The Black Panther E-Book

Gordon Lowe

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 309

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

On the morning of 14 January 1975, Mrs Dorothy Whittle wakes to be faced with every mother's worst nightmare: finding her daughter has been abducted from her room. A note has been left downstairs, demanding a ransom. Later, a recorded message comes from Lesley herself saying where to leave the money but not to tell the police or she'll be killed. The family disobeys the instructions and informs the authorities, and together they struggle to understand and carry out their instructions in a complex cat-and-mouse game with one desperate aim: to get Lesley back alive. The recent release of Home Office papers allows author Gordon Lowe to go behind the scenes and examine how a combination of bad luck and mistakes on the part of both the police and Donald Neilson stacked the odds against a successful resolution to one of the century's most despicable crimes. Here Lowe details what happened to Lesley as she lay naked and shackled by a steel noose at the bottom of a wet drainage shaft with a man in a black hood, the Black Panther, as her only contact with the outside world.

Leseprobe

THE BLACK PANTHER

Donald Neilson. (Hawkes, The Capture of the Black Panther)

THE BLACK PANTHER

THE TRIALS AND ABDUCTIONS OF DONALD NEILSON

GORDON LOWE

In memory of Lesley Whittle

First published in 2016

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Gordon Lowe, 2016

The right of Gordon Lowe to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 6966 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

1

Mrs Dorothy Whittle arrived back home just before one o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 14 January 1975 after a pleasant evening with her friends. Widowed now for nearly five years, she made sure there was something to occupy her on most evenings – her friends at the club to start the week, at home with her 17-year-old daughter Lesley on Tuesday evenings, bingo on Wednesdays, and so on. Life had always been busy for her. First as George Whittle’s secretary, then his common-law wife when he split up with his wife, and years helping him run the family coach business he’d successfully built up into the fourth largest in the country. Not forgetting her two children, of course: Ronald, who was now 28 and running the business, and Lesley, doing her A levels at the local college.

Their house was the largest in the village of Highley, set in Shropshire on the west bank of the River Severn; detached with a double garage, built by George on land next to the business and still sharing the same telephone exchange with the business. George was always careful with his money and there was nothing ostentatious about the house or the man. He would have been horrified at the litigation that followed his death when his wife Selina, whom he’d never divorced, surfaced to claim proper maintenance from his estate when she discovered his true wealth. After all, she argued, £2 a week was not a lot to live on, and the judge agreed. The case had been carefully followed in the local and national press, which set out who’d inherited what in the Whittle family.

Dorothy Whittle now reached the house and as usual drove straight into the open garage. She closed it up and entered the house through the front door, turning off the outside and garage lights. She made herself a hot drink, took a sleeping pill and, turning off the downstairs lights, made her way upstairs.

On her way to her room she looked in on Lesley, who was fast asleep in bed. Lesley had college next morning and would have spent the evening catching up with coursework and making a few phone calls. She always looked angelic as she lay there. Dorothy thought of Lesley as her best friend as well as her daughter. She smiled at the scene she’d seen a hundred times: Lesley asleep in bed with her dirty clothes thrown on the floor and next day’s clothes folded neatly on the chair.

Finally Mrs Whittle reached her own room, undressed and, too tired to read, turned out the light and went straight to sleep.

Next morning she was up at 6.45 a.m. to take a pill for a headache and then went back to bed until 7.30 a.m., when she went downstairs to make Lesley’s breakfast of coffee and cereal. She went into the lounge to open the curtains, but it wasn’t very light yet and she noticed nothing unusual.

As usual she took up a bowl of cornflakes for Lesley to have in bed before she dressed for college. But this morning the bed was empty, so she assumed Lesley was in the bathroom. When she found the bathroom empty she called out to tell Lesley that breakfast was ready, but there was no answer from upstairs. She looked again in Lesley’s room and this time noticed her clean clothes for the new day still lying on her chair, which made it unlikely that she’d left the house for a walk.

Now concern was turning to panic, and she checked downstairs, but all she could find was a box of Turkish delight sitting on a vase in front of the fireplace, with a coil of tape on top that she assumed must be something to do with Lesley’s college work. She was too agitated to look any further.

There was nothing for it now but to telephone her son, Ronald. He lived at the other end of the village with his wife Gaynor and they’d know what to do. But the phone was dead. This was not particularly strange as the phone was still connected to the office and sometimes the girl on the exchange left the line open so you couldn’t get a line from the house. Undaunted, Mrs Whittle went out to the car in her dressing gown and drove the mile to Ronald’s, keeping an eye open the whole way for Lesley in case she really had gone for a walk in the village.

At Ronald’s she found herself becoming incoherent, mainly because there was so little to say except that Lesley wasn’t in the house. ‘Lesley’s not there,’ she said helplessly. Ronald came downstairs. He wasn’t really worried – there were several plausible explanations as to where she might be. ‘Have you searched the house?’ he asked.

Dorothy said she thought she had.

‘She might have caught an earlier bus,’ Ronald suggested.

‘She can’t have. All her clothes are there except her dressing gown,’ said Dorothy.

Ronald was still sure there was an explanation. He went to the house and made a double-check, and then to the office to attend a training board meeting, but he was unable to concentrate and started phoning round to see if anyone had seen her.

At 9.45 a.m. Gaynor rushed down to the office. ‘They’ve taken Lesley!’ she cried, and showed Ronald the DYMO tape. Gaynor had made her own search of the house, only stopping when she came to something rather odd in front of the hearth in the lounge. It was the tall vase placed on the floor in front of the hearth with a box of Turkish delight perched on the top. On the box was a long coil of tape, the sort of thing you printed out and stuck on the front of files or cabinet drawers, which turned out to be four coils of tape when she picked them up.

It took a little time to read the DYMO tape on to which a long message had been laboriously printed, part of it in a sort of shorthand, parts with more detailed instructions. By the end of it Gaynor’s hands were shaking. The essence of the message was a demand for a ransom of £50,000 in used notes, without any tricks or telling the police, otherwise it would be death, all couched in the stark language of an old-fashioned telegram:

A second strip of tape said:

The third strip demanded:

The fourth tape came as an afterthought:

The bizarre way in which this was all presented, the coils of DYMO tape and the box of Turkish delight perched on a vase in front of the fire, had the air of a bad joke or student prank.

Without a word about the tape to Dorothy, Gaynor went straight to tell Ronald.

2

Donald Neilson sat at his desk 55 miles away at home in Bradford. He was at his debriefing as part of ‘the plan’.

Approaching 40 he looked a lot younger, with an almost boyish complexion and a straightforward haircut that his mum might have given him, a hundred miles from the fashionable long hair of the seventies. He wore a denim camouflage jacket that he’d swapped for the dark anorak he’d worn on the operation, waterproof trousers and thick army surplus boots. His boots were muddy and he couldn’t work out why – he must have walked through a flowerbed on his way into the house. On the desk was his tool bag, holding a black hood with two eye slits, a cartridge belt, a sawn-off shotgun and a hurricane torch. Also on the desk were maps, notepads with lists and messages to himself, an assortment of stationery and a Thermos flask of coffee from which he poured himself a cup, pleased to see that the coffee was still hot.

The operation had gone well. The target had been removed from the house in Highley in the early hours and taken to the hiding place without much protest from her. He’d been a bit worried that the girl wouldn’t be up to getting down the drainage shaft at Kidsgrove. Getting her down the various ladders and through the water had been difficult, but she was a fit girl and the worst that had happened was her dressing gown getting wet. At one stage he’d even tried carrying her along the tunnel – she hadn’t weighed much but the roof was too low and he kept hitting his head. He wondered how long it would take to dry down there, but at least she was warm in the sleeping bag and there were extra blankets if she needed one.

In front of him on the floor and draped over a couple of chairs was an assortment of old sleeping bags, blankets, pieces of rope and wire, a couple of kitbags covered in mud, boots, camping equipment (including a single ring stove and gas bottles) and another cartridge belt. Beyond them was an open wardrobe with a variety of clothes falling off hangers or simply stuffed into corners of the wardrobe, spilling out like the intestines of fresh carrion, again mostly military stuff, creased and in need of a wash. But ask him where any particular item was in this confusion and he could lead you straight to it. Not that anyone had ever asked for anything in here for the simple reason that no one was ever allowed in, not even his wife or daughter.

His wife Irene lay asleep in their bedroom over the landing from his office. In her bedroom, asleep on the floor below, was Kathryn, their 16-year-old daughter – just a year younger than the girl he’d kidnapped and still at school. He wondered for a second whether his victim was asleep in her sleeping bag on the foam mattress in her new home. He’d tried to think of everything she’d need for her stay. He’d already heated her up some chicken soup and left it for her in a Thermos – nice and hot, that was, nearly boiling. But she’d need something to help her pass the time. He’d get her some magazines, something a bit posh like Vogue because she came from a good background, certainly good enough to pay up a ransom without noticing too much. He could have asked for much more but they wouldn’t notice £50,000. The last kidnapping he’d read about they were asking a million – stupid sum to ask for because no one could afford that. Perhaps some books as well as magazines if she was a college girl.

The page from the Daily Express that had inspired him to carry out the kidnapping still hung pinned to the wall behind him. It was page four of the issue dated Wednesday, 17 May 1975 and headlined, ‘The Wealthy Man’s £2 Wife – £106,000 Will Shock for Woman Who Lived Cheek by Jowl with Poverty for 30 Years.’

That woman was Mrs Selina Whittle who, after thirty years separated from George Whittle and never receiving more than £2 a week maintenance from him because he said he couldn’t afford any more, discovered on his death that he was worth a small fortune. Most of it was in trust to Dorothy, his former secretary with whom he’d lived but never married, and their children, Ronald and Lesley.

Dorothy, the paper said, had come into George’s life as a 25-year-old blonde he met on the bus. Eventually they lived together and she changed her name to Whittle, and they had a son and a daughter. To soften the blow of death duties, George settled the bulk of his estate on his son, who took over the business, and £82,500 to his daughter in a trust. He left the house and two other properties, bringing in a decent income, to Dorothy. But to Selina, from whom George had separated after fifteen years of marriage, he left nothing, although Ronald had offered to keep the £2 a week going. Selina was now 71, and on her own in Coventry living on £8 a week widow’s pension and £1.55 supplementary benefit. ‘Cheek by jowl with poverty’ was how the judge described her situation, and awarded her £1,500 a year, payable out of the estate and backdated to her husband’s death two years ago. ‘It will not give her the kind of life she would have enjoyed had she remained married,’ said the judge, ‘but at least it will put her safely out of the danger of poverty.’

Selina Whittle said after the hearing, ‘I shall look forward to a holiday when the money comes through.’

When Donald Neilson read the report he was incensed. It just wasn’t fair. That poor woman had had to live in poverty while the estranged husband piled up the money from the business he’d probably set up with her help. The Neilson family had to live in near poverty while these immigrants came in and took all the good jobs or got state benefits while he had to resort to crime to get any sort of income. Where was the justice in that? It made his blood boil. Suppose he took one of the Whittles on holiday and asked for a slice of the cake to get them back? That would be fair, wouldn’t it? Then perhaps he could take his family on holiday.

His takings showed only £11,000 for the last year after three post office raids and three postmasters dead. He once clocked it up in his head that he must have done at least 400 other burglaries in his time and with so little to show for it. So far he hadn’t been caught, but luck wouldn’t stay with him forever. What he needed now was the Big One, the jackpot, the one-off payday where he could start to relax and enjoy life a little.

That was another thing – the house. Grangefield Avenue was marooned on a traffic island with mostly immigrants as neighbours. They wouldn’t give you the time of day, and while he sweated away at his carpentry doing odd jobs and building wooden sheds in the back garden to sell, those people seemed to get proper jobs without any trouble.

Donald poured himself another coffee. He felt better after a little rant and he must remember this was his special day, the day for which he’d been planning and preparing for three years. That’s why everything was going to work perfectly, from the pickup, the ransom demand and then the drop. This was the man whom they failed after ten weeks’ basic training on national service now showing them how to do it – the police, the poshos in Highley with the money, and his own family who sometimes didn’t think him up to the mark.

He’d already shown – and this was something he’d probably proved in the exercise last night – that he was up to SAS standard, no trouble at all. In different circumstances they would welcome him. On his CV would be the stark truth that he could break into a house through the garage, get upstairs in the dark, wake and remove a 17-year-old girl from her bed and escort her out of the house without waking her mother sleeping in a room across the corridor.

He’d found where Highley was on the map and driven down to Shropshire one day for a little reconnaissance. He found the house – not very difficult in a small village. It was ideal for a raid and met all his requirements for a target: detached house, on a main road so that if anyone heard anything they’d put it down to traffic, and near a motorway so he could move around the country quickly. Usually he preferred not to use a car and rely on public transport, much safer that way as the police would be looking for a vehicle. But he’d need a car for a kidnap, and the house in Highley gave plenty of cover, with a side road and an estate at the back where he could park on his recce trips. He was also encouraged to see an integral garage which he’d be able to enter through a side door and from there into the house.

In further visits he worked out exactly who was living in the house – Mrs Whittle and her daughter. He’d even worked out who occupied which bedroom, and their various social habits, which evenings they went out and what sort of time they came home.

He had prepared himself for the eventuality of the victim screaming, the rest of the house waking and the exercise having to be aborted. He would have shot anyone in the house if necessary and that would be the end of it – the same way he’d dealt with the post office people when they’d tried their tricks. Dead men don’t talk, nor dead women, and that was the simple truth. The whole thing was as daring as it was successfully executed. He who dares wins …

He’d taken enormous care in planning the operation, but finding where he was going to keep the prisoner while he awaited the ransom drop had been a piece of luck. The first idea had been to keep her in one of the lock-up garages he had dotted around the Midlands, but that posed problems in their proximity to other housing and garages. Then there was the question of the drop-off area. This, if anything, was more difficult. It had to be somewhere from which he could escape with the money even if he was being watched by the police. One possibility was beside a train track where the money could be thrown out of a carriage window, somewhere in the open where he could see anyone trying to follow him.

The next possibility was Dudley Zoo, with its high walls and a maze of caves and tunnels through which he could escape after the money was thrown or pulled over the wall in a bag. No one could see him and by the time they got across the wall he would be long gone. In fact, he’d found a passage from one of the caves that led, after a few hundred yards, into a street where he could park his car for the getaway. It was perfect – at times the passage reduced to just a few feet wide where he could soon take care of anyone trying to follow him with a single blast of his gun.

It was as he was following the railway line past Bathpool Park in Kidsgrove that he came upon a manhole cover that had been left partly open. He pulled the cover aside to see a ladder going down into the dark, and came back later with a torch to explore the labyrinth of tunnels underneath. It turned out to be a vast drainage system for the whole park, where some of the tunnels were wet with 6in of water running through them, while others were bone dry. And then, on a further and braver exploration, he found a ladder going down even deeper, with a narrow ledge or platform at the bottom of the tunnel less than 3ft wide. This must be some inspection platform for the bottom of the chamber where a stream ran 6ft or so below. It was reasonably dry, and so deep, at least 60ft below the surface, that any bug or tracking device left hidden with the money simply wouldn’t work at that level.

And that’s where the girl was now, safely installed on the metal platform in a sleeping bag, with her dressing gown hanging out to dry on the ladder, safe as houses until he’d got the money. The dressing gown would take a while to dry, and her slippers had got soaked wading through 6in of water, but she was tucked up in her sleeping bag so he shouldn’t feel too bad about her. It was important no harm came to her because he needed her to get the instructions to the family about where to take the money.

He suddenly leant forward and grabbed the black hood, which he pulled over his head and arranged the slits over his eyes. Then he walked over to the mirror on the wall and looked at himself. He was surprised that wearing the hood and pointing a shotgun at them at point-blank range didn’t mean people did what he told them to do. Those idiot postmasters who jumped him and tried to grab the gun had had to be dealt with. That was their fault and he had no conscience about their deaths. He only took a gun to keep control of the situation, and the only time he ever intended to use it was to give a warning shot – but, oh no, they had to try the heroics. And for what – a couple of thousand quid?

He fetched the gun from the desk and returned to the mirror, poking the stubby, sawn-off barrels in front of him and chattering away in his pidgin West Indian English to disguise his voice. His accent was rather good – after all, he’d heard it enough times from his neighbours, ‘Give me keys, man. Keys and no tricks.’

Even when they did what they were told and he was tying them up, they still appeared more worried about themselves than even the money. One of the postmasters’ wives had said she had arthritis and not to do the rope up too tight, if he didn’t mind.

Donald removed the hood, put down the gun and saluted to himself in the mirror. ‘Carry on, Neilson,’ he said.

‘Very good, sir,’ he replied, saluted again and did a smart about-turn.

Now it was time to put the next part of the plan into action …

3

Lesley Whittle lay naked in a sleeping bag 60ft underground on a narrow metal platform at the bottom of a drainage shaft. It had taken them some time to climb down through a hatch and several ladders and passages, sometimes in the dry and sometimes through several inches of icy cold water. The hooded creature who’d ordered her out of bed at the house didn’t say much, and when he did it was in a funny accent, making him hard to understand.

He’d come into her bedroom in the dark and shone a light in her face. He said, ‘Don’t make any noise. I want money.’ She saw he had a gun, a double-barrelled shotgun with short barrels. He waved at her to get out of bed, and when he saw she hadn’t any clothes told her to put some on, and all she could think of doing to be quickest was put on her blue dressing gown and her mother’s slippers that she’d borrowed.

Then he motioned her to go out into the corridor, but as they did so they heard a noise coming from her mother’s room at the end. He did a lot of pointing and grunting and when they finally got out of the room he told her to go downstairs. They went out of the house through the inside door into the garage, where she could see he’d taken the handle off the inside of the door and put it on the floor, and then outside through the garage door. When they were outside in the garden, she felt cold and shivered.

‘Where the money?’ he asked in that silly squeaky voice.

‘In the bathroom,’ she said.

‘How much?’

‘£200, in coins,’ she replied, and hoped he might go back and get it and leave her alone. It was the money they kept at the end of the day from the office and they didn’t think it was worth them taking that amount to the bank and then having to go back in the morning and get it all out again. She wondered how he knew there was money in the house in the first place.

But he didn’t leave her alone and instead put tape around her mouth and then over her eyes and did the same around her wrists. He wasn’t rough, but he was strong and she knew she couldn’t stop him, even if she’d tried. Then he put her in the back seat of a car that must have been parked near the garden because it didn’t take him long to lead her there and shut and lock the door.

The man wasn’t very long; in minutes he was back and shoved something that felt like a couple of foam mats over her before driving off. In fact, she wondered if he’d forgotten about her because if he had found the money he wouldn’t need her any more – £200 in cash was a lot of money and that should have kept him happy. It was always kept in the bathroom. She’d never thought of helping herself to it or borrowing from it – why should she? She only needed some cash for the bus to get to college and then something for lunch. Her clothes were just her jeans and a T-shirt and her Afghan coat in winter – hardly the high life – so that even her allowance of just over £20 a month often left money over. The only luxury she really looked forward to was having her own car and she was learning to drive now.

She never really thought about money. Even her jewellery, a lot of which she was still wearing because she went to bed in it, was made by her boyfriend. It was true she was going to come into some money her dad had left her, but that was all tied up until she was older and she’d decided she’d probably use it one day to buy a house. But there was no cash, except the £200 in the bathroom. Anyway, the figures mentioned in the newspapers when the whole thing blew up about how much her father had left was a big exaggeration and twice as much as the real figure in her case.

It crossed her mind that the man in the hood had read this and thought they were all very rich. She never bought anything very expensive; even the make-up she bought was influenced by whatever two-for-one bargains were going in the shops more than anything else. She had wanted a bookcase in her room and Ronald made one for her and had brought it around at the weekend. In fact, he’d just phoned up about it today – or was it yesterday now – and he was about the last person she’d spoken to before she went to bed. He’d asked her if it was all right and she’d thanked him and said it was fine.

She wished he was here now. He’d sort all this out.

Then she started struggling again and trying to shout through the tape stuck around her mouth. He must have heard her trying to shout and banging around because she heard the car stop. Suddenly he was pulling the covers off her and telling her to keep still. He tore the tape off her mouth and asked what she wanted. ‘I want to go home,’ she shouted at him.

‘Be quiet,’ he said. ‘You’ve been kidnapped. Be quiet and you’ll be all right. But if you not quiet I put you in boot.’

‘I’ll be quiet,’ she said.

‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked, more kindly.

She nodded, and he said he’d check the heater was on. Then he taped her up again and she lay there until they stopped after what felt like hours, but was probably less than two hours. This time he led her from the car up a hill to somewhere cold on her feet. Then they stopped and the man said to wait here until he took a few things down. He said again not to move because she was being watched and she’d be in for it if she tried any tricks. She couldn’t see anything anyway, so it wasn’t much use. She heard the man pull back something metallic like a lid and climb down.

The man came back and he guided her through an opening on to a ladder where he told her to hang on while he threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried her down the ladder, followed by another tunnel that you could nearly stand in. Then it was a walk into a tunnel with icy cold water where her slippers got soaked. He tried to carry her to stop her getting wet but he kept slipping so she said she’d walk. This was followed by a dry tunnel and another ladder, not so long this time, until they reached a narrow platform where he told her to wait while he brought down some more things. He took the tape off her eyes and unbound her hands. Then she could see he’d laid out a sleeping bag and a foam strip on the platform like a little bed.

The bottom of her dressing gown was soaking wet where it had dipped into the water and he told her to take it off to dry. She turned her back on him the best she could but there wasn’t much room and she handed him the dressing gown, which he hung on the ladder and told her to get into the sleeping bag where it was a bit warmer. When he told her to get into the sleeping bag she thought he was going to get in with her and rape her. But he didn’t and went on fussing with all the bits and pieces he seemed to have prepared for her on the ledge.

She wished she had her clothes, and could see them sitting on her chair at home ready for the morning. She wondered if her mother had woken up yet and guessed she hadn’t because she could sleep through anything after her sleeping pills. Perhaps, thinking about it now, she should have screamed when he woke her up, but what would he have done then? And Mum would have woken up and got involved and that would only have upset her. Better it was this way and get it over.

He went through everything like a hotel manager pointing out what was provided for her comfort and how she’d be all right if she didn’t do anything silly. Then he put a wire collar around her neck and did it up with a spanner. He said in his funny accent that he’d put something like tape around it to make it softer, and once he’d done that he relaxed a bit and made them some soup on a stove he set up on the landing above them and which he brought down in a flask. It was all a bit like camping with the sleeping bag and the wet and the cold. At points he’d stop and look around and say, ‘It’s okay, you get dry,’ and feel the dressing gown hanging from a rung on the ladder.

She felt pleased and relieved that at one point he’d told her to take off the dressing gown and use it to dry her feet before she got into the sleeping bag. Standing there completely naked with her back to him nothing had happened, and if anything was going to happen surely it would have then?

She needed the soup and the attempt at conversation to stop her shaking. Her feet were the coldest because they’d had to slosh through freezing water on the way down. ‘All ready for you,’ he added and all the time he shone the torch on her. She could see he wasn’t very tall in the way he curled up sitting in the corner.

‘Could I have my dressing gown?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be warm enough.’

‘Dressing gown still wet,’ he said. ‘Blankets for you.’ He reached to two blankets wrapped in plastic parcels and pulled one out of its wrapper and spread it over her.

‘When can I go home?’ she asked.

‘When they pay money,’ he replied, without explaining further.

‘My mum will want me home.’

‘Of course.’

‘You will let me go home.’

‘When they pay money,’ he repeated.

The man then sat quite still for a few minutes without saying anything. Lesley couldn’t see much of him, but she could hear his muttering occasionally, as if he was going through in his mind what he had to do. Finally he shone the torch down on his gloved hands in which he was now carrying a small portable tape recorder and a piece of paper. ‘You read this. Message to your mother.’

The message, written in capital letters on lined paper, was quite legible in the torchlight. He placed the machine next to her, pressed a button clumsily with a gloved finger and told her to begin. She tried to read as strongly as possible so that she wouldn’t worry her mother. At the end she even made a little joke about getting wet. ‘There is nothing to worry about, Mum. I am okay. I got a bit wet but I am quite dry now. I am being treated very well, okay?’

She was quite pleased with that because she sounded well and strong, and the little bit about getting wet just might give them a clue to where she was. She thought he might object to this and get cross, but he didn’t and just let her go on.

Another clumsy clunk on the button and the tape stopped. ‘Good,’ he said, and played it back to see it was all right. Then he was gone, up the ladder without a goodbye or explanation as to when he’d be back and what he was going to do. She was rather relieved he’d gone – it wasn’t so much what he’d done in dragging her out of bed and driving her all this way to sit somewhere in the cold and dark, but the lack of conversation, as if he didn’t talk to people very much and lived like this, like an animal at the bottom of a hole.

Lesley did the only thing she could do – lay back in the sleeping bag and tried to keep warm and calm. She knew they’d pay him anything he asked and so it wouldn’t be long before she was out and back home. The only thing that worried her was being dumped in the middle of the countryside in a wet dressing gown and bare feet.

Perhaps it wasn’t a sewer; it didn’t smell much except of damp and now all was quiet she could hear water running underneath her. She put on the torch he’d left her and leant over to the edge of the platform and shone the torch down. There, about 8ft below her, was a stream of running water. She couldn’t see if it was clear or not because it was inky black.

She lay back in the sleeping bag and tried to think what they’d be doing at home. The one she worried about most was her mother. First of all Dad dying a few years ago, and now this. She’d have told Ron and Gaynor at once, of course. Lesley hoped they wouldn’t tell the police and just give him the money and make it quick. The police might catch him handing over the money and then he might not tell them where she was if he wasn’t going to get any money.