Ben (29 page)

‘What’s your name?’ he’d called back.

Rabo had been the one to answer.

‘This Ben – or Benzi.’

A second later, the woman in the cab with them had slapped Rabo around the face and told him not to say another word.

‘It’s no good hiding in the shadows,’ Dad said. ‘We need you to tell the police.’

The man looked over his shoulder every which way a dozen times before answering. ‘I will tell the police. But not here. Not in Veria.’

Obviously, he was implying, not all of Kerimi’s friends were gypsies.

I’m so glad Mum and Dad weren’t alone out there. In particular, one of the
Cutting Edge
researchers, Melanie McFadyean, was brilliant. As the whole Kerimi mess looked like unravelling, she was the one who seemed to be able to see the ends of the string and begin to pull them together.

It was Melanie who accompanied Mum to see Rabo for herself. They found the boy at home with his ‘parents’: Kerimi and a gold-toothed younger woman. The adults were relaxed about Mum
talking to Rabo and taking his picture, although they didn’t want to be photographed themselves. Asked about the video the mother shrugged. ‘I was in prison then. For stabbing a woman.’ One flash of her golden smile told Mum exactly how little the crime played on the woman’s mind. Even though absent, she maintained Rabo was the boy caught on film. She also said, still smiling, ‘You can take him if you want. Have him.’

What sort of a woman, step-mother or not, can say that? If she wasn’t joking, and Mum swears she was serious, then this just proves the regard that children are held in in some quarters. They’re commodities, like sugar, oil, gold.

But the woman hadn’t finished. As Mum gave Rabo some sweets and a little cuddle, she said, ‘The boy you are looking for is in the gypsy camp.’

That was not how we expected a meeting with the Kerimi family to be. They were meant to be criminals, and now this woman was helping. Why would she volunteer this information if it wasn’t true?

Mum realised why when they reached the camp in question. Rabo’s mother had been lying. The expensive grin that was never far from her lips should have been clue enough, but the tip-off needed to be explored. An hour enjoying the hospitality of the camp’s dwellers confirmed it. Kerimi was always trying to cause trouble for them. They wished they could help but it had been a bold lie. The question for Mum was whether it had been simply malicious – or a genuine attempt to direct attention away from the Kerimis themselves.

With Mum and Dad following other leads, Melanie took it upon herself to confront Christos once again. Accompanied by
a local TV reporter sympathetic to the gypsy community, she found the sixty-year-old coming out of his house. At first Kerimi ignored them both while he coolly loaded large chunks of scrap metal from one flat-bed truck into another; he wasn’t at all flustered by being interrogated by the woman from the television. If Ben was in the house behind him then nothing in Kerimi’s face was showing it. But his true colours weren’t far away. Something the reporter said obviously struck a nerve: his face turned red, he picked up a metal roof rack and as he threw it he screamed into the camera.

‘I don’t need to steal children. I am the gypsy king!’

The projectile landed near to where the reporter was standing and she took that as her cue to run.

Shaken but even more determined, Melanie and the reporter, accompanied this time by Mum and Dad, went instead to visit Christos’s brother, Andreas. They all got close enough to his house to spy several women in possibly drug-induced states, plus a very animated disabled child pulling against the rope that bound him to a chair. There was no sign of Ben, or Rabo. But they did see Andreas.

Bad tempers obviously run in the Kerimi family. The Brits didn’t need a translator to realise it wouldn’t end well if they stayed on the gypsy’s land. Andreas didn’t have scrap to hurl so he grabbed something else from his car and marched angrily towards his visitors. Whatever he was holding was concealed under a cloth. Mum’s mind immediately went to a scene from a gangster film where the hitman covered his gun with a bar towel. One look at Andreas’s snarling face told her it didn’t just happen in movies.

It should have been me facing off against that man. I am so upset that my mum has had to experience these things instead, but so proud of her and Dad as well.

Back in their car, the Greek reporter translated Andreas’s final words: ‘If you don’t leave I will get my gun and shoot you.’ It was decided that they should go back to the police station. The authorities would have to listen now.

They were wrong. Of course they were wrong. It was Kos all over again. Dad and Mum and Melanie reported everything that the Kerimis had said and done, and the policeman swatted it all away. If anything, he came close to accusing our side of harassing the gypsies. That, he said, was a crime.

‘But what about the testimony from Andonis Bedzios?’ Dad said. ‘It can’t all be coincidence.’

The officer inhaled theatrically and said, ‘Bedzios is a mythomaniac. He lies. He makes up stories. Everyone knows this.’ In fact, he went on, not only was our leading witness a fantasist, he was waging an underworld war against Kerimi and concocting accusations about Ben was just his latest weapon to damage Kerimis. In this version of events, of course, the Kerimis were entirely innocent.

Despite not swallowing anything the policeman said, his words laid our case pretty bare. We were choosing to believe one criminal over another.

We all had to take a step back. Were our decisions rational or were we just following the version of events we all so desperately wanted to be the truth?

I know what I believe, and it’s that sometimes you can get the right result without showing the right workings out. That’s what my maths teacher used to say. Stranded in Sheffield I couldn’t,
hand on heart, say that Andonis Bedzios was telling the truth but I could believe my mother when she said she and Melanie tracked down a woman who used to look after Bedzios’s son. I’ve always believed that children don’t lie about these things for no reason. So, while the woman stirred her cooking pot and Rabo helped, while telling her stories of his brother ‘Ben’, she had no doubt he was telling the truth. By the time Mum reached her, the woman said Rabo’s brother was in another town with relatives. Rabo hadn’t told her where. It was another dead end.

When I heard this I knew I could sit in Sheffield no longer. It was time for me to see Andonis Bedzios for myself.

Everything Mum had said about Larissa jail was true. It was grim, very grim. The prisoners looked terrifying and the guards even worse. The governor of the prisoner was also formidable looking. When he said he wanted to be present at my meeting with Bedzios, I was actually relieved.

As I listened to Bedzios’s words, relayed through a lovely interpreter called Lampros Georgiocas, I stared into his eyes and I honestly saw a man looking back who believed he was doing the right thing. He was telling the truth, I know he was. The governor left him in no doubt what would happen if he wasn’t.

‘Bedzios, listen to me. If you are lying to these people about their boy, I will smash you! Understand me, Bedzios? I will smash you down!’

Bedzios looked at the towering figure looming over him and said, calmly and clearly, ‘I speak the truth.’

Even before the translator had done his work, I knew he was right.

The problem with believing Bedzios was that it meant other people had to be lying. I hadn’t been directly involved except on
the end of a phone but I trusted my parents’ instincts. When they suggested we go above the police force to pursue the prisoner’s claims, I agreed.

Athens’s Public Order minister listened intently to our story. At the end he promised a full investigation. In particular with regard to two of Bedzios’s claims: that Ben was now living in Patras with a rich family; and that three German criminals had been involved with the original abduction.

While the minister’s department acted, Dad took a ferry over to Kos to update Bafounis on our findings and to ask for a favour. The taxi driver who was too scared of possible corruption in the Veria police needed to be interviewed by another force. Dad asked if the Kos police could arrange this. Bafounis said yes.

Before he left Dad asked, as usual, if there had been any updates. Bafounis shook his head.

‘What about the white car?’ Dad asked.

Bafounis gave his trademark shrug. ‘Not yet. We are still looking.’

As he made his way back to the port, Dad mused on how impressive Bafounis’s English had got in the last few years. It was almost as if he’d understood every word back in 1991 and had just chosen not to communicate with us directly.

While dealings with Kos law enforcement tended to leave us with more questions than answers, two members of the Thessaloniki force in north-east Greece were about to make up for it. And they would be risking their lives to do so.

We were introduced to the officers by an improbably named woman called Mariana Zepante-Faithful. Mariana is an incredible person who set up the Illegal Adoption Society of Athens. She campaigned tirelessly, till her retirement, to reunite estranged
families and to put an end to this pernicious trade in children. The fact that Mariana set up a foundation to combat illegal adoption tells me a lot. For all the dismissive shrugs we got on Kos at the mention of abduction, statistics in Greece bear it out. The country has one of the lowest birth rates of any country in the European Union. By the mid-1990s, the majority of baby trading involved children from the former Soviet countries abutting the northern border. It was big business, and for certain criminals has become as important to their trade as drugs trafficking or prostitution.

It was only a matter of time before Mariana’s work brought her into our orbit. She’d found two policemen who swore that the original video shown to us by the detective, Bakirtzis, had actually been shot by Thessaloniki policemen during covert surveillance on Kerimi’s house. How the detective had got hold of a copy was not known, but certain people within the squad saw an opportunity for leverage against the gypsy king. In other words, they knew full well that it was Ben in the film and they were blackmailing Kerimi on the strength of it. What they were getting in return was also not clear but, the officers said, it would be valuable. So much so, they were in fear of their lives just for bringing the information to Mariana.

With the policemen’s help, we located a nice house in a well-to-do area just outside Patras where, they said, a rich family lived with their blond-haired son. A son, they both insisted, who had been sold to them by Kerimi.
A son called Ben.
We waited outside from early morning to late at night and watched the school bus come and go without anyone from the house boarding or getting off. The next day, the same story. If Ben had ever been there it was
unlikely he was now. Someone, somehow, had known we were coming. The family had been tipped off.

Mariana wouldn’t let that be the end of it. She went straight to the Public Order Ministry and demanded an investigation. There were raised voices and expressive hand gestures but dealing with officials, the police and basically banging on doors to get things done within their system had been Mariana’s lifeblood for ages. We’d only dealt with Greek bureaucracy for a few years. She’d been doing it for decades.

A few days later, we were told the house and its family had been fully explored. The child was legally and legitimately the son of the rich parents.

‘He is not Ben.’

We had to take their word, but they couldn’t show me a picture.

Back in Veria, our fortunes took another turn for the worse. Our man in the shadows, the cabbie who had driven Ben and Rabo, had been interviewed by the police.

The Veria police.

Had Bafounis just ignored Dad’s request or had someone intercepted the request? Or was it just plain human error? Either way, the man who swore to us that he had seen Ben left the police station having identified Rabo as the only child he had chauffeured. Whatever or whoever he was scared of had got to him. Nothing we said could change his mind. The only chink of light came when we actually spoke to the police afterwards. Mum asked if she could take a copy of the photograph of Rabo that the man had identified.

‘We don’t have one,’ the officer said.

‘Well, what did he look at then?’

‘This.’

It was the picture of Ben artificially aged by the computers at South Yorkshire Police.

Eighteen months after Mum and Dad’s appearance on
Shadows In The Mist
we were no closer to Ben than we had been before. Between a prisoner serving a life sentence for armed robbery, an in-fighting community of gypsies and two police forces, knowing who to believe was practically impossible. We still had some leads from Bedzios, but relying on the Public Order Ministry to produce results tested everyone’s patience.

On our final trip to Larissa Prison, Bedzios had named three Germans who, he said, were involved in Ben’s abduction. He claimed he had receipts showing they were paying him to keep silent. He seemed to be drip-feeding information as and when it suited him; he certainly hadn’t mentioned this on the other occasions we’d spoken. Could we believe him? It was more a question of could we afford not to? Dad spoke to the police to put wheels in motion. Even as he left the station, he didn’t hold out much hope.