The Lost Years

by Colin Wade

  *

  They made it to the boat hire place and began to execute part one of the plan. Rob had told Anya that they were going to go on a boat ride and stop for a picnic, hoping that the tail would follow them in the car and try to keep an eye on them from the road. They hired a boat and got set, looking like a loving couple that were out to enjoy the warm spring sunshine, lazing about on the river and having a picnic.

  They set off, looking behind them to see if anyone was following them on the river. Rob hoped not. This would blow his plan. He needed the tail to follow them in the car.

  Rob and Anya navigated down the river towards Reading at a leisurely pace, keeping well in view of the road at the points where the river could be seen. After about half an hour they arrived in Pangbourne and moored up to have their picnic, making sure they could easily be seen from the road. Part two of the plan. They got out the picnic and had a lovely meal, lounging on the boat, sitting in the sun. They both had their shades on because they wanted to look across the river to the road without making it too obvious they were watching. They chatted and ate, trying to look cool and calm but desperately hoping to see the black 4x4 on the road, watching them.

  “There it is,” exclaimed Anya. “It has just pulled into one of the spaces along the river. I can’t see the driver but he looks like he has stopped to keep an eye on us.”

  “Excellent, just what I wanted,” said Rob. “Let’s enjoy our lunch and make him wait.”

  *

  He had followed the road to Reading from Goring and stopped a couple of times en route to see if he could see Rob and Anya on the river. He was much quicker and had got ahead of them, stopping now and then and waiting for them to come along. Each time, they came into view within a few minutes. After the last stop he sped to the next place where the river was in good view. Pangbourne. He drove along the road and couldn’t quite work out where it was best to stop. As he began to reach the town centre he realised he had probably gone too far and would have a better vantage point further back down the road. He turned around and went back the way he came. He drove along to some parking spaces, right next to the river with a wide view of the whole thing. As he parked up he could see that they had already stopped on the opposite side. They looked like they were having a picnic. He got out a chocolate bar which had gone soft in the heat of the car and tried to eat it without getting totally messy, all the time watching what they were doing. Waiting to kill them.

  *

  The plan was working. They were leading him on a merry dance but the last stage of the plan was the riskiest. They decided to sit around for a while as they had to keep up the pretence that this was just a lazy Saturday, messing about on the river. At around 1.30 p.m. they fired up the boat and turned around, apparently heading home. They furtively watched the car and sure enough, they could see him starting up and pulling off. Excellent, this is just what they needed. The first half a mile back up the river was exposed to the road but after that there was about a mile where the river flowed behind a wildlife park, stopping anybody being able to see the river from the road. This was the moment. As soon as they entered this area, blind from the road, Rob turned the boat around and headed back towards Pangbourne. They texted Clark: ‘Meet us in Pangbourne car park in 20 minutes’. This was it. They had to get back down the river, get out of the boat and into the Pangbourne car park before he realised what had happened. Rob pushed the boat’s speed up to the maximum they could go without breaking the river speed rules.

  *

  He saw them start up the boat and turn around, heading back to Goring. He skirted the river for a short while before the road bent away as the water meandered around a large wooded area and some sort of animal attraction. He would get to the next vantage point that he stopped at on the way. He parked up and waited. No sign. They were usually there within about five minutes of him parking up. Seven minutes. No sign. Ten minutes. No sign. Had they stopped again? Fifteen minutes. No sign. It suddenly dawned on him. He had been played. They had turned around and were heading towards Reading. He got in the car and went as fast as he could without catching the numerous bloody speed cameras that blotted the whole of this road.

  *

  Rob pushed the boat as fast as he dared and Pangbourne soon came into view. They headed for moorings by the town centre. Clark was ready, waiting for them in the car park. They moored up and got out, desperately hoping not to see the black 4x4. This was the point they were completely exposed and would blow the plan if they were seen. They hurried off the boat towards the car park. No sign of the car. They rushed to the car park, desperately looking for Clark. Suddenly, Rob spotted him as he stepped out of a small, black Fiat Panda. Anya saw him for the first time. A dishevelled, lanky student type with mad fly-away hair and the cutest smile. They bundled into the car without ceremony, shut the doors and took a breath. Had they got away with it?

  Clark broke the silence. “Hi, I’m Clark,” he said to Anya, “you don’t know how much I have been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “Get down,” Rob suddenly shouted. He had spotted the 4x4 driving past the car park. They all crouched down. “Not you,” Rob said to Clark. “He doesn’t know what you look like.”

  “Oh yeah.” Clark adjusted his position to the normal-sitting-in-a-car pose without it being too obvious that he was coming back from a crouching position.

  “Can you see him? Has he seen us?” Rob asked nervously.

  “No, I don’t think so. He is just doing a complete U-turn around the roundabout and heading back the way he came.”

  “Can you see what he looks like?” asked Anya.

  “Fair-haired dude, dark glasses. That is about all I can see. He has gone.”

  There was something about the vague description that made Anya uneasy. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Rob. Clark fired up the car and they headed to his flat in Reading to take Anya through all they had discovered. It was going to be a long afternoon.

  *

  He had sped back along the road to Pangbourne. No sign. As he approached the town centre he was frantically scanning for any sign of the boat, Rob or Anya. Nothing. He reached the mini roundabout by the car park and scanned up and down the roads. Nothing. He didn’t know what to do next. He had bloody well lost them and this was now absolute confirmation that they knew they were being followed. How long had they known? As far back as that day he spent waiting in the hospital car park. Probably. He was pretty certain he had been played that day but couldn’t be sure. He was now. God, he was going to enjoy killing these two for making him look like a mug. He did a U-turn at the roundabout and went back the way he came.

  65

  They had got away with it. As they drove out of Pangbourne towards Reading, there was no further sign of the black 4x4. Their tail didn’t know what car they were driving but they were happy that he was not still around searching for them. They got to Clark’s flat within twenty-five minutes and Clark invited Anya into his lovely waterside home for the first time. Anya was frantic to get on but couldn’t help but be impressed. Clark clearly knew how to keep a home.

  They sat down in the living room after Clark made a big pot of coffee and started to talk about what they needed to go through with Anya.

  “Anya, we need to take you through our whiteboard which has all the photos, connections and key information written on it. It is in my office. However, I think I should outline the details and depth of the conspiracy first.”

  “Look Clark, I am sorry if you think I am being rude but there is only one thing I care about. Where is my baby? I don’t like that you and Rob have been playing your little conspiracy games and not going to the police with this. I am really struggling to understand what the hell you have been doing.”

  Clark sat and took the barrage. Rob 2.0, he thought to himself. Anya and Rob were clearly cut from the s
ame bolshy, argumentative cloth. He pressed on with his most diplomatic tone.

  “Anya, I am sorry this has happened to you and I promise that we will find out what happened to your baby. Your revelation has given us an angle that we hadn’t considered but it doesn’t change the fact that the four girls that were in the clinic at the same time as you were murdered and two of them were your friends.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Rachel Hermitage and Lisa Benbridge.”

  “Oh my God. No.”

  “Yes, and worse than that, we think it has started again. We think there are two more girls in there now.”

  “What! Well call the police. Catch them at it!”

  “We can’t. We have evidence that there are some dodgy police officers involved. We need to play this carefully. If we call the police, there is a really good chance that this will get covered up. There are seriously heavy people involved in this and millions of pounds changing hands. They are murdering the victims and paying people off to protect their secrets.”

  Anya looked at Clark, looked at Rob. Her face etched with the pain of not knowing. Rob had kept quiet, letting Clark take the lead, but it was not going as they hoped. Anya was not happy to listen to the long explanations that Clark had prepared.

  “Show me this board,” she commanded.

  Clark realised he was not going to manage this conversation the way he had planned. He relented. Anya was highly volatile and he had to adapt to her highly charged state.

  “OK, come through.”

  They walked into Clark’s man cave. Anya spotted the whiteboard at the end of the room and walked right up to it. It was full of pictures, writing and arrows linking the people. Her picture was there, next to Rachel and Lisa’s but it was the face in the centre of the board that made her stop. Her legs gave way and she fell to the floor.

  Rob and Clark rushed to catch her but only succeeded in stumbling over each other. Rob picked her up.

  “Anya. Anya. Are you all right?” he said as he lightly tapped her face, trying to rouse her.

  She stirred.

  “What is it? What did you see on the board? You fainted.”

  Anya sat up. Tried to clear her head. After a few minutes she was cognisant enough to speak. From her position, sitting on the floor by the board, she looked back at the picture.

  “That is Bradley. Evil Bradley. He is the reason I became a drug addict. An evil raping bastard.”

  “What do you mean?” pleaded Rob.

  “I told you about the drugs, Rob, and being admitted to the clinic but this was preceded by months of abuse. Verbal and physical abuse. Sexual abuse, by that bastard. He was pure evil. The more drugs I wanted, the worse it got. If I was late paying him for the drugs, he took it out on me. Raping me. Sometimes with other men too.”

  Rob was gobsmacked. He didn’t know what to do. Why had she never told him? More lies. More deceit. He was consumed with rage that someone could have done that to Anya. He wanted to hit something or someone, but all the while his mind was conflicted by being lied to again. The foundations of the relationship being attacked again. His tumultuous mind blurted out the first thing that came to him.

  “Could he be the one that made you pregnant?”

  “Oh my God Rob,” she said through sudden convulsive sobs, “I hadn’t even thought of that. It has to be a possibility – or any of the other creeps that raped me. I can’t believe my baby was fathered by one of those evil men.”

  Clark had let this play out. He knew they needed to handle this carefully. The real horror of this hadn’t really hit him until he was confronted with a genuine victim of this terrible situation. Anya had suddenly made it more than ideas on paper, online records and words on the board. He tried to take back control of the conversation.

  “Look, we don’t know anything for sure. All we know is that you had a baby. We don’t know whether he was the father or not, but what we can be fairly sure about is that he is still around and almost certainly the driver of the 4x4.”

  “What? Why do you say that?” Anya exclaimed.

  “I only saw the guy in the car briefly today and he had dark glasses on, but I am sure it was him. The man in that picture.”

  “So, what does that mean?” asked Rob, running on autopilot now as he still tried to reconcile what Anya had told him.

  “I think it confirms that he is key to this conspiracy. Based on what Anya has told us, I reckon he is the finder. He has groomed the girls, got them hooked on drugs and delivered them to the clinic for the doctor to do his evil work. After that he has almost certainly been the one doing the killings. I am not sure how he is connected to the doctor, George Walker or maybe the Hardacres but I am sure he is the one trying to tidy everything up.”

  They all sat for a minute stunned by this revelation. Anya could not believe how her life had been so controlled by this man, from the minute her parents died and her first meeting with him in the uni bar.

  After a few minutes, Anya stood up and looked at the board again. She had stopped crying and steeled herself to look at more of the horror. Her recent life laid out before her like some unreal nightmare. The lost years.

  She looked at the picture of the doctor.

  “That is Dr French.”

  Clark was shocked but not surprised. He knew getting Anya to see their murder board would help join the dots and boy, was she doing that.

  “Well Anya, that is actually Dr Normandy. He is the CEO of the Loughborough Clinic and clearly implicated in all this. We have a clear money trail leading to him and now you have confirmed that he is in fact the doctor that treated you, albeit with some weird pseudonym, we have him squarely in the middle of this conspiracy. What we don’t know is what he did to you. I think with your baby revelation, he is doing more than curing drug addicts. He is also a disgusting paedophile.”

  “What! Oh my God. Is that what happened to my baby? Did they sell them to paedos?”

  “No, no. We don’t think so. We found pictures of his depravity on the Fairport Medical server but they were in one of George Walker’s folders. We think they are using his depravity to leverage him to do what they want.”

  Anya sat there. Her eyes darting between Clark and Rob, not knowing what to believe or what to do next. The horror was coming at her in waves. After a few minutes she spoke again.

  “I don’t care what that man is. He is evil. Horrible. I knew there was something wrong with him and, my dreams, they have never been about drug recovery. It has always seemed like I was in a hospital bed, hooked up to drips and machines and that creepy man hovering around, violating me.”

  “This is why we need to get in the clinic and catch him at whatever he is doing. We can’t rely on the police to expose this thing.”

  There was a pause while Anya took this all in. Rob and Clark both held their breath. She was highly charged and they now began to understand why. The full horror of what had happened to her was beginning to reveal itself and Anya was here, having to relive it, whilst not remembering exactly what had happened to her or the baby.

  “I am still not happy about waiting, but what is your plan for getting in? We can’t just walk in, as Rob and I discovered.”

  “We are going to try to get a job there. I have created a new identity for Rob and have applied for the cleaner’s job they have advertised. The deadline is Monday and with the killer application I have put together, Rob will definitely get an interview. Hopefully it will be quite soon.”

  “And how is that going to help?”

  “If Rob can get in there, he can recce the place. We have been given some idea where the private clinic is, which is probably where you were treated. I have hacked their CCTV and got a good idea of the layout, but we need someone on the ground to confirm. Once that is done, we can work out a plan for getting in the private bit and hopefully exposing this thing.”

/>   “And finding my baby!”

  “Well, maybe finding out what happened to your baby.”

  Anya was still finding it hard to tolerate Rob and Clark’s apparent lack of urgency. They just didn’t understand what she had been through. The pain of not knowing where her baby was. It was an emptiness she had never experienced. She went back to the board.

  “Why have you written ‘Anya’s parents?’ on the board?” probed Anya.

  Rob looked at Clark. He didn’t remember seeing that written on the board.

  “Eh, yes Clark why have you written that on there? I don’t remember us talking about Anya’s parents.”

  Clark knew this moment was coming. He knew it was probably a mistake to have kept this from Rob but, if he was right about their accident, this was going to be difficult for both of them to hear.

  “OK, I am sorry if what I am about to say upsets you but I have a theory about your parents’ accident, Anya, and it is not a pleasant one.”

  “What? Tell me!”

  “I looked at the reports of their car accident and I think it is very likely that your parents were murdered, probably by Bradley causing the same type of accident that resulted in the other girls’ deaths.”

  “That… that can’t be true,” sobbed Anya, once again overwhelmed by this whole situation. “Why?”

  “All the other girls they chose after you were only children with parents that were either dead or in poor health. I think they realised that they had to find girls who were alone with no one looking out for them. I truly believe they murdered your parents to put you in that position. After you, they realised it was just too much trouble to keep creating this situation and groomed girls who fitted the profile. I am sorry Anya. I know this is just a theory but it seems to fit.”

  Anya let out a howl of pain like nothing Clark and Rob had ever heard emanating from a human being.

  She stood up, grabbed her bag and bolted for the front door, screaming out the same mantra over and over.

  “This is too much. This is too much.”