flies from Moorgate, so she took a bit of a chance on that being an alternative route to work for her quarry.

After five wet and cold days sitting for five hours a day on the pavement close to the station, Dido gave up and decided to head back to John’s home for a bit, or R&R. Part of her ‘on the streets’ persona was that she could not be seen taking the tube, Thameslink or London Overground services in the centre of the city. To keep up that ‘show’, she took the No 63 Bus to Kings Cross Station.

As she got off the bus and looked around for her next bus, the No 259, she saw him on a No 214 bus that had just pulled away from the adjacent stop.

She turned away and swore several times. Her reaction made her miss her connection.

What made it worse was that the route the No 214 took started at Finsbury Circus, and she had used that very same bus route during her stint outside Moorgate Tube, which was less than 200m away from the terminus of the bus route.

Dido kept silently cursing herself all the way to John's home. Not only was she annoyed at missing him and that she had failed to use the camera on the phone that John had given her, but what was worse was the inevitable dressing down that John would give her when he found out what she'd done.

She would never tell him, but she looked up to this man who was nearly old enough to be her grandfather, who had taken her in and helped her when most people would not have even given her the time of day and had proved to be on her side in this quest. Then she changed her mind. John’s words, ‘learn from your mistakes’ and ‘don’t be afraid to admit that you got it wrong’, came to haunt her on her way to his home. She resolved to come clean.

To Dido's surprise, all John wanted to do was hug her.

“Aren’t you angry at me?”

“No, Dido, I’m not angry or pissed off or anything else. These things happen, but it isn't as bad as you might think at the moment. You have identified that the Moorgate/Barbican area is key to your search. That is a big positive step forward."

“But…?”

“No, but’s Dido. You have done more on your own than a team of detectives could in six months, given that the team would not have had a photo of him and only a vague sketch of his face.... yet, and it is highly unlikely that this man has a criminal record. At the moment, the odds are that you have not been recognised by him, so carry on with your operation, and you will get there."

“But…?”

“Time is on your side. As long as the prime suspect does not know that you are looking for them, they will make a mistake. Patience will win the day.”

Patience was not something that Dido possessed a lot of, but she was learning.

It was at times like this that John regretted that this was not an official investigation. If it was, then a search warrant would be obtained for the CCTV footage from the bus. Dido knew the date and time of the bus stopping at Kings Cross. If Dido saw 'him' from the road, then he would be on the bus CCTV as it covered the whole of the lower deck. He mentally sighed to himself. It wasn't official, and that was all there was to it…

Dido had been visiting John Proudfoot for more than six months when, over dinner one evening, he said,

“I have some news for you.”

“You have a hot date tonight, and you want me gone?” replied Dido slightly sarcastically.

John chuckled.
“The only hot person here is you, my dear. No, I engaged the services of a Private Investigator to go back to your life before you were abandoned by your parents.”

“Abandoned? Yeah, right.”

"Dido, I know what they did was about as bad as it gets. They did bad stuff and then legged it to pastures new, leaving you behind to suffer. I call that abandonment, ok?"

Dido decided not to get into an argument with her mentor.
“So? What did the private dick tell you that I didn’t?”

“Dido, I thought that having another view of your early life might give us a clue as to who the people were that sold you on to the traffickers.”

That period in her life was very much a blank.

“The report says that the local cops had their eye on you because of your dipping on the pier when suddenly you and your family were gone. It was as if you and your family had dropped off the face of the earth. The only clue was that your mother flew from Stanstead to Amsterdam and then on to San Francisco. On the same day, your father flew from Heathrow to Madrid and then to Miami. Because you were not with either of them, the local police assumed that you had gone to live with a relative. The report also states that your father was a person of interest in a series of betting shop heists on the other side of the Thames Estuary in Kent. Places like Gravesend, Dartford and Rochester.”

“I knew that he was into bad stuff, but he kept all that from me. All he wanted from me was a steady supply of cash to fund his criminal activities. The train that runs to the end of the pier was perfect for a bit of dipping when it was crowded at weekends in the summer. Out of season, the place was a bit of a ghost town. In winter, the only chance of a bit of dipping was when decent teams came to town to play Southend United.”

“The P.I. found that a family of iffy characters named O’Connell, who ran a couple of bookies in Essex, loaned your father money to set up his last heist, which went badly wrong when their getaway car was boxed in outside the shop by a council refuse truck. The O’Connell clan were, as we used to say when I was on the job, a family of considerable interest. Your father and the rest of the robbery crew got away by the skin of their teeth but without any of the cash that they had just lifted. The Kent Police knew who had done the job but had no evidence. The getaway car was towed but didn’t bring up any DNA, which was a real head-scratcher to the Kent Police. It turns out that your father owed the O’Connells around thirty grand plus interest when your parents disappeared.”

“So, the O’Connells sold me?”

John shook his head.
“They, like all good bookmakers, had laid off the debt to a Dutchman called Erik Van Dreart. He was a nasty piece of work. Customs and Excise had been on his trail for years. Lots of little bits of nothing, but they knew that just under the surface, he was a big-time smuggler but one who was always two steps ahead of Customs agents. It is more than likely that this Van Dreart sold you to the man who was responsible for your mutilation. That side of crime is very much ‘need to know,’ and unless you are on the inside, you don’t need to know.”

“Smuggler? As in illegal immigrants? And… you said ‘was’?”

John shook his head.
“Whatever was there to be transported from Rotterdam or Antwerp or wherever into the UK. Drugs, artwork, diamonds and yes, even people if they were paid enough. “

“Did he take me abroad? For the operation? I vaguely remember some language other than English when I was recovering.”

"That's where that bit of the trail goes cold. Erik Van Dreart’s body was found drifting off Great Yarmouth seven weeks after your parents went missing. That’s why I used the past tense.”

“What does all this mean to me?”

“Not a lot, Dido. I had high hopes that the P.I. would give us a lead, but they didn’t.”

“What about these… O’Connell’s?”

“That’s where it gets weird. A week after Van Dreart’s body was found, they sold up their shops and other property at a great loss and went back to the Irish Republic. These days, they are running a Garden Centre near the city of Cork and are not on the radar of the Irish Guarda.”

“It does not make sense?” said Dido.

“Same here. It is as if the departure of your parents was the catalyst for something that we have no clue about to happen in the criminal world and for the players to follow your parents out of the southeastern Essex area. The Essex CID probably know what happened, but short of going to them, we are not going to find out, and at this stage of the investigation, we don’t want to involve the cops now, do we?”

“It is strange… but there has to be more to it than that?”

“I agree,” said John.
“But for the time being, it is enough. If you remember your plan… digging into how you ended up with him was for when he was in jail.”

“I’d forgotten that, but yes. At least we know that my parents planned their exit from the country, and it seems to me that I was always surplus to requirements.”

Dido fell silent.

John sat watching her. While the news wasn’t that good, at least Dido had admitted that she was never part of her parents’ long-term plans when the shit hit the fan.

“What’s next?” she asked after a while.

“I had some dealings with the NYPD and the LAPD in my time on the force. I will make some informal enquiries about hiring a P.I. over there to try to track down your parents. It might not be easy as you said, they had planned their exit from the country before giving you to the O’Connells … and the USA is a huge place and has more than six times our population spread over a vast area.”

“Can we… can the Police go after them even though they are in Ireland?”

“If later investigations result in concrete evidence against them, then I’m sure that the HMRC would love to get their hands on that family. The PI estimated that they took off owing around a hundred grand in unpaid VAT and Income Tax, but that was just a guess.”

Dido pushed her plate away, her appetite gone for the moment.

“How much did this all cost you? It can’t have come cheap?”

“Dido… Leave the cost to me. It is my pleasure to do anything I can to help you get justice.”

She managed a smile. He was willing to throw money at her case, but he was retired, and her memory of retired people was that they never had a lot of money to spare. That’s why she had never ‘dipped’ people who appeared to be over 60 years old.

“Thanks, John.”

“Now, Dido, ready to learn some more things?”

She groaned.
“What now? How to crack a safe?”

John chuckled.
“That will come later. The garage is not exactly the right place to store several different safes…”

“So?”

“Watching you painstakingly put the little bits of evidence together has been fascinating. What I am about to say may seem strange, so don’t even think about answering me right now. Sleep on it for a week.”

Dido was suddenly very alert.

“What I’m suggesting is that you consider a career as a criminologist. As I have said before, you have a talent as an investigator. The way you observe people is just unnerving. The descriptions you have given me of people going about their business are uncanny. When you told me about the priest with a bit on the side… Brilliant.”

Dido went rather red in the face.

“Dido, honestly, I would have loved to have had even one of you on my CID team. Many of the people in CID are next to useless when it comes to solving crimes. They might have been a great uniformed officer, but the skills needed in CID are far more diverse. Patience and observation are key skills that many who move out of uniform into CID simply don’t have. I blame TV for that, but I digress. What about it?”

“Stop right there, John Proudfoot. I know your little game. This isn’t the first time that you have mentioned something like this.”

“So? What it means is you are going back to school. You have missed so much, but with appropriate tuition, I am sure you can get the qualifications that you need to gain a place at university. The best criminologist I ever worked with in my time on the force got her degree from Cambridge after leaving school at sixteen and working on the production line of a biscuit factory in Wembley for three years. Then, she did an Open University Degree before going to Cambridge for her Masters. For someone who left school with three poor GCSEs, that is remarkable. I see that you have the ability to do the same.”

“Me? Getting a degree? Cambridge? Now you are kidding me…”

“I am perfectly serious, Dido. You have a good brain and an excellent memory, and you can manage a team, as is evidenced by the success that your Oxford Street Irregulars have had in recent months. I have seen you at work, and I am impressed even more so as it all appears to be so natural to you.”

“Thank you, John. You have given me a lot to think about, but I could never afford it in a million years.”

John smiled.
“Not even with those tips you get from people walking by you all day?”

“John Proudfoot!”

“Dido, it would be naive of me to think that you don’t pick up tips. Finding out about the Roman Catholic Priest with a mistress led me to think a bit more about all the data that was going into that pretty little head of yours. Tips about pending deals would be par for the course. It all depends upon what you do with it. Knowing you as I have come to do these past months, I would hazard a guess that you have found someone to take those little snippets of information and turn them into hard cash. The money belt around your waist is noticeably fatter than it was three months ago.”

John left the unasked question on the table.

Dido looked at her feet for several seconds.
“John, you are frustratingly good.”

“I didn’t reach the rank of Chief Super without having at least a little bit of talent.”

“You are only partially correct,” said Dido with a huge grin on her face.
“I have invested most of it through this broker I… I lured them into letting me give him a blow job. Then I told him how old I was. We came to an arrangement, if you know what I mean.”

“So? What is Dido worth these days? Just an approximation will do.”

Dido thought for a few seconds before replying.
“Cash? About eight hundred. Funds? About seventy grand, but I lost around three grand this week when the market dropped, and the pound/euro exchange rate went down as well.”

“Just be careful, Dido. This broker might just up and leave with your money. Does he know that you are a ‘non-person’ at the moment? There are risks, Dido. I get the feeling that you are too trusting of others.”

“I know. That’s why I am looking for another outlet for my information. Spread the risk, I think you call it?”

“Well done, Dido. Spreading the risk is good, but just be careful. On the street, you may have the advantage, but in the dealing room? They rule the roost. You have to play by their rules. It is a different game entirely.”

John smiled.
“And you can start spreading the risk by doing the washing up.”

Dido stuck her tongue out at John but took his hint.

John just got back to reading his newspaper. Dido’s intelligence was there for everyone to see when she chose to reveal it. He wondered just how long she could continue with her double life. He’d seen undercover officers get badly hurt when their cover story slipped just a little bit. With this man… He was under no illusion that he’d have her killed if he discovered her aims for him.

While he mulled a few troublesome clues in the cryptic crossword, he made a decision that would make or break their relationship. It was time to let Dido know about Fox. When she was done clearing up the kitchen, she stuck her head around the door to the lounge.
“All done. I’m going to put on some washing, she said, smiling.

John folded up his newspaper and put it into the wastebasket.

“Dido, come and sit down for a minute. I have something to tell you.”

“Ok, grand master, I am all ears?” she said jokingly.

“What I’m about to say is not a laughing matter. I have tried to find the right time to tell you this, but the longer I keep this to myself, the harder it will be.”

“This sounds serious?”

“My dear Dido, it is very serious.”

He leaned forward.
“When you showed me that photo of the man who had kept you prisoner, I recognised him in a flash. He and I have crossed swords on more than one occasion.”

“Why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Dido, please listen and think before you respond. Please try to put yourself in my shoes. Ok?”

“I’ll try.”

Good. The man who kept you prisoner is Thomas Fox. He is one of the top barristers in the City of London and is also a Professor of Law at the University that is close to where you have seen him. His client list is like a who’s who of organised crime in the country. He has contacts everywhere. I have been grilled by him in the witness box more than once. He is a man that is not to be trifled with.”

Dido went white in the face as she tried to take in what he’d said.

She sat looking into space for several minutes.

“I… When you told me who he was, I could have happily throttled you. Then I tried to put myself, looking at the other side of the coin as you have been telling me for ages, and I do see your dilemma. I don’t like it that you held out on me, but I understand your reasons.”

“That is progress, is it not? A while ago, the old Dido would have stormed off in a huff. You are still here, which is progress in my book.”

“If this man is who you say he is, then he is a formidable foe. I can see why being a bull in a China shop would not work.”

“Tomorrow, he is appearing at the Old Bailey in Court 12. He is defending a very nasty man who slit the throat of a competitor just for fun. Why don’t you get those clothes clean and go to the court and sit in the public gallery? Watch and learn. Then, we can talk again about how we can go about taking him down. We have a name but little else. You were held outside London. Exactly where that is is still very much a mystery. There is so much more to learn before we can even think of making a move against him.”

“We? This is my battle, John, mine and mine alone!” said a forceful Dido.

John shook his head.

“As I said, he and I have crossed swords in court. My last case was one where he defended a murderer. Our case was not as solid as it should have been. He tore three of my officers apart on the stand. Taking him down would mean that I could go to my grave a happy man. Taking him down has to be a team effort. You and me. Only when we are good and ready will we involve the authorities. We don’t know who is in the pay of criminals who might just tip him off.”

“You weren’t held prisoner for years!”

“True, but isn’t it reasonable to assume that you were not the only one he has held? He could well have someone else in the same place as you were. Don’t they deserve justice as well? Tipping him off could result in him disposing of his current captive. It is not just about you now, isn’t it?”

Dido sat thinking again.

“Ok, you win…”

“No, Dido, it is not a case of winning anything until he and all those involved in this crime are behind bad for a very long time. Given who he is, you can’t do it alone. How about it, eh?”

“Ok, but don’t ever do that again… got it?

“I won’t, but it is a two-way street, isn’t it?

“What do you suggest?”

“We have regular progress meetings. I’ll set up some whiteboards in the library that we can use to plot progress. We run this just like a proper police investigation. That way, we will have a case ready to turn over to the Police and CPS at the right time. This is not going to be a short-term task. That man is a formidable enemy. If we underestimate him, then he could fly the coup, and we won’t get justice.”

“I need to think about this.”

“I would not expect otherwise.”

Dido left John alone. He knew that he could have handled that reveal a lot better, but it was done now, and they had to move on. Fox needed to be taken down. Fox was hated by law enforcement.

In late May, Dido and John Proudfoot were having one of their regular reviews of their quest to bring Thomas Fox to justice.

Neither one was in the best of moods, mostly because very little real progress had been made since their last review. Their quarry was proving as wily as a dog fox is when it is being chased by the hounds. When it came to finding the house where he had kept Dido and probably many more young women prisoners over the years, almost zero progress was being made. It was driving Dido mad. John was by now able to read her moods, and this was one of those that needed to run its course.

Dido hadn't wanted these meetings to begin with. She had got most of the way to where the investigation was on her own and didn’t want to let John run the show. To counter her objections, John gave her a rundown on how a large-scale serious crime investigation was run, especially the role of the SIO, Senior Investigative Officer. He concentrated on how the SIO ran a case and brought in specialists like SOCO when needed. Once he'd done that, Dido was much more open with him about how she was planning to move forward once he’d given her the role of SIO with him as her assistant. She was running the show and not him.

The whereabouts of 'his' London pied-a-terre was well known to both of them. Dido had tailed him from the University in the first week of their joint investigation. His London home was a fifth-floor apartment in the Barbican Centre; it was not a place where he would be keeping another child or where Dido had been held for all those years. While finding it was a step forward, Dido knew that the place where she’d been held was in the countryside.

That small bit of information allowed them to develop a pattern of behaviour for Fox. During term time, or for most of it, he taught from Monday afternoon to Thursday afternoon. He spent three nights at his London home before heading to the country for the weekend. Dido was able to confirm his absence from the house where she had been held for around half the week.

The exception to that was when he appeared in Court as the Barrister defending some of the nastiest and most well-connected criminals in the country. His modus operandii was to try to get the trials where he was lead Barrister scheduled for the periods between terms. Dido was able to confirm that there were periods when he would abuse her just one day a week instead of the usual four days.

John tried hard to get Dido to accept that the slow and very painstaking methods of gathering information were exactly what happened in real life. Dido ignored him and spent many a Sunday watching re-runs of the Columbo TV series. John just sat back and smiled. The way Columbo went about his investigations was a million miles away from how the UK Police did their work, he would pick up on small things, both visual and verbal and would weave that into how he solved the crime. Once Dido picked up that skill, it would help the investigation a lot. John knew that it was often the small things that gave the game away, much like a poker player and their ‘tell’.

Just before Easter, Dido, John and a couple of his friends had tried to follow him, but none of their attempts were successful. All they knew was that he lived somewhere to the north and east of the capital. Once that fact had been established, all subsequent attempts at tracking him had fallen flat on their respective faces.

Every week, he would leave the University around 14:00 on Fridays and would always vary his route of exit from the capital. They had found no less than eight different paths he had used since the start of March. Every attempt to follow him to his destination had so far been unsuccessful. Much of that was down to a lack of manpower and an almost paranoid fear of being discovered. To both of them, the investigation needed to remain very much in the shadows until the time came to go public. John didn't show it, but he was worried about Dido's safety should their investigation get exposed before the right time. That was why he'd suggested to Dido very early on that she should change her appearance. So far, she'd resisted his attempts, but he was hopeful that one day she'd relent.

Both of them were clear that they were in this for the long haul, the lack of progress was troubling but not insurmountable.

One area where progress was being made was with Dido and the prospect of going back to school. It terrified her, but she knew that John was right as usual and that one day, she would have to think about what her life would be like once he had been dealt with.

The thorny issue of finding the place or places where 'he' had held Dido was one that would not go away. Dido had a large-scale map on the wall of her bedroom in the annexe that showed all the paths that he'd taken to leave London for the country. None of them went anywhere much outside the northern ring that was the North London railway line. A plethora of bus, tube and railway lines spread out beyond that ring. If you put all the tube, conventional railway and bus routes together, you have a huge web of possible interconnections.

As much as Dido hated Fox, she had to admire his ingenuity. He was certainly living up to his animal namesake.

While Dido had escaped his confines, it was of little use in the present investigation. Once she was free, she fled for her life and avoided all human contact for almost six weeks. She'd lived off of her wits and by giving the odd 'blow job' for a bit of money that was used on fast food. It was only when she had tried to steal some eggs from a suburban garden coop that she had any formal contact with officialdom. She was treated as a vulnerable young woman under eighteen. She'd been put into care with a family in the nearest town, Leighton Buzzard. Apart from that, she had little knowledge of where she'd gone since her escape.

The Police did not know about her period of captivity. She had also refused to be examined for sexual encounters.

Dido had remained with the Foster Parents for just six days. Then she walked out and took her chances on the road. It was all down to her hearing one of her social workers telling the foster father that they were going to try to find her parents or any other relatives. That had put the fear of God into her. All sorts of 'what ifs’ rampaged through her mind. She had this vision of her parents washing their hands with her all those years ago, but the spectre of 'him' coming forward as posing as her legal guardian… That was too much to risk, so she had gone on the streets. That was where she had remained until her encounter with John Proudfoot. For her, never had the apparent foolishness of appearing to try to steal a car had such a profound effect on a young life. Since that encounter, her life had changed beyond even her wildest dreams. All that remained was to get justice, and that started with the man responsible for imprisoning her for years and, in that time, made her perform horrible sex acts with him and his cabal of friends.

The words ‘All that remained’ were so easy to say but so hard to achieve. Progress was slow.

The report that John had shown her about her old life in Southend very much confirmed that vision of abandonment. Until she came of age, she was determined not to become dependent on any man and that included John Proudfoot. She trusted him… to a point. When she was legally an adult, she would review the situation.

Dido left the meeting at John’s with a lot on her mind.

It wasn’t until two days after that meeting that Dido realised that there was a solution that had been staring her right in the face all along. Her 'team' of pickpockets were masters of blending into the scenes around them. Many also had an encyclopaedic understanding of London streets that would make 'the Knowledge' that Taxi Drivers in London have to know seem like a lesson that a child would learn. One of them, who was only known as 'Janus', knew the sewer map just as well as the London A-Z road maps.

Dido made the call to John, feeling excited at finding a solution to what might have been an insurmountable problem.
“John, I know how we can follow him and not be detected.”

“It was staring me right in the face all the time. My old team of dips.”

“Yes. Their skills are perfect for this. They can blend into the background at will.”

“I have no idea where they are right now. I’ll set up a meet and put out the word.”

“I have an idea, but the meeting will not be in London.”

“I don’t want to alert the law to what we might be planning. I think that with a sizeable carrot, they will go for it.”

Dido listened to John’s thoughts on the idea.

“All they need to know is that he is a person of interest and that he is to be observed and nothing more.”

“Will they follow your orders?”

Dido chuckled to herself.
“I have more than enough dirt on them to put them away for a long time. How else do you think that I was able to keep them in line for so long? After a bit, two of the old team began to take liberties, so I made a call, and the ringleader found himself on a plane to Nigeria and an interview with a prince. They had robbed a Nigerian VIP right outside Claridge’s Hotel in broad daylight. After that… they all played ball and earned a lot of money from our little enterprise.”

“I think that they’ll play by my rules if I make it worthwhile.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

“Yes, John. I will be careful.”

Dido hung up the phone and made a mental note to get a new phone and sim ASAP. She’d had that one for three months, which was far longer than normal.

[Ten Days Later, Darling Gap Car Park, Sussex Coast.]

Dido’s motley crew of pickpockets had gathered for a meeting with her. She’d chosen the place because of a TV programme about the chalk downs. She’d never been south of London in her life. In her mind, it was far enough away to be well away from people who might recognise her or her ‘crew’. All she’d said to them was ‘get here and £500.00 will be yours’. They’d all come and hadn’t raised a question or objection. Despite their varied criminal backgrounds, they all owed Dido a lot. For well over a year, they had made a very good living from their ‘dipping’. They’d all gone off on their summer vacation with bulging pockets and zero convictions against their name. Her request for a meeting, even with a sizeable carrot, was not going to be ignored.

Dido had packed a picnic, and the group was sitting on the grass well away from where the rest of the visitors were walking, taking selfies and eating ice cream.

“Ok, Team,” said Dido.
“I want to get something straight, and what I am about to propose is optional. If you don’t want to take part, then I won’t hold it against you. You can leave with the money that I promised. You came as I asked, and I always keep my promises.”

A couple of them looked a little disappointed.
“What I want you to do is follow someone. We need to know where he goes, what he does and all without him having even the slightest idea that they are being tailed. If you do that, then each of you will get another two grand each. Are you in? If you aren’t, then as I said, I’ll give you your £500, and if I am right, there will be a bus going to Eastbourne along in twenty or so minutes. There is a direct train service from there to London Victoria every hour.”

No one moved. Dido smiled.

“Good. This person is very cunning. He should be, his name is Fox. I have a map for each of you showing the various routes he has taken to get out of London before we called off the tail. Now, with seven of you, you should be able to rotate the one following him. I have prepared some resources that will help you tail him. They are in the lockup in Kensal Rise.”

The lockup was where they held various sets of disguises and props that they used in their criminal enterprise.

Dido passed out the small package of information that she had prepared. The group was silent for several minutes as they studied them.

“Boss,” said the one woman on the team, Marsha.
“Why? Why are we following him?”

“He is a suspected rapist… of Children.”

No one argued with that. It was true, as Dido knew only too well.

“How long have we got Boss?” asked another of the group, Felix.

“He is a University Professor. The term ends in three weeks. He spends two or three nights during the week at an apartment in the Barbican, which is near the university. The starting point will be after his last tutorial, which ends at 14:00. In the meantime, I have arranged four rooms for you at two different hotels near Kings Cross. Look at the routes on the maps and work out a plan to follow him should he use them. The resources of the lockup are there for you to use.”

They were all studying the maps.
“In the lockup, there is a mobile phone for each of you. The PAYG SIM in them has two hundred minutes on it. The SIM cards were all bought from vending machines at Heathrow, so they are almost untraceable. I have loaded up the phones with all the relevant numbers. One of those new numbers is mine.”

“Except for you being on CCTV using the machines?” quipped Janus.

Dido laughed.
“Except that they were all bought by someone who looked like a Muslim woman and who was wearing a hijab. Besides, I was miles away at the time. I was panhandling outside Tower Hill Tube.”

“Janus… Do you think that the boss would make a simple mistake like that?”

“Sorry, boss.”

“No need to be sorry Janus. Mistakes are easy to make when you are working outside your comfort zone. I have learned a lot of tricks in the past couple of years, and this is just one of them.

The group enjoyed the picnic and the sea air. Dido let them travel back to London on their own. They’d agreed to meet at the lockup the next day to look over the resources and plan their course of action. I went home, hoping that this plan would work.

“I take it that no news is good news?” asked John the next Friday when he and Dido met late in the afternoon. He was in town for a Chief Superintendent’s Association Dinner.

“I’m not expecting anything until this time next week. I would hope that this week, the team has been doing reconnaissance of the routes we know that he has taken and working on a plan for how to move around dynamically. The three electric bikes that I bought from the Transport for London Lost Property auctions should help them do that.”

John looked at me curiously.
Then he shook his head.
“I won’t ask where the money came from… but…?”

Dido smiled.
“Then don’t, and you will be told no lies?”

He smiled. They were cool, but the old habits for a lifelong copper die hard, especially when Dido and money were mentioned in the same breath.

[2 weeks later]

Dido met Janus near the iconic Glasshouse in Kew Gardens. After greeting her friend, she bought lunch for them both; they found a spot to sit down where they could talk and eat at the same time. To any casual observer, they looked like friends meeting for an afternoon in the gardens.

“Ok, Janus, what is so important that you texted me in the middle of the night?”

“Boss… It is like this… We are doing it all wrong. We are following the wrong person.”

Dido smiled, but internally, she was seething with anger. She did not like being told that her plans were wrong.

“Ok, shoot. Who should we be following?”

Janus opened up his phone and showed her a photo.

Dido recognised the man. His name was Marcus. He was the son of Fox and was who ‘looked’ after those being held captive by the Professor while ‘he’ was lecturing to his students.

“This is Marcus Fox… but you know that, don’t you?”

“How… how did you get onto him? As far as I know, he does not come into the city.”

“He was at the target’s flat yesterday, taking a lot of things from it and putting them into a Volvo SUV. It was a rental if the stickers on the front windscreen are anything to go by.”

“That makes sense. He won’t be back in the city other than for a few days until September unless he is appearing for some scumbag at the Old Bailey,” remarked Dido.

“Thanks to the bikes, we were able to follow the SUV until it took the M11 at the start in Leytonstone.”

“He could have gone anywhere after that?”

“That is true, but I took the liberty of asking a neighbour of the Professor at the Barbican about the dude. She said that he had a place just south of Royston. I went up to the flat after they’d gone and knocked on his door. I made out that I was a student who had just graduated and wanted to thank him personally.”

“That was a great move, Janus, even if it was slightly risky. You are probably all over the CCTV now. If he finds out, his friends in the cops could identify you.”

“I was willing to take that risk. I saw from your body language that this was ultra important to you.”
Janus held up her hand.
“Please don’t tell me why it is so important. I don’t want to know.”

Dido smiled and nodded her head.
“This old biddy who lived next door heard me knocking. She told me that he was not expected back until late August.”

“Janus, there will be an extra bonus in this for you. At least we know where to concentrate our resources.”

“Don’t even think of it, boss. Our task is to find him. We haven’t done it yet.”

That was news to Dido and made perfect sense. Her brain was working overtime.

After leaving Janus to take the tube back into the city, Dido headed in the other direction towards the public library in Richmond.

Once in the library, she pulled out some maps of the small town of Royston. She gleaned that it was far enough out of London for his base but close enough to commute into when needed. The A1(M), A10 and M11 were within ten to fifteen minutes away by car. The town had a railway station with direct services into the heart of the city. Both the Barbican and Farringdon Stations were only a few minutes brisk walk away from the university. Suddenly, a lot of things began to make sense. She remembered nearly being run over by a car when she crossed the A1 to the west of Baldock a few days after she had escaped from his house. Those days were all about surviving and had not really penetrated her memory.

Dido left the library after an hour, feeling a lot better. Progress had been made at last.

Two days later, she met up with Janus once more. This time in Highgate Cemetery near the grave of Karl Marx.

“Janus, please tell the guys that they have done a brilliant job finding the Royston clue. I think that you all should head off to wherever for the summer. I’ll arrange for payment through the normal channels.”

“Are you sure? The boys were just starting to enjoy themselves. This makes a nice change from… well, other things.”

“But Boss? You want to take down this scumbag, don’t you?”

“I do, but by legal means.”
She stopped herself from adding, ‘ plus being locked up and abused every day like I was’.

“As I said,” said Dido in a desperate attempt to get the conversation back on track.
“I’m doing this by legal means. He needs to go to jail, and they don’t like rapists and child abusers in there.”

“What happens when you find out where he lives?”

“I investigate the property and everything. Even if I can’t get him for rape but can for something like tax evasion, then I’ll do it. I’ll just make sure that the evidence is rock solid and one million per cent legal. Whatever he goes down for is my business, ok? How I do that is with the help of a very good friend who has contacts in all sorts of pies.”

“Gotcha, boss, but just remember, we are all here for you should you need us… ok?”

“Thanks Janus. It is good to know that.”

“All our reports of how we tracked him will be in your email in the morning. Dove is collating them as we speak.”

“That’s Dove all over. Tell everyone that I’m very thankful for what you have done, and whoever thought of tracking Marcus… well, it was inspired. Thanks.”

As they said goodbye, Dido said,
“I will put envelopes in the lockup for each of you in a few days. I’m relying on you not to let anyone get clever and take more than one.”

Janus smiled.
“Gotcha Boss. You always played fair with us, and it is only fair that we do the same with you.”

Dido walked around the cemetery for over an hour after saying goodbye to Janus. While it was a strangely beautiful place, her mind was on what to do next.

Dido had not only been a pickpocket but had kept her ear open for years, even while she was being held captive. She would spend hours with her ear glued to the door of her cell, listening to ‘him’ and his friends discussing investments. She now knew that many of those discussions involved crimes. She was certain that no one knew about her eavesdropping. It would only become public knowledge when ‘he’ was in the dock or, as she knew now, shortly before it.

After she'd escaped from his prison and had gone on the streets, Dido had headed for the City of London. All she knew from hearing those conversations was that was where the big money was made. Once again, she had kept her ears open and had picked up all sorts of financial titbits, both good and bad. She had made the acquaintance of a journalist quite by chance when he'd fallen over her after a particularly drunken lunch. She began to feed him little snippets of information in return for payment.

Always uppermost on her mind was finding 'him'. Where she had been held was very much out of the city and to the north. She would travel out of central London every weekend and hope that she could catch a glimpse of him at places where people come together. Supermarkets became a favourite spot for a bit of panhandling. It was one of those trips that changed her life for the better when she met John Proudfoot.

Dipping was all well and good and could provide a steady but mostly small stream of income, whereas the big money was made in the city by people who gambled other people’s money for a living.

After a big row with John about her criminal activities, they had settled on Dido using her skills as a pickpocket to survive with one proviso: if she was arrested and later charged, then he didn’t know her and she didn’t know him. Dido had agreed with that.

While panhandling outside Tower Hill Tube at the start of her quest to identify her captor, she found a broker who would invest her cash with no questions asked other than a blowjob or two. That proved to be a very profitable partnership for both of them. The profits from those investments were in an offshore bank and were earmarked for after, hopefully, 'he' was locked up for the rest of his life or to pay for university. John’s quest to get her to come around to his way of thinking was working.

It looked like that would have to wait until after the summer. In the meantime, Dido needed to get well away from London once she had taken care of a bit of unfinished business.

Dido sent her team of ‘dips’ off for their summer break in late June. That allowed her to see how being on the ‘right’ side of the law felt.

John had been hinting that sooner or later, she was going to have to make a decision. Stop the crime and become a good citizen or… face the inevitable arrest and probable imprisonment along with the publicity about her sexuality. The mere thought of that was enough for her to see what it felt like to be a good citizen.

[A week later, Oxford Street, London]

“Nice day for a dip then, Blondie?”

Those words startled Dido. Her first reaction was to touch her hair. That was a trait that John Proudfoot had commented on several times. It annoyed her that she had done it again after vowing to stop. It was a ‘tell’ that she wanted to obliterate. She turned around feeling angry, but as soon as she saw the person standing there smiling, she relaxed.

“A good day to you, Constable Patel. As you can clearly see, I am not exactly dressed for a ‘dip’, as you put it, and my name, as you well know, is, Dido.”

Dido was well known to the local Police as a pick-pocket or, in slang terms, an artist in the ancient art of the 'dip'. Despite a huge amount of circumstantial evidence, she'd never been arrested, let alone charged with any crime. Her patch of Regent Street and Oxford Street in central London is covered by more CCTV cameras than possibly anywhere outside the area surrounding the Palace of Westminster, but none of the footage showed her putting her hand into someone's pocket and removing the contents. She was just too good to be caught like that. In recent times, she no longer did the 'dipping' herself but had trained a group of homeless misfits to work together to everyone's advantage.

This particular July Wednesday afternoon was hot and sultry. To be seen wearing a coat would immediately arouse suspicion for anyone known to be a pickpocket. Dido was wearing a very skimpy top and a short denim skirt that showed off her shapely legs. There was hardly anywhere she could hide the contents from a ‘dip’ until she could pass them off to one of her ‘team’. A small day rucksack was on her back. It contained just a bottle of water and a waterproof cagoule.

“I haven’t seen you or any of your team around this week?” asked the Constable.

“Constable Patel, if you had done your homework, you would have known that my team, as you put it, are on holiday, and that is not an admission of anything illegal, you understand? Every July and August, a good part of the country goes on holiday. My friends are no different, and before you ask, I do not have any idea where they are at the moment. It is not because I don’t want to know, but because if I don’t know, then I can’t tell people like your good self any lies now, can I?”

The constable shook his head. She always had an answer to any question that the Constable used to try to trap her. She was just too good, and that was part of the frustration of the team who covered that part of London.

“Besides, there’s a new game afoot in case you hadn’t noticed…” remarked Dido.

“What do you mean Blo… Dido? No b… lies now.”

Dido smiled.
The constable and she had known each other for almost two years. Their relationship had been combative at first. Now, it was more one of mutual respect than anything else. After several months of trying, he had reluctantly accepted that short of a miracle, he would never catch her in the act of lifting a purse or wallet.

All the local street criminals knew that Dido was on relatively good terms with a few of the police officers who patrolled this area, so her being seen passing the time of day would not be that unusual, especially given her state of dress. It was all part of the never-ending game of 'cat and mouse' that played out on the streets of central London every day.

“Have I ever, and no disrespect to your Hindu religion, bullshitted you or Detective Sergeant Harrison, whom I saw loitering with intent outside John Lewis a few minutes ago?”

The constable didn’t rise to her bait.

“If you had kept your eyes open, Constable, you would have seen that there are two new teams of ‘dip’ artists at work on this very street right under your noses. It was the chance to observe them in action that brought me here today when I could have been sunning myself on the beach in Newquay on such a fine day as this.”

“Two? Where are they?”

Dido shook her head.
“I’m going to walk away right now, Constable. It would not do to be seen talking to you for too long. Tongues will start wagging. Please ask DS Harrison to meet me at the Masons Arms up near Great Portland St tube at eight tonight. He can buy me a steak and a pint in return for the lowdown on the competition.”

The constable smiled.
“No honour amongst thieves then?”

“Not when they are going about their business tooled up to the nines, if you get my meaning?”

Her words wiped the smile off of Constable Patel’s face. One thing that made Dido and her band of dips different was that they never went ‘tooled up’. If any victim fought back, the thief would leg it rather than enter into any confrontation. If there were new ‘dips’ operating on their patch who were armed, then the game had changed for the worse.

Dido didn’t wait for a reply as she headed off towards Oxford Circus Tube. The first part of her task had been completed. She had cast the bait. All that remained was to see if the fish, or in this case, DS Harrison, would take it.

---

[That evening in the Mason's Arms Pub]

“Now Dido Pleasance… I’ve fed you and satisfied your thirst, so how about it? Who are these teams of ‘dippers’ that you mentioned to Constable Patel?”

“Thanks for the meal and the beer. They know how to serve ale here,” said Dido as she dabbed her lips with the serviette.

She smiled at the Detective. Little did he know that she was well under the legal age to be served alcohol, but she looked old enough, and he’d bought the beer for her.

Dido had been observing the Sergeant's body language since he had arrived for their meeting. She guessed that he knew nothing about the newly arrived teams of 'dippers'.

“As you clearly have no idea as to whom they are, I will start at the beginning. Towards the end of April, I started to see some scruffy individuals watching my team at work. This is no admittance of wrongdoing, you must understand.”

“You are informing me about some potential crimes. That is all.”

“Good. As I said, these scruffy individuals kept popping up at the usual hot spots. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you where they are. That piqued my interest, so one wet afternoon in May and with nothing better to do, I followed one of the individuals. I was in disguise, by the way, so don’t bother going looking on your CCTV for me. Anyway, this person of interest disappeared into Great Titchfield St. There, he wrote down something in a notebook. Once that was done, he returned to Oxford Circus. This went on more than three times in the next two hours. Each time, he had followed a different one of my friends who were, as I am sure you are aware, going about their business. Just before six that evening, he left Oxford Circus on a No 25 bus going East. I followed him, and as he changed busses at Liverpool St, I lifted the notebook from his pocket.”

“What? You stole it?”

Dido smiled.
“I did just that. I wanted to see what he had written about what he saw going on.”

“And?”

“Fat lot of good that was. It was all written in Cyrillic.”

“Russian then?”

Dido shook her head.
“At first, that’s what I thought. I was soon put right by an acquaintance of mine, Levi Ustinov. I’m sure that he is in your files somewhere, but since he qualified as a teacher, he has gone very straight. He is now so law-abiding that he refused to translate the text for me. All that he would say was that it was mostly written in Bulgarian but with some Serbian words. After that, I took it to a Serbian exile who, in exchange for a decent sum of money, he agreed to translate it on one condition. He’s an illegal immigrant, so you can guess what that was, so I will not name him. Anyway, he translated it, and from the level of cursing and crossing that was going on while he was doing so, the contents are pretty awful. I’m sure that you can verify the translation. When I read it, frankly, it gave me the willies.”

“What does that ‘the contents are bad’ mean?”

“What it means, Sergeant, is that both your lot and mine are in for a whole new era of hurt. If you would forgive me for saying so, we that, as in people like me, never targeted locals. I’m sure that your records show that. Then, we never deliberately lifted a passport. If we did so by accident, then it would be sent or even hand-delivered to the embassy or high commission for that country. We had some honour, small as it may seem, but the evidence that you have on me would show that.”

He gave a small nod of the head in response, so Dido carried on.

“This new lot moved in and began lifting wallets almost as soon as my associates went on vacation. I’m sure that if you look at your crime reports for this month, it will show that everyone is fair game and that the level of violence on the streets has gone through the roof. The notebook shows that they know all about you and the other beat officers and your superiors. They also know about my team, but thankfully, they have little data on me. Even so, the contents of the notebook are, in my opinion, very much like the sort of data that would be needed for an invasion plan for the streets of central London. Towards the end, the book makes it clear that my friends are first to be disposed of when they return from their holidays. Their word for it was ‘eliminated’.”

“Are you having me on, Dido?”

“Sorry, Sergeant, I am being very serious. Let me give you an example of how they operate.”

The sergeant answered with a slight nod of his head.

“Earlier today, and just before I had my little chat with Constable Patel, one of their team lifted the wallet of the assistant to the Director General at the BBC. This happened outside the Starbucks store on Upper Regent Street at 12:15 today. I have photographic evidence of the crime taking place, plus it shows that the thief is carrying a large knife in such a way that leads me to be under no illusion that it would be used. I’m sure that you will be easily able to verify that... with such a well-known target.”

“Where is this notebook? Do you have it with you?”

Dido shook her head.
“Now, Sergeant… do you really think that I’d give you that? Right here in a pub?”

“What then?

“You will receive a copy of the notebook and its translation tomorrow morning by courier. Please don’t try to backtrack the messenger. You will hit a brick wall. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes… But why?”

Dido smiled.

“Think of it this way, Detective Sergeant. I happen to know that you passed your Inspectors board more than six months ago, yet… you are still a D.S. What would get you the promotion you deserve? How about solving a string of robberies, and I don’t mean pickpocketing? I mean a very top-notch Jewellers in Bond St with everyone involved armed with AK-47s. Despite being very profitable, their pickpocketing operation is a mere sideshow. A sideshow that allows them to gather information without their true purpose being revealed. Interested?”

His body language told Dido that he was, so she continued.

“The last part of the notebook makes it clear that they are using ‘dipping’ as a way of casing several possible locations for a heist. There was another team doing the same near Bond St tube. Their exit was down Marylebone Lane and into the High Street. I watched this one for almost a week, and today, they are gone. They had moved onto what has to be the next phase of their plan whereas the Oxford Circus team were still operating.”

Dido took a sip of her beer.

“First thing this morning, all of the western team watched the Jewellers in Bond St. One by one, they walked down the street and did a loop back to the station. This was about the time when the staff were arriving for work. That leads me to assume… that they are about to rob at least one high-class jeweller on Bond St. It goes without saying that they will be armed. As I said before, I’ve seen several large knives on the ‘dippers’. The notebook talks about a delivery of ‘ten forty-seven’ from Sofia. I hope that it does not mean ten AK47’s”

'What?" said the D.S. as he filled in the blanks.

“Think of it as a parting gift, D.S. Harrison. As I told Constable Patel, I’m giving up the game. My associates are all moving on to pastures new, well away from the jurisdiction of the Met Police.”

He laughed.
“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Dido. You are far better than that.”

Dido grinned.
“As much as you might find it hard to believe, I have bigger fish to fry when I get back from a short holiday.”

The Sergeant just shook his head.

“I am working with a retired cop on a much bigger piece of very serious wrongdoing.”

“Now I know that you are lying.”

“Sorry. That is the gospel truth. I can’t divulge any more, but you have more than enough to be going on with. Foil a robbery, and that Inspector position will be yours for the taking. Who knows… there might be a few more tips coming your way in the future…”

She smiled at him. He knew that she was enjoying the encounter.
“One last thing. Here is a website address. It has a video of the man from the BBC getting his wallet lifted. Aren’t mobile phone cameras wonderful?”

She handed him a slip of paper.

“I have emailed a copy of the video to Crimestoppers, so if you want to wait a day or so, you can arrest the woman without the need to divulge the source. She is part of the Bulgarian ring. A white Transit van is used as a mobile base for their loot. There are a few shots of it at the end of the video. It has the sign saying Bayswater Builders on the side, but that could easily be changed as I’m pretty sure that it is held on with magnets.”

The sergeant sat at the table for the time it took him to drink another pint of the excellent Fullers beer. His mind was a total mess as he tried to digest at least some of what Dido had told him. Far from answering questions, his encounter with the possibly former pickpocket had caused his mind to ask a few dozen more. What irked him most was the way that she could wrap him around her little finger. Of all the informants he had worked with, she was by far the most open with her information plus, she never wanted any money for the information. All he’d ever spent was for the odd meal and a drink. All he could think of was that she had some other motive for doing what she was doing. This tip was potentially several orders of magnitude bigger than anything that she had given him before.

In his opinion, it had to be a very, very big thing for her to give up such a lucrative criminal career. This mysteriously retired officer and the case were probably nothing more than a diversion, but he’d learned a while ago that with Dido, you could never tell when she was having him on. She seemed to be perfectly serious about giving up the game, but because she was so good, it would be hard.

He downed the last of his beer with a shake of his head. He was going to have to wait until the morning before he could even begin to get any answers.

---

The promise that Dido had given him the night before was kept when, just before midday, a package arrived in the office that was addressed to him.

His good mood ended when he read the translation of the diary entries. Dido’s additional notes gave a lot of background data. She noted that there had been several smash-and-grab incidents in recent weeks. The notes in the diary clearly showed how the thieves had cased the 'joints' before carrying out the robberies. He found himself agreeing with Dido that these were nothing more than dry runs for the big day, and she’d even suggested a few named shops as the actual target.

Her notes made it clear that the two teams of pickpockets that were operating in Oxford St and the surrounding areas were being controlled by the same people even though they were only linked at the highest level. The sheer level of sophistication amazed him. The bonus was that Dido had included photos of all the ‘dippers’ and some of their middle management in the package. She had not told him about those photos the previous evening. He finished his review of the package with one overriding thought. He wished that the detectives he knew were even half as good as Dido at gathering evidence.

The DS didn’t know that was all down to the coaching that Dido had been receiving from John Proudfoot. It had taken him a while, but he was finally starting to get through to her. Dido had used this case as a trial run for the later project. To her surprise, she had found the whole process very stimulating. She was beginning to like being on the right side of the law.

“Dido, I am sorry for doubting you. I owe you!” he muttered under his breath as he prepared to take the contents of the package to the Robbery Squad at West End Central.

After some deliberation, the Sergeant decided to hold off on taking the evidence upstairs. Instead, he took a little trip along Oxford St in a No 25 bus. From the upstairs front seat, he was able to observe the foreign team at work. Dido was right about almost everything. By his third trip along Oxford St between Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road, he saw one of the runners entering a boarded-up shop in Little Titchfield St, just as Dido had described. From his position, he was able to take a photo of the event. A White Transit van with the ‘Bayswater Builders’ sign was parked in the alley at the side of the building.

The D.S. returned to his desk in a good mood.

He sat at his desk and thought about Dido. His bus ride had confirmed her story. She'd shown more investigative prowess than most of his colleagues. It was just sad that she was on the other side of the fence. To be giving up a profitable gig for her and her team must mean that this other thing that she was doing was a lot more serious than a robbery. She had hinted about that the previous evening, and he had dismissed it outright. Now, he was not so sure.

He thought back to his first encounter with Dido and how their relationship had evolved. She was able to see things just that others could not. Her indirect help via ‘Crimestoppers’ had put away several violent offenders. It was clear to him from his latest encounter with her that she had a particular aversion to violence. He wondered if some incident early in her life had made her that way.

Little did he know how close to the truth that was.

Dido left London that day on a train bound for the Isle of Anglesey, and after a week in a ‘Yurt’, her trial run of ‘being the good guy’, so to speak, had been a great success. For the first time since that last summer in Southend, she felt at ease with life but was only too well aware of the greater challenges ahead before she could even begin to think about life after ‘him’.

Dido returned to John Proudfoot’s home after a week away. Right away, she noticed that he was frowning even more than usual.

“What’s the matter, John? You look as if you are carrying the weight of the whole world on your shoulders.”

As soon as she’d said it, Dido regretted it. That was a phrase that her mother used when talking about her father.

“Not the world, Dido, just this case. I’ve been thinking about how to find the ‘Foxes Lair’.”

“So have I,” said Dido in a matter-of-fact way.

“Then you can prepare dinner while you work out how you are going to present your fiendishly cunning plan to me as if you are the SIO on the case.”

Dido didn’t react to his taunt. She had come up with all sorts of plans to find him in the past, and rightly so, John had shot them all down in flames as being unworkable.

“Ok, ok. I guess I deserve that.”

Dido went into the kitchen and found all the ingredients for dinner sitting on the worktop. She wasn’t surprised. This was his way of working.

She began to prepare the vegetables after switching on the small wall-mounted TV. She'd read a discarded copy of that morning's 'Metro' on the tube after she’d returned to the capital from Anglesey. Buried deep on page four was a brief piece about an attempted robbery from a shop on Bond St. She was hoping that the local TV news would shed some more light on it.

As she’d hoped, it was the lead item on the London news. She was so engrossed in it that she failed to notice John leaning against the door from the hallway into the kitchen.

“Did you have something to do with that?”

Dido almost jumped out of her skin.

“John… I didn’t see you there?”

“Well? Did you? I could not help noticing how you almost sliced a bit off your finger when the words ‘multiple arrests’ were said.”

Dido smiled.
“I might have told someone about the people who may have tried to commit this robbery.”

“Then I’m proud of you.”

John came into the kitchen and took the knife from Dido.
“Why don’t you tell Uncle John all about how you have gone away from the dark side?”

“Dark Side? Dipping is hardly the dark side, is it?”

“It is still a crime, isn’t it?”

“Hardly on the same scale as a jewellery heist armed with some serious weaponry, is it…?”

“Granted. What did you do?”

“I only used the skills that you taught me. Observing people and watching what they do.”

“That’s only part of it. What else did you do?”

Dido looked at the floor for several seconds. Then she said,
“Ok, I lifted a diary from one of the team leaders. It was written in Serbian and Bulgarian. I got it translated, and it outlined the plan. Plus, I took a video of one of them lifting a wallet inside Starbucks on Upper Regent Street. I put it all in a package and gave it to a DS.”

John finished chopping the veggies with a huge smile on his face.
“How did that feel?”

“Good. Is that wrong?”

“No, my dear, it is not wrong. What you experienced is what most police officers work for years and never get to experience. Being part of a team takes a lot of the personal adrenaline rush away.”

“You don’t mind me going behind your back like that?”

“Dido… Dido… You are becoming your own person. You have developed some contacts of your own inside the police. I guess that DS owes you a favour or three for the information you passed on to him. If so, then use it wisely. It isn’t a get out of jail free card.”

Dido didn’t answer because she was looking at the TV. She smiled when she saw the person from the Police speaking to the camera.

“Is that your DS?” asked John.

“Yes, but he’s now in line to be a DI.”

“I’m guessing that you had something to do with that?”

“And why not? He played ball with me in return for a few tips about some other crimes. He’s one of the good guys.”

“How do you know that? What if he is now in Fox’s clutches?”

“He knows nothing about my past. All he knows is that I’m a street dipper with a keen eye when it comes to observing people doing wrong.”

“With a South East Essex accent. I’m just saying, be careful who you trust when it comes to cops. You told me that you were made to sexually service several high-ranking officers of the Met Police. If they are that corrupt, then who knows who else they have their own sticky fingers into?”

“Message understood, but John, I just got that good feeling when dealing with him. He never even propositioned me.”

“I get that, but please, Dido, be careful.”

“I took precautions just like you told me to. I sent all the details to Crimestoppers, and he held off for them to pass it all on.”

“You are learning, but…?”

“Be careful.”

“Good. Now get the pasta on to boil while I make the sauce and grill the bacon.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

John's words about being careful did resonate with Dido. Going off mission as she had done seemed like a good idea at the time, but what John had said about being spotted was right. They could trust no one until they had so much evidence that even the most corrupt cop and CPS lawyer could not ignore it.

The days of walking around Anglesey seemed such a long time ago. She’d spent much of the time working out what she should do for the future. Going back into some form of education was a huge step for her and incredibly daunting. John had been dropping hints for a long time, and she’d ignored them, but a TV documentary about criminal re-offending rates had struck a note with her. The lack of education was cited as a major reason for the problem. It scared her witless. From just being able to survive on the streets to, if John had his way, getting a degree was hard to imagine.

School had not been a pleasant time for the old ‘him’. The lessons had been incredibly boring. Without really thinking about the work, he’d received top marks for all his homework. Because of the boring nature of the lessons, the old him had bunked off school, which had gotten him into trouble with the school and his parents. They’d even threatened to suspend him then… the shit hit the fan, and his old life ended. ‘He’ was no longer on this earth and had been replaced by Dido. Her life was as Dido, and while ‘he’ would always be there in the background, she could only afford to think about herself and her future.

The upside was that she’d proved to John that she was a good learner. She’d mastered picking front door locks in a matter of days. While that wasn’t anything like learning sums, science and everything else, it proved to her that if she was sufficiently interested in a topic, she would stick at it and learn it inside out, backwards and forwards. She’d done it with the sort of locks that people have on their front doors. Now, picking them was easy, and she’d even done it blindfolded. He’d raised the stakes and included combination locks similar to ones used in safes. She’d mastered the technique of listening for the tumblers to drop in less than a week.

The prospect of having to deal with fools and idiots at college did not appeal to Dido. Her intolerance of others was in her mind down to Fox and friends. They had demanded instant obedience when they came into the cellar. Any protestation or delay would result in punishment. Dido knew that she would have to learn to tolerate idiots and even those who didn’t want to learn if she was to get anywhere towards building a career for the time after Fox had been sent away for more years than he had left on the planet.

She had made the final decision to return to some form of education while she watched the vehicles cross over the famous tubular bridge that connected the island with the mainland. Dido wondered why Telford had chosen a square metal tube for a bridge. After a shudder when, she realised that it was a bit of her old male self coming to the surface. Thomas had been into building structures with Lego before…

Then she smiled and wondered if that wasn’t so bad after all. That clinched it. Dido was going back to school. His enquiring mind was right there in Dido.

Dido didn’t tell John about her decision to return to some form of education on that visit to his home. She had some more research to do first. Little things such as courses, venues and, importantly, the cost.

She even took a trip to Royston and spent a day going through the electoral register for the district for anyone named 'Fox'. There were three, but after cross-referencing their addresses to a map, they were discounted. At least that was one thing less to check in the future. It wasn't until she was on the train to Cambridge that she thought about the risk of being discovered. That was when she made the other decision: she needed to get her face fixed once and for all.

When she arrived at John’s home, he came out to greet her. He knew that something was up from the way that she purposely strode up the drive to the house.

“I wasn’t expecting you today, but I get the feeling that you have something to tell me?”

Dido shook her head. He could read her like a book.

“I do… Two things.”

“Good. Let’s go inside. I have a bottle of wine open.”

“John?”

He grinned.
“Your lack of awareness tells me that you forgot that it was your 18th birthday yesterday.”

For a moment, Dido wanted to kick something. She had been so focused on other things she had forgotten that she was now old enough to vote, get married without parental permission and buy a drink in a pub.

“I… I forgot.”

“Then let’s go inside out of this heat, and we can toast your coming of age.”

Once they’d toasted Dido’s birthday, John sat and waited for Dido to divulge what she had decided. After a bit of hesitation, she said,

“You win.”

“I didn’t think that we were at war,” replied John without even thinking.

“Not at war, but you were right about… well, everything.”

He shook his head.
“No, Dido. I’m never completely right about anything. I merely provide guidance and suggestions, as you well know. What suggestions of mine are you talking about?”

Dido shook her head and mentally kicked herself for starting their conversation in the way that she had done.

“I’m going to get my face fixed. I was silly… no, make that stupid. I went to Royston to look through the electoral roll without thinking.”

“That wasn’t advisable, but what’s done is done. Did you find them?”

She shook her head.
“Not a trace.”

“Then that indicates that the property they live in is owned by a company. Councils are less proactive about getting people on the electoral roll if a home is a company place where staff may come and go at regular intervals.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“A small step but a step forward nevertheless.”

Dido didn’t say anything.

“I’ll give you the contact information of the plastic surgeon. Then, it is up to you to decide what you have done.”

“Only if I can afford it. The sort of things that I need cost lots of cash.”

“Just do what makes you safe from being recognised by Fox.”

“And?” asked John after a pause.

“I’m going to school. Not sure when or where yet, but I’m going to at least try to get enough learning so that I don’t appear like a total dork when applying for jobs and stuff.”

“That’s a good plan.”

Dido shook her head.
“Cut the crap, John. You have indicated more than once that you have a plan for me. Why not let me in on it, and we can evolve it from there?”

John sat back with a smile on his face. He poured them both another glass of wine.

“Not here, not today,” he said in a serious tone.

Dido didn’t look that happy,
“Meet me outside Surrey Keys Overground Station at midday tomorrow, and I’ll explain everything,” said John with a little smirk on his face.

She glared at John. Her grand plan of dealing with both issues in one visit had fallen flat on its face.

[the next day – Surrey Keys, SE London.]

John was waiting for Dido outside the London Overground station. Traffic zoomed past him as he waited. The smell of unburnt diesel fuel lingered in the air long after a very decrepit Transit van had disappeared towards New Cross. This was part of modern London that he didn’t miss.

He was so self-engrossed that he missed Dido arriving by bus. She tapped him on the shoulder. John nearly jumped out of his skin with surprise until he saw who it was.

“You were miles away,” said Dido.

“I was, but…?”

“I came by bus.”

“Oh. Then we had better get on with business, hadn’t we?”

“Business? What is there in this decrepit part of London?”

“It isn’t all like this. We are heading over towards the river. There are a lot of apartments there where once there were old warehouses. Greenland Dock, as its name implies, dealt with the Arctic Fur Trade decades ago.”

Dido followed John past the fairly decrepit shopping centre and supermarket into a much nicer area. The hum of traffic died away, only to be overtaken by the sound of a plane taking off from the nearby London City Airport.

"Here we are," said John as they reached the path that runs along the river. Several runners were pounding the pavement during their lunch break.

“The river bus stop is just there. It can take you to Westminster Pier in about half an hour,” he said, pointing at a floating jetty that stuck out into the river.

Dido had never been to this part of the city before. The towers of the docklands' financial area were just across the water.

“Come on, I have something to show you,” said John as he walked up to the door of a building.

He led Dido up to the 4th floor and opened a door to one of the apartments.
“Come on in and take a look around.”

The view down the river towards the Millennium Dome was magnificent.

“What is this place?”

“You need a place close to places of learning. Why not this one?”

“I could never afford a place like this.”

“Then don’t. Dorothy and I bought this place and the one next door as somewhere to rent out for a steady income during our retirement. We’d just completed on the purchase when she was diagnosed with cancer. Since then, I have not had the heart in me to rent them out. Too many memories.”

“I still could not afford the rent.”

John opened his briefcase, pulled out a document, and put it on the kitchen counter.

“This is a document that transfers the ownership of this apartment into a trust. In seven years, it will be yours free and clear.”

“John… Be honest with me for once. No one in their right mind gives away a place like this. What is it worth? Half a mil? There has to be a catch. Didn’t you tell me about things that seem too good to be true are probably full of shit?”

John chuckled.
“I did warn you off of gift horses. But Dido… you are, as I have said many times, the daughter I never had. I had this document drawn up more than a year ago, but my lawyer told me that you could not sign it until you were eighteen. You are now old enough, so have a read and tell me what you think.”

Dido shook her head but picked up the document. It was only two pages, and John had insisted that the legalese was kept to a minimum.

“Why seven years?”

“Tax. To give someone a gift of this size, the person giving it has to live for seven years after the gift for it to be considered free of Income Tax. By putting it into a trust, I can die, but the property is kept in my estate until the seven-year period runs out. You can’t sell the property until you obtain ownership of it, but the trust deed gives you free rent of the property for the entire seven years. This would be your base while you continue with your task of bringing Fox to heel.”

“But… seven years?”

“Think of it this way: year one, crash courses in English, Maths and Sociology and one science. Then, two years for A-Levels followed by a 3 or 4-year degree course. That plan does not preclude bringing Fox to justice in the intervening period should we get the evidence we need to call in the Police.”

“But it is farther from Royston than your place?”

John smiled.
“When the time comes to do detailed searching in that area, then my home will be a perfect base, but now you need to think about your education and how you can out-fox Fox when it is your turn to give evidence against him.”

“What if I fail those A-Levels?”

“You resit them and try again. I failed my Inspectors exam twice before passing. It wasn’t the end of the world. All the time you are studying, you are learning about people and interacting with them. You missed out on so much being locked up by him. I think that you know that you are pretty awkward when it comes to being sociable with people you don’t know and trust. Time will help you improve those skills.”

Dido went and looked out of the window at the river below them. For almost the first time since she escaped from her prison, she was crying. These were tears of joy.

“John…” muttered Dido.

“Why would you do all this for me?” she added, wiping away some tears from her cheek.

John resisted, sighing. Instead, he gave Dido one of his handkerchiefs.

“What else am I going to do with my money? I certainly don’t want to give it to my cousin Frank, who is a serial loser. Give him a hundred quid in the morning; he will have lost it all on the horses and slots within a couple of hours. He has no sense of the value of money. I’ve told you before that you are the daughter that Dorothy and I were unable to have.”

Dido managed a nod of the head.

“Besides, it is not as if I’m turning you loose the day after your eighteenth birthday with five hundred grand now, am I?”

Dido shook her head. She was still trying to come to terms with his generosity.

“Good. Then sign the document, and the clock will start ticking.”

John’s voice echoed around the empty apartment.

“There are two bedrooms. One can become the ‘War Room’ on our quest for Fox.”

“But… Won’t the next part of the search be up in Royston?”

“That’s only part of the story, isn’t it? You have your studies. If you look at the date on the document, you will see that I had it put together before we knew who had kept you prisoner for all those years. With the Overground, the Jubilee Line and the River Bus, isn’t this a good place to have a base?”

“I know, but…”

“Dido. Stop right there. You are not unclean. You are not a loser. You have shown a determination to bring the man who wronged you deeply to justice that would faze almost everyone else I have ever met. I did meet and get to know a lot of victims over the thirty-odd years that I was on the job. Dido, you show a determination that none of the other victims ever came close to. I am confident that you will get the redress that you so justly deserve.”

“Thank you, John. I… I just didn’t expect any of this.”

“Don’t thank me until you have a degree and Fox is sent down for the rest of his natural life.”

Dido smiled back at her mentor. They were cool.

She proved that by giving him a hug followed by a light kiss on the cheek.

John showed Dido the various facilities in the apartment. She just nodded her head. It was more than she had even hoped for at some point in the distant future.

“All of this comes with some strings,” he said when the tour was over.

“Ok, John, shoot!”

He chuckled at Dido’s use of language.

“I have set up an account that will pay the council tax and management fee automatically for the period of the trust deed. If… If you do have someone share it, you will need to inform the council. As a single person, you get a 25% reduction in council tax. There is enough money in the account to cater for the loss of that reduction. I have put enough extra cash in the account to cope with a 5% increase in the council tax every year. Are you with me so far?”

“I think so. This is all new to me.”

“That’s why I’m trying to make things easy for you.”

John handed over a set of keys.
“These are the keys to the place, plus there is a key to a storage unit in Deptford. Dorothy bought a lot of used but serviceable furniture at charity shops in preparation for us renting this out as a furnished flat. It has been there ever since. Choose what you want from it, and it is yours.”

“But… how will I get it here?”

John smiled.
“That’s the next string.”

He pulled out a flyer from his briefcase and handed it to Dido.

Her eyes bulged. The flyer described a ‘pass your driving test in a week’ course.

“Consider that your birthday present from me.”

Dido smiled.
“Does that mean I can drive the Cortina?”

“There is zero chance of that, my dear, but I’m buying a new car. You can drive that when it arrives.”

“But I don’t have a license?”

John nodded.
“That’s the final string. You have to go legit. Now that you are eighteen, you can legally change your name, get a bank account without a parent being a guarantor and…”

He grinned.
“Pay Income Tax.”

“Me? Pay Tax?”

“Ok, perhaps not at first, but there will come a time when you will. The sooner you become a legal person with an identity, the less hassle it will be later. Then comes the downside of being legally an adult. If you are arrested and convicted, you will not be sent to a young offenders’ institution. Having a criminal record as an adult can jeopardise any future employment prospects. More and more employers are performing criminal record checks… especially those in the legal profession.”

Dido shook her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“It is all a bit much.”

“That, my dear Dido, is what being an adult is all about. Things are harder when you are of age than when you had people making decisions, be they right or wrong on your behalf.”

She looked out of the window once more. A river bus was slowing down for the nearby stop. Three people were waiting to board. It all seemed a bit surreal to her.

“Thank you, John. I will try to live up to your expectations.”

“All I hope for Dido is that you do your best and don’t forget where I am, ok?”

She turned and stuck her tongue out at him.

John nodded his head and smiled. Dido was growing up fast. She had come a long way since the day that she had tried to steal his beloved Cortina.

[End of Book 1]
Book 2 will begin to be posted in the new year.

[Authors Note]
If you liked the seven parts that I have posted so far, please take the time to comment on the story so far and where you think it will go in Book 2.

Three years have passed since Dido turned eighteen and was therefore legally able to make decisions about her life for herself. In the interim, she had enough cosmetic surgery done on her face to make her look quite different from the sixteen-year-old who had tried to break into John's lovingly restored Ford Cortina. With John’s help, she’d become a legal person with all the responsibilities that came with being a citizen. She had even voted in an election.

Her home in South East London gave her a place where she could put down roots. Thanks to a trip to a careers event being held at the local library, she learned that she could start learning at a nearby college.

John giving her the flat via a trust for seven years that would avoid any tax liability was all a bit much for Dido to fully understand at first. After taking the document that John had given her to a solicitor, she began to understand what John was going on about. Dido still found it hard to grasp just how generous he was, but she knew that she was very lucky to have tried to break into his car when she did. She had seen other homeless people come and go in her time on the streets. It wasn’t that uncommon for the Police to come around asking if they knew one of their fellow street people who had met a sticky end. Meeting John had probably saved her life, but she would never say that to anyone other than him.

Dido returned to school that September as a part-timer at a Sixth Form College that offered lower-level subjects for those who had missed vital parts of their education. Most of her fellow students were immigrants and even a couple of asylum seekers, but they all wanted to learn. After initially struggling with the discipline needed to attend classes, she began to apply the same level of determination to the subjects as she had done to identifying her captors as Professor Jonathan Fox, QC and his son Marcus.

John Proudfoot was always there for her in the background, but now that she had something to focus on his role was more of a provider of moral support and the odd Sunday Roast than a major player in her quest to bring Fox to justice for the time being. She never stopped looking into his past, but as John had made it clear very early on, this was a marathon and not a sprint.

She stuck it out and passed her end-of-year exams with flying colours. The smile on her face when she learned her results would have lit up a town. She finally had proof that she could do things on her own and, importantly, succeed. Fox would always tell her that she was unclean before he raped her. Passing her exams was proof to her that she wasn’t unclean and a loser.

Armed with a top-grade O-level in Maths and English Literature, Dido went full-time at the sixth-form college the following September. Despite being older than most of her compatriots, she signed up to take A-levels in Psychology, Law and Sociology. Two long and sometimes difficult years later, she passed all three with top 'A*' grades. Once again, she'd proved to the world that she was not a loser and that no one would even give you the time of day.

The time spent at college provided plenty of time for Dido to learn about socialising with her fellow students, although her ideas about music, fashion and almost everything else were very different from her fellow students. She blamed the lost years for that, but to their derision, she developed a love for classical music and each year, she often frequented the BBC Proms events that were held at the Royal Albert Hall. She even dragged John Proudfoot to a few events, but his musical tastes were more ‘Prog Rock’ than ‘Classical’. For her, listening to classical music enabled her to immerse herself in the sounds and especially the melody, something that was impossible with most modern stuff.

In the spring of her second year, she applied for a place on the Criminology Degree course at the London University, where Professor Fox taught law. If her application was successful, then eventually, it would involve being in the same room as 'him' for lectures and tutorials. That would be a great test for her strength of character, given her history with him in the past. Dido had spent a lot of time with her counsellor talking about how she should handle the first encounters with the man who had abused her so badly for so long.

She had seen him in action at least a dozen times, either at the Old Bailey or Southwark Crown Court. John’s description of him was very true. Any doubts that she might have had were soon dispelled by the absolute mauling that he gave the Detective Chief Inspector who had arrested his client. It was as if an all-out war had been declared between Fox and the officer. No quarter was given until the judge stepped in and stopped Fox from defaming the witness any further. However, even the threat of a contempt charge plus a civil lawsuit didn't really stop the tirade from Fox. He carried on but with slightly less barb to his comments. Eventually, coming face to face with him in court was some way off, but it would happen. She was under no illusion about the task ahead, and for that, she would have to rely a lot more on John for help, as he had faced Fox in court a few times before he retired.

Her initial reaction to the task ahead was one of despair and hopelessness. It took a lot of gentle persuasion by John Proudfoot to bring Dido around. Gradually, she began to see the wisdom of his words, especially when he said 'Be Prepared'. While this is the motto of the Scout movement, Dido began to see that if she was prepared for her day in court, and for Fox to employ tactics like those that she had witnessed, she could outfox Fox. It was John who said, 'he is a bully and bullies do not like not getting their way'. Dido could readily identify with that statement from her time as his captor. Her mission was to learn from him how he prepared for and operated in court. When it was time for her to face him in court, then she’d have countermeasures to all the tricks he regularly employed to denigrate witnesses.

The story resumes with Dido taking a short holiday before becoming a full-time university student.

---

[10th September, outside Montmartre Metro Station]
Dido visited Paris at the end of summer for a week of 'being a tourist' before starting life as a 'proper' student. Most of the time, she was just that, a tourist, but one that was armed with a Credit Card scanner. She visited all the usual tourist locations with nothing more than a small backpack on her back and a small 'bum bag' for her phone and some small change.

The scanner used some wizard technology to syphon card details from those who didn’t take precautions such as using a wallet or a purse that blocked NFC access. Once a card or cards were scanned, the details were sent securely to her partner in Appledorn in the Netherlands, without her even having to break stride thanks to the tiny box of tricks that sat in a false compartment at the bottom of the backpack. If anyone examined it, it would appear to be nothing more than an iPod. It was actually a Classic iPod, but with some very special enhancements that only an expert in Apple technology could detect. It even played music if it had to.

Once the details had been received in Appledorn, a small sum of money was transferred into her offshore bank in Panama. A week in Paris and those small sums had netted her close to £31,000, but even so, it had not been without some risk. Almost from the outset, she had come to the notice of the French Police who had warned her off from attempting any ‘dipping’ on their patch.

“Mademoiselle, we know all about you and your habit of picking pockets,” said the Police Officer who had stopped her as she emerged from the station.

Dido had merely smiled back at them and said in perfect French…

“I am here on holiday and not to work. If you want to search me, then please go ahead. Please tell me where exactly I could stash anything that I steal from someone?”

Dido was right. She'd worn a series of sleeveless dresses all week. The tight-fitting nature of her clothes meant that there was nowhere she could hide any 'loot'.

They had declined her invitation and had allowed Dido to go for the time being. She smiled at them and left.

Now that the Gendarmerie had made contact with her, Dido was determined to lead them on a wild goose chase just for fun. It was hard for her not to lift any purses or wallets. There were plenty of targets now that the Parisiennes were returning from their summer vacations, but Dido had promised herself that she would let the electronics do the ‘lifting’ until it was time for her to return home in a few days besides, she was enjoying just being a tourist. A trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower had been her most profitable ‘tourist hot spot’. It had netted her close to £4,000. A day trip to Versailles was almost as profitable but the star performer was a day at the races. People with money were everywhere. Her electronic dipping earned her more than £7,500.

She enjoyed the Louvre apart from the queue to see the Mona Lisa. On the way back to her hotel, she was approached by someone who was vaguely familiar to her but she could not place the face at the time.

The man who was much older than Dido and accompanied by a very attractive and much younger woman, gave Dido some information.

“Just phone it into Crimestoppers when you get back,” he said.

“Just remember that these people are tooled up.”

It was only later that Dido was able to put a name to a face. The man was like she had been, a street criminal. His patch was around the Tower of London. Dido had seen him when panhandling near Tower Hill tube station.

She was perplexed about why he'd picked her out of the crowd of other tourists using the Metro Station. By then, it was too late, and the man and his companion were long gone. After a bit of reflection, Dido knew that his unrehearsed speech meant that it was done on the spur of the moment. A chance encounter with someone from both their pasts.

Dido travelled home via the city of Lille. At a café near the station, she returned the card sniffer to her friend from Appledorn, before catching the next London-bound Eurostar.

[17th September, St Pancras International Station]

Dido returned to London very pleased with her week's work, only to find that as soon as she had cleared customs and immigration at St Pancras Station, two plainclothes police officers were waiting for her.

“Back from your Paris crime spree, I see?” said one.

“But why did you not use the direct service?”

This officer was well known to Dido. Detective Inspector Guy Morton had arrested her several times since she’d arrived in the capital as a homeless urchin with a skill of lifting wallets and purses. None of the charges he’d levied at her had stuck. Dido was always able to get out of any charges without ever going before the courts. She was just too smart for that.

“Nice to see you Detective Inspector. Who is your sidekick? I don’t believe that we have met before?”

Dido ignored the question about her journey home. It was none of his business.

“This is Detective Constable Alice Fisher. She is on my team.”

“Always good to know about the opposition!” joked Dido.

The DI saw the funny side, but the DC just glared at her.

“We hear that you gave the French Police the run-around?”
Dido grinned.

“Nothing like a little game of cat and mouse to liven things up. To tell the truth, those numpties are nowhere near as good as you lot.”

She looked at the DC.

“That is a compliment in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Was it profitable then? Your trip that is?” asked the DC.

“Not really. I enjoyed myself, but I’m out of pocket, but making money was not the purpose of my visit. I wanted to see the sights of the city before I settle down to life as a student.”

“We heard about your ruse of becoming a student. That won’t wash with us you know?”

Dido grinned.
“You could enrol the DC here on the course just to keep tabs on me. I think that the Police perspective would liven up our tutorials a good deal once it became known that you were a representative of the ‘filth’. I use that word because I have heard many law and criminology students from the esteemed institution that I will be attending use it. To me, you are just the opposition who are there to be beaten or on the odd occasion, helped along your long and winding road towards solving real crimes. Besides, it would broaden her understanding of the law and criminal behaviour.”

Neither of the officers rose to her taunt.

“Just why did you go to Paris if you weren’t going to lift a few purses and wallets? I don’t believe that you were a tourist.” asked the DI.
Dido grinned.

“I was just that, a tourist. Oh, believe me, Inspector, it was hard. The temptation to life a few wallets was all around me and yes, people were doing just that, but this time I had nothing to do with any of it. The Gendarmerie had a tail on me for all but the last two days. I’m sure that they will verify that I committed zero crimes during my visit.”

“Don’t give me that load of cock and bull Dido. Dipping has been your life since you came to London. Going to university costs money? Where is that coming from if not from your criminal activities?”

“Alleged criminal activities to be exact, Detective Inspector.”

Her comment didn’t seem to register with the DCI so she carried on.

“I’m not admitting to anything but to be accurate Detective Inspector, it was almost six years ago that our paths crossed for the first time. I’ve changed, so have you. We all are different people from what we were five or six years ago. Besides, you lot all know me by sight, and guess who is the first one to be hauled off to the nick if anyone reports some light-fingered-blonde chick nicking their things. As I said Detective Inspector, I am done with dipping. That is not a confession by the way. This is all hypothetical.”

Neither of the officers said anything in response so Dido did it for them.

“If there is nothing else then I’ll bid you good day.”

She picked up the handle of her wheeled suitcase and started to walk away. She’d gone about three steps before she came back to where the officers were standing.

“Detective Constable… please give me your notebook. I’m going to give you a tip.”

“Detective Constable,” retorted the DC. She looked at her boss.

“Please give Dido your notebook. This will be a first for her. Helping the Police? Wonders will never cease.”

Dido shook her head.
“I just said that from time to time, I may give you lot a bit of information. In this case, I’m just letting you know who knifed Joe Tapper. They will do it again.”

The crime had happened while Dido was in Paris.

“How do you know all this?” asked Constable Fisher.

Dido just tapped the side of her nose.
The now late, Joe Tapper was another well-known 'dipper'. He never worked alone and his usual patch was around Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. He was a perfect gentleman and dressed the part right down to the cravat, silk handkerchief in his jacket pocket, a half-hunter-watch on a gold chain and a bowler hat. Tourists would line up to take photos of him. While they were busy with that, one of his associates did the dip. That was how he'd lasted for more than thirty years in the game.

Dido wrote down an address and returned the notebook to the DC.

“If you follow up on this you’d better go in armed. According to my informant, the people who live in the squat are well-armed and not just with knives. That’s why I’m giving you this tip. The likes of Joe would never go dipping carrying anything remotely illegal if you follow my meaning.”

“What do you want in return for this… If by some freak of nature, it works out that is?” asked the DI.
Dido smiled.

“Just remember that you owe me one. Conspiring to top someone and then actually doing it, is a different ballgame to dipping, isn’t it? According to my source, he ‘dipped’ the pocket of one of their crew outside the National Gallery, and lifted close to a grand in notes. That money was from a drug deal so they went hunting for their pound of flesh.”

She flicked back her blonde locks and strode off in the direction of the Underground with a smile on her face.

“How was your trip back from Paris?” asked her long-time friend John Proudfoot when Dido arrived at his home in Epping the next day.

“Good. No, make that very good indeed.”

“Why?”

“I was met by DI Morton outside Immigration. He had this new sidekick with him, DC Alice Fisher.”

“The DI I know. He and I have crossed paths a few times in the past. The DC is a new one to me.”

“From her accent, I’d say that she is a Mancunian or from somewhere close by, probably Salford.”

“Good looking?”

“Not bad but remember John, you are old enough to be her grandfather.”

“So?” said a smiling John. Dido knew that he was joking.

“What did they want?”

“They wanted to congratulate me on giving the Parisienne Plod the run around all week.”

“That was the plan, wasn’t it?”

“It was but they didn’t believe me when I said that I’m done ‘dipping’ so I left them with a little tip about Joe Tapper.”

The smile that was on John’s face disappeared in a flash.

“What did you do?”

“I told them where the people behind the attack on Joe Tapper hang out and also that they are armed. That’s all.”

“That’s all? Are you mad?”

“Joe didn’t deserve what happened to him. He and I might have crossed swords from time to time, but to have three fingers amputated like that is beyond the pale. They sent a message all right. That was amplified by killing him as soon as he got out of St Thomas’s and throwing his body into the river. This mob might be from Brum, but they ain’t no ‘Peaky Blinder’s’ if you get my meaning.”

“What if they find out that it was you that dobbed them in?”

“They won’t find me in my old haunts now, will they? Besides, I have not observed them and have not been anywhere near their base. I was just passing on a tip from someone I met on the Metro.”

“Are you saying that you just happened to run into a crook from London in Paris? Pull the other one.”

“It was almost by accident. We’d both been to the Louvre and met on the platform at the nearest Metro station. If anything, they wanted someone with some credit with the Plod here in London, to pass this information on. Don’t ask who they are or where they are but if I were a betting woman, I’d say that the attractive German brunette who spoke very little English that he had with him would be a sign that they are retiring, and won’t be back to London any time soon. I won’t name names but this man was a well-known conman who operated out of hotels like the Ritz, Savoy or the hotels near the Tower of London which is where I first saw him as he made a rapid exit from one of those hotels.

“But Dido!”

The look that Dido gave John told him to shut the hell up. There was no going back.

“Ready for your lesson tomorrow?” asked John.

“Yeah.”

“Did you look at the directory of safe models that I gave you?”

“Yeah. Complicated is an understatement. How can you know all this stuff?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know it all now. You need to know the major types by sight and then how to remember key points so that you can swot up on them later if it is a new model. Preparation is key remember.”

“I know. You don’t know how hard it was to get ready each day and go out into the crowds and not lift anything. Believe me, there were plenty of opportunities but every time I was tempted to do the dirty deed, I stopped myself. I also made sure that I didn’t have anywhere to hide the loot or a team to pass the objects off to.”

“But you managed it didn’t you?”

Dido smiled.

“I did. I’m not saying that I’m cured of wanting to lift the odd wallet or two, but for the moment I’m ok. Your idea worked… for the time being.”

Dido laughed.

“What is so funny?” asked John.

“I nearly fell into the ‘Fagin Trap’.”

It was John’s turn to laugh. He’d coined the term ‘Fagin Trap’ because of the lyrics to ‘You gotta pick a pocket or two’ from the musical ‘Oliver’.
“It appears that a little of my cautionary teaching has sunk in?”

“You know bloody too well that it has.”

“Good. Then you should read up on Dudley Safes tonight and I’ll test you tomorrow. It will be good practice for you for your course.”
Dido smiled back at John hoping that she wasn’t letting on that she’d spent most of the previous night going over the technical specs of all the Dudley safes that had been made in the last 20 years.

As Dido prepared for bed, she wondered how many of the class she was about to join had a retired Chief Super in their corner or who could pick a lock blindfolded. 'Not many', she muttered to herself.

[University – The first day of term]
Dido felt very nervous as she along with dozens more students, as they assembled for their first lecture. The lecture theatre was packed and to make matters worse, it was not yet 10:00, but three other students had already tried out their chat-up lines on her. This was both a compliment and an insult to her. The three of them were in her eyes, still wet behind the ears. Straight out of school and un-streetwise, besides, she wasn't interested in people who were several years younger than her and their conversations were mostly about some internet non-entity who had become an 'influencer' or something like that.

She kept her distance from those conversations until she knew more about her fellow classmates. Instead, she basked in the knowledge that she had already come a long way in her quest to bring Fox and his evil friends to justice.

Those nearest her were talking about social media. One boasted that she was an influencer. She’d never heard that name before so she listened in a bit more attentively but the conversation got so overloaded with other terms, she tuned out.

While Dido did maintain a presence on the various Social Media Platforms, that presence was very low-key. She wanted to silently broadcast loud and clear, 'Dido Pleasance she was there to learn' and unlike most of those around her, she had a definite goal in sight. Several of her fellow students were lamenting that they were only there because they failed to get the grades to get on the Law Degree course. She wondered if that lack of positivity might come and bite them in the backside when it came to exam time.

So far it seemed that the other students hadn't grasped the fact that she was at least three years older than them but it was early days. If that made her stand out from the crowd, then that was good but still strange. After years of striving to blend in with the crowds, being a student was her chance to shine, but within reason. Her years on the street in and around the seedier side of society were her secret weapon. John Proudfoot had told her many times that her experiences on the street and her brushes with the law would help her out, but he’d warned her not to boast about it. His words for revealing her past life was ‘less is more. The less that you reveal the better’.

She’d rebelled at the idea for a bit, but gradually, his words started to make sense. Play it cool and low-key while learning all she could about Fox.

Dido had eavesdropped on a couple of conversations among her fellow students. They were comparing the various Public Schools that they had attended. Dido's CV would read, Southend Junior School and Lewisham Sixth Form Academy. Hardly anything worth boasting about so it would be kept hidden unless it was necessary to reveal it.

She'd already worked out most of those who had money, and who didn't. One student wore a ‘Rolex Submariner’ watch. In her former life that person would have been ripe for ‘dipping’ but that was not her target. That was Professor Fox, the deputy head of the department but that was for the long term. Getting her mind around being a student was going to take a lot of effort. It had been a long, long time since she'd attended any full-time education. Her sixth-form college was only three and a half days a week. That gave her plenty of time to do other things. That would not be the case for at least the first year of this course. Because of her age, she qualified as a 'mature' student. As long as she could pay the fees, she was accepted.

The income from her recent trip to Paris would cover all of her fees for the first year and the first term of the second year. That took a lot of pressure off her budget… for the time being. Despite John paying her Council Tax, she had to find everything else including the maintenance charges.

After being her own boss for several years, and having a good deal of freedom about what she did and when, the prospect of attending lectures, tutorials and shudder, and writing real assignments was a shock to her system. John Proudfoot had done his best to prepare her for the delights of assignment and report writing, but it was a task that she hoped to grow into overtime.

The prospect of getting even with the man and his equally evil son who had abused her almost every day for five years was a big lure but on its own, it wasn't enough. John had to butter her up considerably. His main concession was for him to teach her the fine arts of housebreaking and especially safe cracking. She knew that at some point in the future, she would have to use them to get the final bits of dirt on this man who on the surface was an upstanding member of the community but in reality, he was anything but upstanding.

She knew that Fox's dark side, when exposed would make the goings-on of the likes of Jeffrey Epstein pale into insignificance. John's final argument was promising her that they would take down the network that had trafficked her in the first place. That was an even longer goal than sending Fox to jail.

Dido had taken a long time and many, many hours of therapy to put most of what he had done to her, behind her. Getting her to accept that getting even was the best way forward had seen her emerge from the shell that she’d sunk into once she’d gotten away from him was in his eyes, a major step forward.

John had spent many, many days making sure that Dido was on board with the ‘softly, softly catchee monkey’ approach that he wanted her to follow.

After a lot of consideration, Dido had come around to his way of thinking. After all, she was getting an education in a subject that had intrigued her ever since her first encounter with the Police back in Southend well over a decade before.

Now that she was sitting there waiting for the class to start, the reality of the situation was a bit different. All these pretty young things around her, and this was just the men, laughing and joking with each other made Dido seem positively ancient in comparison. At that moment, all her street smarts counted for nothing. She was sure that in time, they would, but for the time being, she was just a 'fresher' like everyone else. She planned to keep her head down until she was able to suss out everyone on the course and, more importantly, the lecturers.

---

Dido’s daydreaming was cut short by the arrival of the first lecturer of her course.
“Welcome to the Department of Criminology and Law. My name is Dr Felix Strauss. I will be your Ethics lecturer for this year.”
Dr Strauss was a man in his mid-50s with hair that was going grey at the temples. What struck Dido the most was that it appeared that he didn't have an ounce of fat on his body. She'd seen the top marathon runners in London for the Marathon and at the Olympics and his body looked just like theirs. One word formed in her mind… Impressive body.

Dido had always thought that she had run her team of ‘dippers’ pretty ethically. That view was destroyed in the first five minutes of his lecture. Only towards the end of the hour did she begin to grasp what sort of ethics he was talking about, and it didn’t apply to criminal organisations. His closing words were…

“Next time I will start to look at the ethics of criminal gangs. We will begin with the evolution of the Mafia and then move on to some of the American cults, like those of David Coresh.”

That was it… the lecture was over. Dido’s mind was racing through what he had covered. A lot of it made sense, but there was a lot that appeared to be pure gobbledegook to her at that moment. She took one last look at her notes and hoped that she could read the scrawl in a few months when she needed to revise for her exams.

“Coming for a Coffee?” said a voice from behind her.

“Our next lecture in not for an hour…”

Dido turned around and saw that it belonged to a woman. In an instant, Dido clocked her. She was the Police or something very close to them.
The woman saw her hesitation.

“I don’t bite, you know, Dido. DI Harrison sends his best wishes and will miss seeing you on his patch.”

Dido didn't know if she should accept the invitation or leg it. Most of her mind said, 'leg it. Nothing but trouble can come from this, but for some reason, Dido said,
“Yes, why not?” she said with the words on a sign that hung above John Proudfoot’s workbench in her mind.
“Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies in a stranglehold until they yield.”

Dido took the appearance of what to her was an obvious police officer on her course in her stride. She had nothing to hide other than her story from before she met John Proudfoot. Her decision to ‘go straight’ had caused a certain amount of joviality amongst those Met Police Officers who had encountered Dido during her time as a very skilful pickpocket in central London.

Amongst those who laughed it off, some officers were downright suspicious of her motives. If Dido was an expert in anything other than picking pockets, it was that she was a good reader of people. She guessed that someone would be keeping tabs on her from time to time, but to have someone… someone so obviously an officer of the law, was a bit of a surprise, as was the direct approach that she had made to Dido.

“You very much have me at a huge disadvantage,” said Dido to the fellow student who had asked her to go for a coffee.
“I’ll go for a coffee as long as you are paying?”

It took the other woman almost a second to grok what Dido had just said. Slowly, a smile appeared on her face.

“I’m Trish Traynor. Do you know of anywhere that serves a decent brew? Not the coloured water we get from those machines.”

Dido resisted the urge to laugh. Trish’s accent was clearly not from the south of England.

“I know of an excellent place near the Barbican if you don’t mind a little walk?”

Trish glanced at her watch.
“We have a Criminal Law 101 tutorial in an hour. I did a year of a Law degree before changing track, and from what DI Harrison told me about you, you know more about the law than most of the lawyers I’ve met.”

Dido smiled but said nothing as they headed for the coffee shop.

“This smells good,” said Trish as she put down two mugs of coffee on the table where Dido was sitting.

“You wanted good coffee. This place serves the best house-roasted Java in this part of the city, but it can be a bit strong at times. It all depends on who is in charge of the roasting of the beans.”

Trish sat down and smiled at Dido. She hated it when people did that to her.

“Well, Officer Traynor? What force are you with then? Durham or Northumberland?”

“You clocked me then?”

“It wasn’t that hard. We oldies rather stand out amongst all those teenagers, don’t we?”

Dido gritted her teeth as Trish smiled back at her.
“What else have you observed?”

“My guess, and it is only a guess… is that you bummed around for a few years after school without a plan in life, and then went to Law School and hated it. Then you stumbled on a career in the Police. Then I guessed that you are not long out of the Training College and that your superiors are glad to see the back of you after only a few months because they think that you are a smart ass. A case of the round peg in a square hole sort of person, if I am any judge of people. My reason for saying that is because even after a few minutes, I can tell that you are a lot sharper and more clued up than most coppers I’ve had the sometimes dubious pleasure of meeting over the years.”

Trish didn’t say anything, but her body language told Dido that she wasn’t that far off the mark.

“Am I close?”

Trish remained motionless.

“Someone must have told you?”

“For some officers in the Met, the prospect of me going straight was just too hard to grasp.”

“Are you? Going straight, that is?”

“That’s your job to find out, isn’t it?” replied Dido.

Trish just sat silent.

Dido took a sip of the excellent coffee. It was far too strong for her to drink regularly.

“Trish? Why are you dressing down?” asked Dido, changing the subject.

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“You are trying to look like a student, aren’t you?”

Trish was wearing a pair of jeans with holes at the knees and a decidedly well-worn top with a small coffee stain on the bottom hem.

“That’s what I am… we are students, aren’t we?”

“We are, but we aren’t the same age as everyone else. From what I’ve seen so far, everyone else is almost straight out of school. At least some of the conversations about their public schools would indicate that sort of thing. Therefore, isn’t it up to us to set an example?”

“You mean glam up?”

Dido laughed.

“Not glam up as if we were going out for the evening. To put it simply, we present ourselves as professional women who are to be taken seriously. After all… that’s what we want to be at the end of the course, isn’t it?”

“I see what you are getting at… Make ourselves attractive to all those dirty old professors and bag ourselves holiday jobs and grade uplifts?”

“Don’t be so cynical. I, for one would love to stop wearing leggings every day. They don’t flatter an awful lot of women.”

“Now who’s being cynical?”

“Cynical? If telling the truth is being cynical, then so be it. Look over the road. What do you see, eh?”

Trish looked across the road at a very fat woman who was wearing black leggings and a white skimpy top. Her ample bust was having a very good go at escaping the confines of a black bra as she battled with a shopping trolley that was full of clothes. The clothes were all neatly folded. There was a laundrette a few doors away.

“If you have got it, flaunt it, eh?” said Trish.
“At least she isn’t trying to hide it.”

Dido shook her head.
“Call me a prude if you like, but I could never face going out if I looked like that. She obviously can, but I couldn’t.”

Trish laughed.
“I guess that you don’t hang out in Clubs, then?”

“Me? No way. For one thing, I don’t want to be, and for another, I like being able to hear things, and for a final thing, I don’t do drugs. I don’t even drink booze apart from a good beer or a glass or two of a decent wine at the end of the week. To be honest, I prefer a good piano concerto or a symphony to almost anything released in the past twenty or thirty years. Music to me is about painting a picture. Rap and modern R&B can’t do that.”

Dido grinned.
“Yes, I was born two hundred years too late, but I can’t help liking the sounds that I do.”

“Wow! Look at Miss Goody Two Shoes…”

“Speak for yourself, Trish, but I had a lot of issues with drugs and booze around me all the time when I was growing up. That was enough to put me off them for good.”

That was a bare-faced lie, but it was part of the backstory that she had concocted for anyone interested in where she came from.

Dido was not going to let on that her parents had started to send her out from the age of 6 to lift wallets and purses so that the money could be used to fund their other criminal activities. Then came the black hole of her life that lasted for more years than she wanted to remember. It was only after she'd escaped that and had been living on the streets that she had an encounter with an understanding Police Officer. He got her off the streets, but this Trish character was never going to know about him if she could help it. Six degrees of separation and all that stuff.

There was an uneasy silence between them until Dido said,

“We have a minute or two before we have to leave. How do you know DS Harrison?”

“My boss and the DS were at Hendon together. My boss is the godfather to the DS’s first child.”

“So, you aren’t officially keeping an eye on me then?”

Trish laughed.
“Nothing of the sort, although if you or anyone on the course breaks the law, then I am duty-bound to act, aren’t I?”

“You are. At least I know where I stand.”

Dido looked at her watch again.

“We should be getting back. I don’t have the foggiest idea where the tutorial is being held…”

Trish grinned.
“Second floor, turn left out of the lift and it is in the room at the end of the corridor on your right.”

She saw the look on Dido’s face.
“I did a reconnaissance of the place last Friday once I’d received my timetable. I have a good memory for places and stuff.”

Dido almost said ‘smarty pants’ but refrained from doing so.
Instead, she finished the last of her Coffee and stood up to leave the shop. The strong taste was going to linger in her mouth for a while. She was glad that she had a bottle of water in her bag.

---

Dido soon settled down to life as a student. Trish was always there in the background, but Dido’s effervescent personality soon won her a small group of associates. One or two might become a real friend after a while, but the rest? Useless twats, but they came as a group. Her intimate knowledge of London allowed her to help those from outside the city to stay out of the less desirable and unsafe parts of the metropolis. As far as the majority of the class was concerned, she was a nobody because of her educational background. John Proudfoot had warned her about people like that, ‘snobs’ and that she should ignore them. He’d seen many ‘know-it-all’ constables fly through training only to fail miserably when it came to real-world policing. Dido pigeonholed these as being just like them.

She found that the course was as interesting as she'd hoped it would be. Dido thought back to when her mentor, John Proudfoot, had suggested that not only was it time to go straight, but to learn new skills. She’d initially refused to even consider it, but over time, she’d grown into the idea and his plan for her to bring Fox to justice. Now, it was all down to her. She had one chance to do it, and that time was now.

At first, Dido thought that these new skills were just to do with opening safes, but John was persistent in his reasoning that she would fit right into student life on a Criminology course. He’d trained her to think logically and look at things from every possible angle. That was helping her manage the people around her. Almost every day, she thought back to the day that she’d tried to break into his car and then say thank you to him for rescuing her from that life.

Dido the student was a very different person from the child back in Southend, who was disposed of by her parents just to settle a debt. While Dido played a full part in the course and student life, Trish faded into the background. This didn’t go unnoticed by Dido. She tried her best, but for some reason, Trish seemed reluctant to step out of the shadows. Dido thought that it was her fear of being exposed as a copper more than anything.

---

When all her efforts to get Trish more involved in the after-college scene, crashed and burned, she went to see her mentor, John Proudfoot.

After listening to her explanation, John sat back and twiddled his thumbs. This was a habit of his. It had irritated Dido for a long time until she understood that this was John just being John. That one thing had taught her a valuable lesson, and that was not to jump to conclusions when it came to people and importantly, when investigating a case.

“My dear,” said John

Dido groaned to herself. This was John's way of letting her know that she was in for a telling-off or some other form of verbal castigation.

“I think you have the hots for a copper,” said John.

“No!”

“Wrong answer. I can read you, my girl. You know it as well as I do. Right from the moment you came here today, your whole aura and body language were shouting to me, ‘I have woman trouble’.”

Dido sat down and waited for John to speak. She knew that he would eventually come up with some words of wisdom. She respected him more than any other man she had ever met. His words and gentle guidance had made her grow up and become a woman of means. That had been way, way beyond her expectations before she had met John.

“I’m guessing here but here goes… I think that it is the cop who is on your course that is the problem?”

“Yeah.”

“My second guess is that it is what she is not doing, is what that worries you?”

Dido nodded her head.

“And my third one is that for some strange reason, you fancy the hell out of her, this woman of mystery who also happens to be someone who would arrest you on the spot if she caught you committing a crime?”

“You got me dead to rights there, John.”

“As you are going straight… what is the problem?”

“Only for the time being… until you know what.”

John sighed and shook his head.

“Didn’t we discuss that before? You know perfectly well that there is a way to get him without breaking the law. People like him do not give up habits like that. It is ingrained in his whole psyche.”

“I know, but…?”

“No buts, Dido. That is the plan. All you have to do is follow it, and he will get what he deserves, and you can go straight. That means you can be free to get down and dirty with the lady cop if you want to, that is?”

“John, I know all that, but it is how I feel.”

“Feel? You don’t feel shit. Sorry, Dido. You have never had a romantic relationship with anyone in all the years I have known you. All you have ever wanted to do is get even with him. How many times did you refuse a date when I dropped one into your lap?”

“That was then. This is now. I feel different.”

John smiled.

“Are you sure that it isn’t down to going straight that is causing your internal turmoil?”

“Don’t you think that I have considered that? I followed all the rules of evidence collection that we covered in class. Whichever way I process it, it always comes back to the same answer… I fancy the hell out of her.”

He didn’t say a word, he just grinned.

“Ok, ok. You warned me that something like this could happen, but… never with a cop!”

“That’s life. It takes all sorts to make the world we live in.”

Then John added,
“Just take things as they come. If I read between the lines correctly, she is holding back from joining the full student social life because of her fear of being found out. If that is the case, then take control. Get her more involved with you on the social side of things. That way, you can see if those feelings are real. If they are… then one day she is going to have to know the truth about you. The plus side of that is that she is a cop; she is less likely to spread it all over social media than any of your other classmates. She’s not going to broadcast that she is a cop from what you have told me about some of your classmates.”

Like most of John’s ‘sermons’, Dido took it and spent some time thinking about it. As usual, he was mostly right. Dido did make efforts to get Trish to become more involved, and it started to pay dividends.

---

[The last week of term]

“I want a thousand-word essay on the issues around giving a guilty plea in court. It is to be written from the accused’s point of view,” said the lecturer, Dr Phillips.

A collective groan went up from the almost one hundred students who were gathered in the lecture theatre.
“Please, no copying stuff straight from the internet and all references must be fully detailed. The references do not count in the thousand-word limit.”

This time, the groan was, if anything, louder than before.

“It is to be emailed to me before midnight on New Year’s Day. Any that are received after that will receive an automatic ‘F’, as will any wholesale copying of previous papers on the subject. I am looking for the words of the accused. The Americans call it allocution.”

There were more groans as everyone packed up to leave the theatre. Dido sat motionless and staring into space.

“Ms Pleasance? Is there something wrong?” asked Dr Lawson, the lecturer.

His words shook her out of her malaise.

“Sorry… Dr Lawson. I was trying to map out the assignment while it was fresh in my mind.”

“Good for you, but don’t you have a tutorial to attend?”

“If you mean the one with Dr Hardy, then I do, but I’ve already done her end-of-term assignment and emailed it to her. She responded earlier, saying that I don’t need to attend today’s tutorial.”

“Are you that keen?”

“No, Sir. I’m just trying to stay organised. I like to get things done in the order that they were given out. I should have your assignment done in three days.”

He smiled.
“This I have to see. If you get it to me by Tuesday of next week, then I’ll add one grade to your mark. I like people who are prompt with their assignments. Last-minute submissions show either a disorganised mind or laziness or both.”

“Sorry, Dr Lawson, I don’t need any favours. I want to be treated like everyone else on the course.”

“Very well. No favours, but I do look forward to reading your work before Christmas.”

“Oh, I am sure that you will,” said Dido with a wry smile on her face.

Dido went home that evening pretty happy with her world. She worked long into the night, and just before dawn, she emailed her assignment to John Proudfoot for comment.

John replied by lunchtime that day. He didn't have much to say apart from her mixing up the different 'Points of View'. Dido made the changes he suggested before going to bed. After thinking about it overnight, she made a couple of minor tweaks before emailing it to Dr Lawson. She hoped that it would cause him to rethink his image of her as being a typical dumb blonde. He'd made a couple of comments in her direction during seminars because Dido had not been asking questions. She was holding fire because most of the questions were, in her opinion, dumb or verging on stupid. If those asking had bothered to listen to the lecture rather than fiddling with their phones, they might not be asking about points that were, in her opinion, perfectly well covered during the lecture. Trish agreed with Dido about the questions. Trish wasn't in his good books because Trish had pointed out that a Law Lord’s decision in 2010 had reversed the previously held legal view on witness tampering. Dr Lawson didn’t bother to acknowledge in the next tutorial that Trish had been right.

Those seemingly little things did nothing to endear Dido or Trish to the majority of their classmates.

Christmas came and went with Dido spending a lot of the vacation at John Proudfoot's home. Most of the time with John, she spent working on the topics that were going to be covered during the next term. John noticed her dedication to the cause, but not without some concern.

"Are you missing her?" he asked one morning just before the new year. Dido was reading an article on the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act. She’d been reading the same page for an hour.

Her first reaction was to sigh.

“You are then. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. I am not going to do a thing about it until after the end of the academic year at the earliest.”

John laughed.

“Are you hoping that she fails her exams?”

“No chance of that. Her law background and cop training will make sure that she passes.”

“What about you?”

Dido made a ‘so-so’ motion with her hand.

“Why are you so-so? What subject or subjects are troubling you?”

“Chemistry. Everyone, and that includes ‘her’, has at least an O-level. I have nothing. I’m winging it most of the time. Crystallography is a total blind spot for me. I have to get through this year, and then I can forget about it.”

John laughed.
“You won’t forget about it, believe me on that. I had a nemesis subject. It almost stopped me from becoming a Police Officer. These days, the rules are not so strict as back then.”

“What was it? Your nemesis subject?”

“English. I failed my O-level four times. It wasn’t until I wrote a paper on the shortcomings of the PACE[1] act that the bosses relented and let me into Hendon on a fast-track path.”

Dido shook her head.
“Look at the references to that article that you are reading,” suggested John with a huge smile on his face.

“You sly bugger, you!” said Dido a minute later. His name was right there.

“Not just a pretty face, you know. Some of the suggestions I made about the operation of the act were adopted by forces all over England and Wales. It wasn’t until the millennium and the advent of some new regulations coming out of the Home Office that those practices fell out of favour.”

Dido just sat there shaking her head.
“Why? Why didn’t you say something?”

“Do you remember what we agreed when you went back to school?”

“Ok, ok. You are there to answer my questions, and you will not impose your knowledge on me unless I ask for it.”

“Exactly. Now, if you want to talk about PACE and the subsequent legislation, given that you have been reading about it, we can continue. If not, I’m going shopping. We are out of bread and milk.”

He smiled,
“Besides, it stopped me from talking the hind legs off a donkey and going way off track in the process.”

Dido took the hint and went back to reading the article. This time, she started making notes of particular points in the law that she would discuss later with John.

John smiled back at his protégé. She was turning into a fine woman and had the potential to become an even better investigator than he’d ever been. Because of her horrific experiences at the hands of Fox, she looked at the world in a way that people like him could only wonder about. He knew from first-hand experience that she saw things in the world around her that he and almost everyone else would miss.

[1] PACE. Police And Criminal Evidence Act 1984.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/60/contents

[The following February]

The steady stream of punters leaving the club signified that closing time was near. The flow soon dwindled to a few stragglers. The two doormen looked at their watches anxiously. It was well past 02:00 when the last customer left the club and climbed into a waiting taxi. For the doormen, their work for the night was done and dusted. They went inside and locked the door behind them.

Inside the club, the bar staff had nearly completed clearing away and washing up the glasses. Even the manager pitched in to help and was sweeping the floor. So far, it had just been a normal Thursday night in Camden, North London.

The manager finished sweeping up the bar area and headed towards the toilets. This was the one part of his job that he hated. There was no telling what he'd find in them. It would be a normal night if he found at least a few syringes and some used drug wrappers. No matter what the club tried, it was almost impossible to keep hard drugs out of the club.

The manager, a naturalised immigrant from Greece named Georgios Papandreou, took a deep breath before entering the men's toilet. He knew from past experiences that it could smell too high heaven and have urine, condoms, needles and sometimes much worse scattered all over the floor or even, on the odd occasion, up the walls.

On this particular night, the smell wasn’t that bad. What was bad, though, was the sight of a woman lying on the sodden floor with her dress up around her neck. He looked closer, and it was clear that this wasn’t a genetic woman but someone who had been born a man. This meant trouble for him and the club, but he did the right thing and checked for a pulse. There was one, so he left the toilet and called the emergency services.

Then he went in search of the two doormen. He was in luck. They were about to leave for their homes.

“Sorry, guys, you had better stay put. There is a tranny in the Men’s Loo. She’s been sodomised with a beer bottle. I’ve called the cops and ambulance.”
He used words they’d understand rather than the correct description of the victim.

The two men's faces went white.

“Sorry, Boss, we had no idea.”

“I’m not blaming you. From what I saw, she was more than passable unless you want to start doing DNA tests on the door, which we are not. As I said, I’ve called the Police and Ambulance, and because this place will become a crime scene, they will need a statement from all of us.”

No one said anything.
“Dave, can you retrieve the CCTV disk and make at least three copies of it? We’ll need to give the original to the law, but we’ll need one for our solicitors in case we get sued by the victim.”

“Sure, thing, Boss.”

“Oh, Dave, I don’t want any images deleted, especially those of people arriving and leaving. She’s quite a looker and would not have made me stop her if I were on the door; besides, you were not the scumbags that raped and sodomised her. Those are the people the cops will be after.”

“Gotcha, Boss.”

Then George addressed the other man.
“Terry, I think a strong cuppa for all of us might be a good idea. I get the feeling that it is going to be a long night. It might be good to keep it coming; once the law arrives, okay? We do not want to be in their bad books as our license is up for renewal next month.”

He smiled.
“You must have read my mind, George. I’ll keep them supplied.”

“Send the paramedics to the gents. Please try to keep the cops away until they have done their thing. If there is a photographer with them, let them through, but her medical treatment comes first, understand?”

Both the doormen smiled and nodded at their boss. He was doing everything he could to make this incident as routine as possible, even if it was anything but.

George went back to the toilet and covered her nether regions with a towel. The fewer people who knew what she’d been hiding, the better. Then he sat holding the woman’s hand until the paramedics arrived and shooed him away.

---

George’s prediction about a long night proved to be correct. The sun had risen at least an hour before the Police finally let the three men leave the club. George had drafted in his assistant to look after the place while the Police finished their investigations. The SOCO team would be there for another few hours.

George didn't go home; instead, he headed for University College Hospital. That was where the victim had been taken almost five hours earlier. He hoped that he could be back at the club before the SOCO team left, so he could clean the toilets and lock up.

The people at the hospital were very reluctant to provide any information other than to say that the victim had been admitted. At least he got them to tell him which ward the young woman was about to be admitted to.

On his way back to the club, he called a friend of his. He hoped that they’d know what to do.

“Long time no speak, girl,” he said when the phone was answered.

“Sorry, girl, this is not a social call. Someone like you was sodomised in my club last night and…?”

“Yes, Dido, I do mean just like you down below. It was a bit of a shock, I can tell you. For a moment, I thought that it was you. If it had been, I think I might have keeled over on the spot.”

“She is in UCH, but I don’t have a name or anything.”

"Passable? You bet. She'd outdo 99% of the real females we get in on a weekday night.
We might get some hotter chicks on a Friday or Saturday, but not every week, she’s that good. Her legs are long and thin, if you know what I mean. Her face was messed up with the beating that they gave her, but I’d say that… and sorry girl, she would be more passable than the old you.”

Thankfully, Dido took that on the chin. George was describing the victim and using Dido as a common reference.

“I’ll get the name of the detective leading the investigation and text it to you as well as the ward if I can. They don’t like giving that sort of stuff to strangers.”

“Thanks, Dido. I owe you one.”

He hung up and sighed. When his parents had sent him to England to ‘get educated in the ways of the world’, almost the first person he’d met at his primary school was Thomas Day. They'd bonded almost immediately because they were the school outcasts. He was a boy, but one who was very effeminate and a loner, and he, the son of a Greek shipping magnate who could barely speak English, was staying with an aunt after his parents' messy divorce. They had made an odd couple, but together their friendship blossomed even if they were only seven years old.

For eighteen months, they were best friends, but more than that, they’d become a team. It was them against the world.

Then one day, George's friend just wasn't there. His parents had done a flit from their home, but to a nine-year-old, it was all his fault even if it wasn't.

George didn’t find his friend until many years later, when on a visit to the London Dungeon with his uncle and aunt, a dirty, smelly homeless girl had called him by name. He’d nearly jumped out of his skin. They’d dragged him away in disgust. The wretch bore no resemblance to the boy he’d been friends with. The fact that she’d used the nickname that he’d given him when they became friends all those years ago had made him bunk off school the next day and take the train from Southend to Fenchurch St and go in search of her.

He'd found her panhandling outside Tower Hill Tube Station. They’d crossed over Tower Bridge and walked along the river path to Bermondsey while they talked. George had been sick in the river when she had told him what had been done to her after her parents had more or less sold her to a child trafficking ring and then to a paedophile. Despite her frankly appalling smell, he'd hugged her. They'd shared a fish and chip meal before George had to return home. After that, he'd helped her in any way he could. It wasn't a lot or that often, but for Dido, it was good to know that she was not alone.

Two months later, she met John Proudfoot. John didn’t know much about George until now. It might be difficult to keep John from knowing about George after this. Dido had tried to keep parts of her life compartmented, but as time passed, this was proving to be more and more difficult.

Their friendship was as strong now as it had ever been; despite moving in different circles, they would find time to meet at least once a month since she’d returned to education. George was proud of how Dido was growing up before his eyes. When she passed her A-levels, George treated her to a meal at a top London restaurant. Dido had to get dolled up to the nines for the occasion. His heart went all fluttery when she walked into the dining area. Men all over ogled her and more than likely paid for it later. George was so proud of Dido. Then this had happened.

Seeing the victim lying on the floor with nothing to hide had made him call Dido. The poor sod who was in the hospital needed her help more than anything. She needed to know that she was not alone, as did Dido when she told him about what had been done to her when she was taken from him.

George had known even from their time together in Southend that Thomas had fancied women, and Dido was just the same. That was what had made their friendship last across the years that they were apart.

George went to bed satisfied that he’d done all he could for the time being, but he made a mental note to speak to Dido on a more regular basis. Now, with this new victim, things had gotten more complicated.

---

Dido had taken George's call while she was on her way to the University. For a moment, she debated cutting classes and heading to UCH. After thinking about it for three stops on her bus, she decided to go to the hospital after her last tutorial of the day, which finished at 14:30.

Before she went into her first lecture, she called her friend John Proudfoot. She needed his help just in case the men came back to finish the job.

“John, can you call in a few favours and find out the name of a young woman who was taken to UCH early this morning?”

“My friend from Southend, George, you don’t know about him, but that’s for later, found her on the floor of the men’s loo at the club that he manages. She’d been bum fucked with a bottle and generally beaten up. His words were ‘someone like me’. You know what that means…”

“I know. We always knew that I was not the first nor the last, but… She needs some help… if she will accept it, that is.”

“Yes, I know I rejected your help at first, but that was then. Things are different now, aren’t they?”

“Thanks, John. Send me a text with the details as I’m in lectures all morning and tutorials until half-two.”

---

Dido’s mind was very much ‘somewhere else entirely’ that whole day. Her friend Trish noticed it after the first lecture. Dido would normally ask several questions at the end of the presentation on forensic techniques that had been discredited by new advances in science.

“Ok, girl, what is on your mind?” asked Trish as they walked to their next lecture.

It took Dido a few moments to get her mind into the right gear to answer.

“Sorry, Trish. I got some bad news on my way here. A friend of a friend was rushed to UCH early this morning. She was raped and badly beaten up, last night.”

“Then you should go to her…!”

“I will after lunch. I know that doctors and the like work on their patients in the morning.”

Trish reached and took hold of Dido’s hand. For an instant, Dido wanted to pull away, but decided that this was a gesture of friendship rather than anything else.

“You have a good heart for a ‘tea leaf’!”

“How many times do I need to say that I’m not a ‘tea leaf’ as you so bluntly put it? At least not now.”

“I know that. I can see that I was wrong about you, but there is so much that you are keeping to yourself that it is eating you up from the inside out.”

Dido didn’t answer but smiled at her friend.

The first time she'd called Trish, a 'friend' had stuck in her throat for well over a week. Being friends with someone who was not only a student but a serving Police officer was a new experience for her. After a few sleepless nights, she gave in and called Trish her friend. But there was a lot of her life that was off-limits to her friend. Apart from the man she hated and was certain to bring to justice, only John Proudfoot and George knew what she'd gone through as a child. John had been the one person to take the time to work with her after her rescue from the streets and ensure that she was able to function as a human being. His patience was slowly rewarded, and the person Dido was now, a student, was largely down to him.

---

After lunch, Dido left the University campus and walked to the top of Grey’s Inn Road. From there, she could catch a bus to Euston Road and University College Hospital. During her journey, she went over what she was going to say to this new victim of ‘him’ and his evil cabal. She’d never had to tell anyone other than John Proudfoot and George about those years before. John had listened and not passed judgment until she’d told him everything. George had just hugged her and told her that she was a good person. The one thing that John had never done was to lay any of the blame for what had happened to her. Dido hoped that she could now return the favour.

Dido used the information provided by John Proudfoot and found the ward where the victim, Joanne Young, was located. She went into the ward just as afternoon visiting hours started.

“Hello?” she said as she poked her head around the corner of the cubicle where Joanne’s bed was located.

“Go away. I’m done answering questions,” came a distinctly grumpy reply.

“I’m not here to ask questions. I’m here to help.”

“Bollocks.”
Joanne turned over in bed so that she was facing away from where Dido was standing.

“Joanne, I know what you have gone through. It happened to me as well.”

“So? Plenty of women get raped.”

“No, not last night, but before. You are not alone.”

Dido didn't wait for a reply. Instead, she went and sat down right beside Joanne. She fished a photo out of her bag and shoved it in front of her eyes.

“Look at this. Tell me if you know this man?”

Reluctantly, Joanne opened her eyes. She let out a little scream when she saw the image.

“It is all right. This bastard is not here. I was abused by him just like you.”

“How…. How did you find me?”

“The manager of the club that you went to last night is an old friend of mine. He gave me the heads up about you and where you were taken when he saw what had been done to you by the people who sold you to him. He and I go back to before I was… was taken.”

Joanne sank back into the bed.

Dido took the chance and gently placed her hand on hers.

“How long are you going to be in here?”

“They said until tomorrow morning.”

“Good. Then I can bring you some clothes for when you get discharged.”

“I have my own…”

Dido shook her head.
“If I know anything about the cops, then your outfit from last night will have been seized as evidence.”

“Thank you.”

“Joanne, I know that you have had it tough in the past, but now that you have found me, I hope that you can see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. It won’t be easy, especially after last night, but you are not alone now.”

“You have no idea what I went through!” said Joanne with a few words of defiance in her voice.

Dido leaned over and whispered into her ear for nearly a minute. In the end, Joanne was not only crying but gripping Dido's hand like a vice would grip a piece of metal.

Dido hugged her and sat down to wait for Joanne to stop sobbing.

“I know that it is hard. It was for me until I came to understand that what I did with my life was now in my own hands. Since then, I have taken control and I have dedicated my life to getting even.”

“I never knew…”

“Neither did I until this morning, but my friend George recognised what had been done to you when he found you. George was my best friend from before I was taken.”

Joanne noticeably stiffened up. This time, she understood what Dido had said.

“Don’t worry, Joanne, George is not going to post photos on social media. He is one of the good guys. I know that you probably hate all men right now, but there are some good men out there. I trust two. George, the manager of the club, is one. The other is John Proudfoot. He is a former Chief Superintendent of the Met Police. Without his gentle guidance, I would have topped myself years ago. Instead, I have a purpose in my life. If you want some help, then John and I are here for you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t rush. You need to heal first. Physically, I mean. Mentally will take a lot of time, and you have plenty of that. John can arrange counselling with a woman. She has helped me no end.”

Dido decided to change tack.
“Do you have a phone?”

She shook her head.
“The cops said that there was nothing of mine left behind after they’d… they’d done with me. The scumbags stole it plus my phone, purse and even the keys to my flat, or at least I seem to remember leaving home to get a takeaway with them.”

“Bastards. Ok, can you write down your address on this?” asked Dido as she pulled out her college notepad and gave it to Joanne.

“I think so.”

Joanne's hands were pretty unsteady, but they wrote down an address.

“Thanks. I’ll see if I can get you some of your clothes for tomorrow.”

“Thank you, but how will you get in? My keys were in my purse?”

Dido smiled and tapped the side of her nose.
“I’ll manage.”

Dido stood up and picked up her bag.

“Wait!” said Joanne.

“Who are you? You never said?”

Dido smiled.
“Sorry. My name is Dido. Dido Pleasance.”

“Thank you, Dido.”
She gave Dido a small smile and a slight nod of the head.

Dido left her to rest, feeling pleased with her visit.

---

Dido's happy feeling didn't last. When she arrived at Joanne's flat, she found the door was open. With some trepidation, she stood outside and eased the door open with the back of her hand.

The flat was empty. Empty as in stripped bare. No furniture, no nothing. For an instant, she wondered if she had come to the right place. Then she remembered the mailbox out in the hall. There was one letter addressed to Joanne. That confirmed that she was in the right place.

Now that it was clear, Dido walked slowly inside. She found that even the kitchen cupboards had been stripped bare and … Her heart sank. Someone had decided to erase Joanne from society. The smell of some bleach-based cleaner was everywhere. She bent down and used her breath to fog up the surface of the kitchen table. There were no fingerprints. There were none in the bathroom. Nor were there any hairs in the bath plughole. The smell of bleach and what she would come to find out later was a chemical used to clean up crime scenes, was almost overpowering.

She checked the Bedroom and it was just as spotless. Someone who knew how to sanitise a crime scene had been hard at work.

Then she panicked. What if?

Dido pulled out her phone and called John Proudfoot.

“Hi, John.”

“I did visit her. She identified ‘him’. George was right.”

“No. She’s getting out tomorrow. That’s not why I called.”

“I’m at her flat in Dalston. It has been cleaned.”

“No, I mean emptied of everything and every trace of her has gone. The smell of Bleach and some other cleaners is everywhere. Nothing is left in the flat. No furniture, no carpet, nothing. This is a crime scene level of clean if you know what I mean.”

“I agree. I think that someone who has influence got panicky. I think she might be in danger if they find out that she survived.”

“That’s what I thought. Can you do it discreetly? It is pretty obvious that these thugs have money and an organisation behind them if they could get this place cleared in such a short time.”

“No. Not right away. I’m going to do a bit of digging. Someone must have seen the crew who worked to clear the place in record time.”

Dido chuckled.
“No, I have not gone over to the dark side. It is just some of what I’ve learned on my course rubbing off on me, combined with your excellent tuition naturally... What are the words… Oh yes, ‘follow the evidence’…”

“Please let me know what you can arrange.”

“Thanks, John. I’ll call you later.”

Dido hung up the call and took a lot of photos before leaving Joanna’s now former flat.

---

It didn’t take her long to find a neighbour who was busy putting out a rubbish bin.

They told Dido that they had seen some workmen plus a skip arrive just before 08:00 that morning. The neighbour didn’t think much about it. A bunch of workmen clearing houses was not that unusual for the area. Dido could see why. At least three houses in the street had workmen present with the inevitable yellow or orange builders’ skip outside the house that was being worked on.

The neighbour also stated that they'd left just before 3:00 pm and that the skip was collected less than half an hour before Dido arrived. He knew that because his wife was able to park his car in the very place that had been occupied by the skip when she returned from collecting their children from school. The neighbour said that there was a company name on the skip that had been used to remove her belongings, but could not tell her what it was.

Dido walked back to Dalston Junction Overground Station with just one thing on her mind. Had ‘he’ done this? If it wasn’t him, then whoever had done this had money and influence. Either way, this did not bode well for Joanna and her future.

---

Dido was very subdued when she got to her flat near the Surrey Keys shopping centre. If someone with enough power to have organised the flat clearance at such short notice could do that, what else could they do? Did she still have a bank account? Did she still have an identity? How good was her current identity? Those and a few dozen more questions were on her mind.

Those thoughts and concerns had distracted her so much that she forgot to go to Tesco’s and do her weekly shop. She was almost home before she realised what she’d not done. There was nothing for it but to go back, get something to eat for that evening and do some clothes shopping for Joanna.

---

John Proudfoot called her just before 7:00 pm.
He had good news and bad. He’d twisted the arms of two of his old colleagues from ‘Special Branch’. They were going to stand guard on Joanna until she could be released from the Hospital. While that was good news, John was very worried by the speed at which Joanne’s home had been cleared.

He told her that there had been a rash of similar attacks back in the 1990s in West London. Anyone who crossed the drug gangs had their life erased. He meant totally erased. Banks, HMRC, everything. John's team eventually tracked it down to a bunch of geeks in Stanmore who delighted in declaring people deceased, including fake wills and powers of attorney. Their cohorts went in and cleared their homes and armed with apparently valid death certificates, pocketed their money, pensions and the whole shebang. It had taken them almost a year to pin the crimes back on one particular drug gang. John's opinion was that this crew was a lot more organised and professional. The sheer speed at which they cleared their victim’s home was evidence of that.

That news didn’t help Dido’s mood one bit.

---

Dido was more hopeful than anything when she arrived at the Hospital the next morning. She carried some clothes and some makeup for Joanna, but had mentally prepared herself to find her gone.

To her eternal relief, Joanna was not only still there but was ready to leave once she had some clothes for the street.

While Joanna was getting ready, Dido was getting up the courage to tell her about her home.

Despite all the things that had happened to her during her life, preparing to tell someone that their entire existence had more than likely been erased from society was way outside her comfort zone.

For someone who had been abused like they had, to lose what little she had managed to get together and build a new life was a gut punch and more.

John Proudfoot was waiting for them when they emerged from the Hospital.

“Joanna, this is John. He is, as I said, one of the good guys. He looked after me, and now he’s going to help you move forward.”

“John,” said Joanna in a very uncertain voice.

“Please get in, ladies. Being a former cop can only keep the traffic Gestapo at bay for so long.”

The two women got in the back of his BMW.

“Where are we going?” asked Joanne as John drove through Camden Town.

“To John’s home near Epping,” said Dido.

“Why not my place? I have my things, such as they are, there.”

John looked at Dido via the rear-view mirror. He nodded his head.

“That’s going to be a bit of a problem. I went there yesterday and there was nothing there apart from a council tax demand.”

“What do you mean… nothing there?”

“Your home had been cleared out and surgically cleaned.”

Joanne went white in the face. Dido saw her grip the door handle very tightly.

“Think of this this way,” said Dido.
“My shrink told me that even just seeing things from your old life can trigger PTSD events. When I went to visit the London Zoo, I had one when I saw the steel bars on the door to the male gorilla’s cage. Since then, I have been back, and it is ok. That first time, I didn’t know what happened to me.”

Joanne managed to return a small smile, which didn’t fool Dido for a second. She knew that there was a long and very difficult road ahead for her.

"This is your personal space," said Dido as she showed Joanne the annexe.
“John won’t come in unless you ask him apart from delivering clean bed linen and towels. There is a place to wash and dry your clothes, and even a small kitchen, but beware, John is a brilliant cook. You will be expected to pitch in and help with the washing up, but believe me, it is a small price to pay for some really top-quality meals.”

“But… I only have the clothes I have on me now?”

Dido shook her head.
“I went shopping for you last night. There are several changes of clothes in the drawers and wardrobe. Don’t be afraid to use John’s credit card to help you build up a wardrobe. I regret not doing that when I lived here.”

“How did you get the money?”

“Joanne, I am sorry to say that before I met John, I survived by lifting a few wallets. My bastard father trained me to do it starting when I was five or six years old. It is what I was doing before I met John, and old habits die hard.”

“What do you do now?”

Dido grinned.
“I’ve gone straight if that is what you are asking? Otherwise, I’m a first-year criminology student.”

Joanne shook her head.
“But… you missed so much schooling?”

“We have both missed so much schooling because of him and his pals, but it is not the end of the world. Thanks to John, I went back to school and managed to get some O-levels and three A-levels. Without his gentle persuasion, I know that I’d probably have topped myself a long time ago.”

Dido took hold of Joanne’s hand.
“You are not alone. There are probably more of us out there, and one day, he will be brought to justice. It is my life’s work to make that happen.”

A few tears rolled down Joanne’s cheeks.
“Thank you, Dido.”

“As John said, take your time. Make your future your own. We are here to help in any way we can.”

Dido left Joanne to look around the annexe. She gave John a brief update on what had gone on.

“Thanks, Dido. She is going to take a lot more work on my part, but I’ll take it slowly.”

“Those guys who defiled her in the club need sorting out, but they seem to be so well organised, it hurts.”

“Agreed. I have arranged a meeting with the SIO on her case for the day after tomorrow, which coincides with the first visit from one of Dr. Sue’s colleagues.”

Dr Sue was the counsellor who had helped Dido face up to what had been done to her. That was chicken feed when compared to Joanne. She was off work having a baby, so one of her colleagues was going to be Joanne’s counsellor.

“That was quick work?”

“This is between you and me, but Joanne was not the first victim of a gang rape who had her whole life erased within hours after the rape. The new National Crime Agency are running the show, and the investigation into them has been called Operation Chesil.”

Dido swore under her breath.

“Exactly, my thoughts when I heard about it. It sucks. My first impression was that Joanne was the victim of a gang of Hooray-Henries, but the emptying of her home was premeditated. These guys are organised to the nth degree. We will need a big slice of luck to crack the case,” said John.

His years of experience, although not current, were coming to the fore. Dido had never seen him as worried as he was at that moment.

“Then we need to concentrate on her and not the bastards who deserved to be castrated and made to eat them in public,” said Dido.

John smiled.
“Nice idea.”

“Yeah, I know, it ain’t gonna happen.”

“Dido, you have your studies to think about. Joanne is a long-term project, and the last thing we want to do at the moment is impede the NCA investigations. I’ll make sure that she is shielded as much as possible from their questioning. I may have to pull a few strings, but I will keep her safe. When the time is right, we can go after the bastards. That time is not now, ok? Unless they fall into our laps, Fox is the number one target.”

Dido listened to his statement. She knew him well enough to know that he’d said it from the heart.

Dido, because of her time being held captive, was not a person to physically show affection, especially towards a man, but for once, she put those fears behind her and gave him a big hug.

Dido left John's house after lunch the next day and returned to her home in SE London. Her mood wasn't good, and to make matters worse, she missed getting off the train at Stratford. It was only when the tube train went underground that she noticed what had happened. She cursed to herself that she'd missed her stop. That added half an hour to her journey home. The bad news didn't end there because of the restricted hours allowed for supermarkets to open on Sundays, her store of choice was closed by the time she got there.

One of the local and overpriced convenience stores provided her with a microwavable evening meal, but it wasn't the same as cooking it herself.

That evening, Dido tried to work on an assignment for her forensics class, but her mind was just unable to concentrate on anything but Joanne and the evil people who had defiled her so badly.

Life for her, John and especially Joanne, had gotten a lot more complicated. Her next problem was how she was going to explain the situation to Trish, who would be asking about ‘her friend’.

Dido’s last task of the weekend was to call George and give him an update, but Dido, being Dido, didn’t tell him where Joanna was staying. John had made it clear that the fewer people who knew where she was, the better.