It did not take a lot of persuasion for Trish to accept Dido’s offer to share her home for the remainder of their time as students. Now that Trish knew all about Dido’s very chequered history and they had the beginnings of a relationship that was turning out to be more than just good friends, all the awkwardness of the first year between them was a thing of the past.

They decided early on that their relationship should remain a secret from their classmates at university.

Trish began to see a softer side to Dido when she was away from the university, but after speaking to a Police Psychologist in general terms, she was under no illusion that the hard veneer that she presented to the world was pierced. If their relationship was to last, then it was up to her to care for Dido through thick and thin.

That was an easy decision for her. She’d never had feelings for anyone before that were even remotely like those she had for Dido.

The story resumes in early November of Dido’s second year as a student.

Book 3
Chapter 17 – Found Him

[November of Dido’s second year as a student]

Since the academic year had started, Dido and Trish's visits to John Proudfoot’s home were confined to weekends, but this week, she surprised John by visiting on a Wednesday afternoon. Her phone call requesting a pick-up from the station had suggested that she had something important to tell him. She’d avoided even mentioning the subject during the call. That was Dido through and through.

As soon as she was through the front door of his home, she started speaking at a great rate of knots. John just let her speak herself out before saying,

“Slow down, Dido, tell me again how you found out exactly where Fox lives in the Royston area,” said a slightly exasperated John Proudfoot.

“Ok. I’ll start again. One of my classes is, as you know, taught by Fox. That means lectures and tutorials. He makes a point of taking the lectures himself, but for the tutorials, about half of the time, we get his research assistant, a dumb idiot who knows almost nothing about the law, but her daddy runs the barrister chambers where Fox works when he feels like it, so you connect the dots. How she passed her law degree is beyond me. Trish and I know more about criminal law than her, but we have to bite our lips and say nothing.”

“Are you with me so far?”

“Yes,” replied John.

“Every Thursday, we are timetabled to meet for a tutorial in the Law Library, where, when Fox appears, he delights in setting us tasks that are next to impossible to solve within an hour. For example, to find out why a certain verdict was overruled on appeal without using the Internet. We all think that it is his way of telling us that we are second-class citizens regarding the law. Only those wanting to become a lawyer are worth his time and trouble.”

“Ok, got that”, said John.

“Last week, the library was closed for redecoration after a massive water leak from a biology lab on the floor above. Every book has been boxed up, and it is a mess. They hope to have all the repairs and renovations done by the start of next term. Because of the upheaval, several of us had hoped he’d cancel the tutorial. There is no chance of that. He rescheduled the tutorial for Friday at two in the afternoon in his own office, as his research assistant was taking her driving test. The slave driver extraordinaire insisted that we not only have to attend in person, but we must do an extra assignment just for the class to be submitted by midnight on Monday. It is almost as if he blames us for the leak…”

“Ouch.”

“So, Friday comes along and our tutorial group all troop into his office. He’s on the phone with some scumbag client called Marmaduke Hardy. I looked him up after the class. Not a nice guy and, AFAIK, is near the top of Interpol’s ‘Most Wanted’ list.”

John grinned.
“Have you called Crimestoppers on him yet? If Hardy is not under arrest, there should be no reason for him to be on the phone with him, but how did you know that?”

“Fox took a picture of a document on his desk using the rear camera on his phone. That’s when I saw the caller ID name.”

John shook his head. Once again, Dido’s powers of observation had surprised him.

“Anyway, he motioned to us to all sit down on the other side of his desk from him while he hastily wrapped up the call. I sat at the end of his desk and put my bag on the floor next to a wastepaper bin. I could not help seeing a letter with the word ‘Royston’ in the address partially crumpled up in the bin.”

“So, you stole it from under his nose?”

Dido laughed.

“Do you honestly think that I am that stupid? Nah, I just took a photo of it. I never touched the letter or the bin, so no DNA or Fingerprints. I made it appear that I was getting something from my bag with my phone in my hand. In reality, I was getting my notebook, so I didn’t lie because he is frigging brilliant at picking up even the slightest porky pie. I don’t think that I was discovered.”

John laughed.
“Teaching you to be a Criminologist was a bad idea. Now you are a super crim!”

“No criminality involved. The evidence was in plain sight, so no search warrant was needed as he invited me and all the others into his office. I have to admit that being a dip has given me some skills at controlling my emotions in tense situations.”

“As I was saying… super crim…” said a grinning John.

“Then what?”

“After the tutorial, I sent the photo to an old friend of mine, and she did a ride-by of the address over the weekend. She sent me the photos from her helmet cam. It is the place, all right.”

“Are you sure about that? By the way, what is a helmet cam?”

“John… Sometimes, you can be as thick as three short planks…”
He smiled.

“Was she sussed out during this ‘ride by’, and is it the right place?”

“Yes, it is the right place and no to being sussed out.”

John didn’t look convinced, so Dido expanded her explanation.

“Firstly, a helmet cam is what a lot of cyclists use in case they are in an accident. It fixes to the top of her cycling helmet. Secondly, she didn’t stop and only did one run up the lane. As she was on a racing bike and the lane that runs past the property is on a route used by lots of cyclists because of the lack of heavy traffic, I highly doubt that she was discovered.”

“Then…” she added,
“Dove is one of my old team of dippers. She rides a bike all the time, so my suggestion of a little trip out to Royston was not a problem for her. She went yesterday with all the Lycra gear and everything. She sent me a video of her ride past the house late last night.”

“How do you know all that? No trying to pull the wool over my eyes now?”

Dido laughed.
“As if I could do that, eh?”

“No, I used a VPN to hide my searches and googled the name of the lane. One of the results was a picture of the local cycling club using it at weekends. Then I thought of Dove, and it worked.”

“Ok, so she wasn’t discovered. How do you know that it is the right place?”

“Because the helmet cam was lucky enough to pick up Marcus Fox carrying what looked like shopping bags of food from a car into the house.”

John thought for several seconds.

“Here, let me show you,” suggested Dido as she sensed his hesitation.

Without waiting, she pulled her laptop out of her bag and called up the recording.

Upon viewing the recording, John said,
“Ok, I’ll accept that the information was obtained legally and verified without being discovered. For a moment in your story, I wondered if you ‘dipped’ his pocket.”

Dido grinned.
“I did think about it, but decided against it for one reason.”

“You would get caught?”

“Nope. He uses a man-bag for all his stuff. It hangs from a loop on his belt. I might be good as a ‘dipper’, but to even try to take that would be madness.”

“Could you not just cut the strap?”

Dido shook her head.
“He’s reinforced the strap with steel wire. You have to look hard, but the leather has worn through in a couple of places, exposing the wire. Next to impossible to dip, I’m afraid. After seeing him at the seeing him at the university for the first time, with the bag dangling over his privates, I remembered that he always made a show about taking it off if he was going to bum-fuck me.”

“That man is psycho.”

“That we can agree on.”

Dido gave John the Ordnance Survey map of the area with the location of the target location marked on it.

“Dido, promise me one thing…”

She smiled;
“I know, I know. Don’t do anything until you have had time to think about things?”

“Yes. You know me too well…”

“No, John. Now that we have the location, we can plan the next steps in our timeframe and no one else’s. I get the feeling that you have been thinking about this day for some time. That is how you do things. I also know that if that is the case, you will tell me in your own good time. That’s fine by me. I have a lot of work to do before the end of term, and it will only increase after Christmas.”

“Where is that petulant teenager who tried to break into my car?”

“Long gone, thanks to your mentoring and infinite wisdom,” said Dido with a grin on her face.

John shook his head.
“What sort of she-devil have I let loose on the world?”

Both of them laughed.

John did indeed have an idea about verifying the accuracy of the sighting. One of his former compatriots in the Met Police had been very creative when setting up a surveillance operation on a suspect’s home just before he retired. Getting a warrant for a phone tap would be next to impossible due to the suspect’s connections in society and, in particular, his reputation in the legal profession as someone you don’t mess with. Then, none of his team were exactly experts in covert surveillance outside the confines of the capital. The crimes that the target was suspected of committing at that moment were not enough to call in a dedicated team of officers to watch the property, which would be questioned because of the cost. There was also a risk that the suspect could have been tipped off about the operation.

That particular officer had a brother who was a former army officer. The brother knew about some former Army special forces personnel who were at a loose end. He had used them to watch the property for a week. The cost to the force was a fraction of what it would have been when using police officers. They would be used to gather more information that could help improve their chances of getting a search warrant. That worked, and as a result, even the bean counters went away happy. Moreover, because the team never trespassed onto the property of the suspect, all the evidence that they obtained was legal and admissible in court, although none of them would testify in open court because of the risk of identification by people who wanted to kill them, but those hurdles could be overcome if needed.

The video evidence produced by the team was enough to take the surveillance to another level. It was this group of former servicemen that John had in mind for this task.

A few hours of investigation and a visit to Royston in his Cortina on his way for an afternoon at the Imperial War Museum at nearby Duxford gave John the perfect base for their operations. His visit confirmed that a public footpath ran along one side of Fox’s property. Half a mile along the path, it bordered another property that was available for letting. Using the path as a means of access, it might be possible to conduct the operation without even setting foot on his property and therefore avoiding any illegality. Slowly, a plan was coming together.

Dido, meantime, was trying hard not to think about the problems that John was grappling with and failing miserably. She had a paper to submit to Fox himself by midnight on Monday, and so far, all she had was a blank sheet of paper to show for all her efforts. In desperation, she turned to a thing she hated: Google. After an hour, she had an idea for the paper. Professor Fox was known to use several search engines and other tools to check for plagiarism. Any hint of that, and he’d fail the paper and not accept any excuses.

After a fairly sleepless night, she came up with a plan that she hoped would not trigger Fox’s plagiarism detector.
“One day, Fox and your goose will be well and truly cooked,” she muttered to herself as she began to write the paper.

In the background, John had the area around Fox’s home surveyed by an associate who loved a challenge when it came to walking obscure footpaths. She would take the local council to task if she found a path blocked, especially with barbed wire. The report he received a week later verified that the public bridleway that ran along one boundary of the property was just about passable. It said that it was not used very much in the winter but seemed to be a favourite for mountain bikers in the drier months of the year.

The photos attached to the report indicated that it would be ideal for some covert surveillance, and importantly, there were two locations on the path that gave a good view of Fox’s house with very little chance of discovery. All of this was confirmed by Google Earth, as was the layout of the driveway and paths on the property. All of this would come in useful later in the operation.

John then took the unprecedented step of renting the nearby property for three months. He dithered and dithered before taking the plunge, but the more he thought about it, the more he understood that it was the right thing to do. While the operation should not take that long, three months was the minimum that the agent would let the property for. He reasoned that if Fox was not under arrest by early in the new year, then something was badly amiss with the British system of justice.

Once the deal was done and dusted, he made contact with the leader of the small group of veterans who would be conducting the actual surveillance. He discovered that they were going to be wrapping up a job in four weeks and could start a week after that. That fitted in with his plans, so John hired them for four weeks with an optional two-week extension. He regarded it as money well spent if it led to the arrest of Fox.

Once all the details were ironed out, he sent a text to Dido,

“Plans in place for round-the-clock obo of the Fox’s den, so keep well away for next eight to ten weeks, understood?”

Dido replied,
“Understood.”

Normally, Dido would have questioned John about his plans, but the workload that she and Trish were dealing with meant that they had little time to spare for what Dido called ‘the other project’.

Trish admired Dido’s self-restraint on the matter. If she were in Dido’s shoes, she would have been chomping at the bit to go in and give Fox a good seeing, too. While that was not the sort of attitude a serving police officer should show, now that she knew what had been done to her, Chrissy and probably others would test anyone when it came to getting even for his past crimes.

There wasn’t much time to think about the Fox’s lair due to the extra work that Fox had dumped on them at short notice. Neither of them gave up, and by early Sunday afternoon, both of them had completed their assignments. Fox, being a sadistic bastard in both of his lives, had given each of his criminology students a similar but different assignment. That was his way of ensuring that there was no working together as a team. They shared their work so that a pair of fresh eyes could check for obvious errors as well as cross-check all references and facts that were cited.

Fox used his two PhD students to do the donkey work with the marking. If the submission passed their checks, then and only then would he read them. Both of them found small errors which were easily corrected.

With that done, Trish suggested,
“Shall we go out for a late Sunday Lunch?”

Dido responded with a big sigh.

“I take it that you are a ‘no’ then?”

“It’s not that. I just don’t feel like going very far.”

Trish looked out of the window at the river. The four masts of the ‘Cutty Sark’ were visible along the river to her right. Beyond that, the Greenwich Observatory, perched on top of a hill, gave her an idea.

“Why don’t we take the riverboat to Greenwich? Isn’t there a pub right by the stop near the naval college?”

Dido raised an eyebrow at her friend.

“That is an idea that I can go along with. I wasn’t thinking about going downriver.”

“Shall we go then?”

“Yeah, why not? Have you sent your assignment to Fox yet?” asked Dido.

“Not yet. I wanted to give it one more read-through later. You?”

“Mine went half an hour ago. It isn’t very good, but it will have to do.”

Neither of them was expecting good news when they joined the rest of their group for the next tutorial with Fox. They came out of the session feeling a lot better. Two of their class had been late submitting their assignments and had not only been given an ‘F’ but a verbal haranguing that went on for more than ten minutes from the man himself.

Trish wondered if that was a taster of what Dido was likely to face when she faced him in court. If it was, then she hoped that Dido would be able to withstand his barrage. Both students at the end of his tirade looked shell-shocked.

Dido sat quietly at the back as she usually did, hoping to keep her reactions to his verbal jabs to herself. She’d been on the wrong end of them more times than any of those around her could imagine in their wildest nightmares. At least in the class, they were verbal threats, unlike those she received while a prisoner in his cellar.

Trish, as was now the norm, kept an eye on Dido. She was worried that one of the days, she’d lose it and tell the world what an ogre this man was and throw all of the hard work that she’d done towards bringing him to justice, flushed straight down the drain.

Once they’d left Fox to gloat about their shortcomings to his research assistant, Trish took Dido to one side.
“I was worried that you would lose it in there and give him a broadside.”

Dido smiled.
“It did cross my mind. At least we didn’t get an ‘F’ for our work.”

“True, but the bastard downgraded our papers because we got a reference wrong. We didn’t deserve a ‘C-‘.”

Dido managed a smile.
“Do you want to join the ‘kick Fox where it hurts’ team?”

Trish grinned.
“Count me in. He is a sadist first class.”

Dido gave her best friend a big hug.

They were closer than ever, thanks to their common enemy, Fox.

A few days later, Dido was summoned by John to a meeting at his house for the following Friday evening. Dido invited Trish along without even clearing it with John. As far as she was concerned, Trish was part of the team after their brief trip to North Wales in the summer.

John, while initially surprised at Trish being with Dido as he picked them up from the station, he could see right away that together, they were fast becoming an inseparable team and that as a team, they were stronger together rather than as individuals.

After an excellent dinner that had been prepared by Chrissy, the four sat in the now-cleared dining room.

“Trish, what I’m about to propose is not exactly legal, so if you want to duck out now, then no one here will hold it against you. I am talking to you, Trish.”

“I’m here for the duration. If this illegality involves Fox and brings us one step closer towards bringing him to trial, then I’m in,” replied Trish without any hesitation.

John smiled and nodded his head.

“Now that we know where his country abode is, and for the past four weeks, I have had a team of ex-servicemen watching the place. The watchers are not on his property. Thanks to a public bridleway that runs along one boundary of his home, they have been able to record all the comings and goings and not set one foot on his property. It is all perfectly legal, and even Fox could not get that evidence thrown out on a technicality.”

John fished out a sheet of paper. It was a copy of a large-scale map of the area around Fox’s home.
Then, he produced a detailed log that had been produced by the team of watchers.

“As you can see from the log, and this backs up what both Dido and Chrissy have said, he and his son are creatures of habit for the moment. As it is term time, Fox himself spends three or four nights a week at his apartment in the Barbican development. Fox Junior, as both Chrissy and Dido can testify, looks after the girls during the week apart from Wednesdays. On that day, he goes AWOL. I say AWOL, but one of my watchers took it upon himself to follow him over three different Wednesdays. He is a creature of habit. On two of those days, he ends up at a property in Stevenage that is owned by this mysterious ‘Canal Properties and Investments’ from Panama City. He stays for at least three hours before returning to the house. My source says that there is a young woman with a 2-3-year-old child living at the address. No guesses as to who the father is.”

“As for the other week, he drives to Stevenage and then takes the train into London and visits a prostitute at one of the top hotels in the West End. He gets the last or next-to-last train home.”

John let that sink in before continuing.

“What I’m going to propose is that one Wednesday in the not-too-distant future, two of you go and take a look-see inside the cellar while Fox Junior is away. Look, see and don’t even think about touching anything or rescuing the latest prisoner. He, as in Fox, would do a runner the moment he found out that another of his captives had escaped due to the negligence of his idiot son. What we want is information. The more, the better. When we get it, our next step is to take it to the right people and obtain a proper… as in 100% legal search warrant and then and only then, go in with all the resources to get him and his son into custody and his latest victim medical treatment. Am I clear on that?”

None of the three women could find fault with John’s proposal.

“Because Dido and Chrissy have been held captive by Fox, I want them to go inside. No jury in the land would convict them of B&E given their history.”

Dido was ready to go in right there and then. Chrissy was a different kettle of fish.

“Chrissy,” said Dido in a soft voice.
“He will not be there, and I’ll be at your side the whole time.”

“Dido is right, Chrissy. One of my team of watchers will confirm his arrival at the property in Stevenage. Once Fox Junior is there, we can go in.”

“Ok,” said a very hesitant Chrissy.

“Chrissy,” said Dido softly.
“I’ll be there with you all the way. John’s plan means that neither of them will be there. All you need to do is photograph everything. The more evidence we can collect, the better chance John has of persuading the right people to issue a search warrant for both of them.”

“I know all that, but… Going back there gives me the shakes.”

She was right. Chrissy was visibly shaking.
“Why are you so calm?” she asked Dido.

“I’m calm because of the hours that John spent talking me into doing what I’m doing to get even with Fox. Yes, I could have just come up behind him on the street and shoved a blade into his back. That would have ended it for him and probably me as well. This way, I get to face him down in court.”

“But… How can you even bear to be in the same room as him?”

“It wasn’t easy at first, but I got there. Having a clear goal in mind keeps me sane and stops me from cutting his dick off and making him eat it in public. Believe me, it is hard, but with every tutorial I attend, it gets a bit easier. I will enjoy telling the jury what a sadist, pervert and paedophile he is. I have the evidence that will make it impossible for the jury to find him not guilty.”

Dido looked at Trish and smiled.
“Besides, I have Trish watching over me while we are at university. She… she will stop me doing anything silly, won’t you, Trish?”

“I will if I can,” she replied, smiling.
Her eyes said, ‘Doing that might be difficult, but I will try’.

“What? What do you have on him that will ensure that he gets found guilty?” asked Chrissy, looking puzzled.

Dido leaned over and whispered into Chrissy’s ear. Chrissy managed a smile.

“Ok,” she said.
“I’ll give it a go.”

John looked at Dido, who seemed satisfied. Trish had watched the whole thing go down without commenting. She wasn’t sure that Chrissy was strong enough to return to the room where so much evil had been done to her. Dido was a very different person. She was getting an idea about how much her adult character and persona had been influenced by John Proudfoot. In her mind, that was not a bad thing.