The theory that one of their classmates was suspected of being part of the gang that was raping women and destroying their lives took a while to sink in for Trish. While it had been rumoured, it was John’s words that made it all too real.

While she knew that he might have been involved on the periphery, to find out that he was an alleged rapist was hard to swallow. She could see that for Dido, it was not exactly ‘hot off the press news’. That caused her to apply some of her own deductive methods to Ollie.

In their classes, Ollie Wright would try hard to play the role of a lothario. None of the few other females in the class would go near him unless they were with other female companions. He had a chilling effect on people. Trish had sensed it early on in the course. This role did win him a small group of ‘wannabe alpha male’ followers who seemingly hung on his every word when it came to tales of his sexual exploits. Trish looked back at them and soon discovered his tell. He’d grab his left shoulder with his right hand when telling a lie. Those tales were almost all lies. She cursed herself for not being able to recall who the tale was about, which at least had a veneer of truth to it.

For Dido, it hadn’t taken long in their first term to see through that veneer. She had experienced many visitors to Fox’s home who were free with their mouths but were unable to ‘rise’ to the occasion. After that, everything that came out of his mouth was regarded, at least by Trish and Dido, as complete bollocks. Trish never knew how Dido could see through the bluster that men would concoct about their sexual conquests until that day in North Wales when Dido had told her about being held captive by Fox. Since then, Trish had begun to see beyond those tales of conquest and judge them for what they were, confessions of their failure to even speak to a woman in a way that would make them attracted to him. If they were accompanied by a verifiable tell, then so much the better.

“Do we take him down, or do we leave him alone?” asked Dido when they were back at their home and Trish had shared her thoughts about Oliver Wright.

“I say we leave him well alone, but we watch and wait,” said Trish.

Dido nodded her head. Slowly, a smile spread over her face.

“I don’t want to know what fiendish plan that you are cooking up!” remarked Trish.

“Ok, darling, I know that there are certain things that are best kept from a serving officer until the time is right.”

“Correct. I guess from your smile that it is at least a bit illegal?”

“For you, it would be, but for me? As a private citizen, not illegal, but he’d sue me in a flash if I were caught in the act, but you should know me by now, Trish, this vixen won’t get caught.”

“As long as your hands are clean, then we are good. What others might or might not do on their own is of no concern to me.”

“Good,” said Dido.
“Then we’ll speak no more about it.”

Dido didn’t do anything for over two weeks. Both Dido and Trish watched Ollie while they were on the University premises. Outside, they backed off and did nothing. He continued to boast about his conquests. On the Monday of the third week, he was ‘boasting’ about getting off with a beautiful ‘blonde bimbo’ at a nightclub.

Dido knew immediately which club it was, but kept her comments to herself.

That evening, Trish said,
“You know what club he was talking about, don’t you? I saw you stiffen up when he described the décor.”

Dido smiled.
“I do, and it might be an opening for us.”

“Us!” exclaimed Trish.
“Nothing illegal or that could come back to bite us… understand!”

“Naturally, my darling. I’ll go and see the manager on Wednesday afternoon. You were going back to the National Archives at Kew, weren’t you?”

“I was, and I can’t think of a better place to get away from your scheming. Don’t forget, our tutor wants to see a draft outline of our thesis by Friday.”

Dido grinned.
“All done. I did all my research in July and August, then I wrote it all after we came back from the States and did a bit of editing in the middle of September. “

“All? You mean the whole ten thousand words?”

Dido nodded.
“I reckon that it only took me six and a half days once I got into it. It is currently some nineteen and a half thousand words long, so it will need to be heavily edited unless I get a waiver. I’m going to give our dear tutor the whole thing to read over Christmas. If it does not blow his polyester socks off, then I don’t know what will.”

Trish shook her head.

“Don’t worry, darling. There is nothing about illegal investigations. On the contrary, it is all about how current Policing is failing the victims of Child Trafficking. Yes, there are some hypotheticals, but they are not that out of the ordinary and are based on my own and publicly documented experiences. No names, naturally, but there is a pattern to the failures if you take the big picture into consideration. The big picture is something that the cops on the ground can’t get too involved with, but… the senior officers can and should look at that sort of thing and work it into their standing orders for child trafficking cases.”

Trish was shocked by Dido’s synopsis. To her, it was way beyond what an undergrad should be reporting on, but Dido was not a normal undergraduate student.

“That is a bit different from what you proposed at the end of last year?”

“And a lot of water has flowed under many bridges since then, including my testimony at the Old Bailey.”

“When can I read it? The current draft, if I’m allowed to?” asked Trish, referring to Dido’s thesis.

“Be my guest, the current version is in the blue ring binder on the shelf in the sitting room,” said Dido in a matter-of-fact way.

Trish was once again amazed by her friend and lover. She was always full of surprises.

Dido, for her part, was wondering if John’s words in private to her at the end of the trial might be coming true. Was she leaving Trish in the dust? All this crimefighting malarkey seemed to come so easily to her.

She resolved to rein in her enthusiasm at least a little bit. Trish was the only person apart from John that she truly trusted. There was no one else on the planet who had even tried to like her as a person and not as a victim of Fox. George Papandreou came close, but that trust was based on their dim and distant past relationship.

The next morning, Dido noticed that the binder holding her draft thesis was missing.

“Did you read it?” she asked Trish over breakfast.

Trish smiled.
“If you mean your thesis, then yes, I did. It is very good, and yes, you were right about the hypotheticals that you used. I was worried for a while.”

“Did you find any major foo-pahs?”

Trish shook her head.
“I ended up reading it twice. For a work describing the failures of investigations into child sex crimes, it is beyond good. The recommendations you lay out in the second part puzzled me for a bit. Your voice… as in the way it was written, changed. It was more like it was John speaking.”

Dido smiled.
“I wondered about that. I read a number of his reports from his time as Chief Super, especially the one into the 1984 version of PACE. I guess I borrowed some of his style. I’ll go over it and change it.”

“If you do that, then you are on your way to a certain 1st.”

Dido shook her head.
“A lot of water has to flow… and all that jazz…”

Trish sighed.

“I take it from that sigh that you are struggling?” asked Dido.

“I am. I can’t get the opening right. It will come, but not today, and I know that I’m not alone.”

Dido raised an eyebrow, so Trish continued.

“Yeah. I heard some mutterings from a few others about not knowing where to start over lunch the other day.”

Dido took hold of Trish’s hand.
“Please don’t feel that you have to get yours done ASAP. I only did mine over the summer because I wanted to spend time on Chrissy’s case. I feel sorry for her that nothing major has moved on her case for what seems like ages.”

“On the subject of ages, the day before I left to come down here, my Chief Super back in Durham talked to me about what I was planning on doing after I graduate.”

“And, you said, ‘Sorry, Chief, I don’t have a clue?’” suggested Dido.

“I did, or words to that effect.”

“He told me in strictest confidence that while CID was open to the idea of having a Criminologist in the department, many of the more… to use his words, ‘time served’, officers felt threatened by people like us with all our new-fangled ways of looking at crimes.”

“That is an interesting point and one that I had not considered.”

“They still think of me as an outsider even though I have been in the force for almost six years or will have been come next June.”

“There is a lot to be said for the years of experience. We have seen that for ourselves with John. We would not have gotten even close to getting Fox sent down if it wasn’t for him.”

“That, my dear, I can agree with,” said Trish.

Her body language told Dido that she wasn’t finished.
“His, my Chief Super’s, words got me thinking.”

Dido groaned and pretended to play a tiny violin.

Trish ignored her.
“It got me thinking about our futures. I had this crazy idea that we would go into business together with John as the Chairman. We both know that he misses the crime-fighting game and how he regrets ever accepting the role of Chief Super. He wanted to be on the front line, and he has said more than once that you coming into his life saved him from an early grave. We have seen him come alive when there is a bit of sleuthing to be done. He has contacts, and we’d need them to get gigs on cases.”

Dido sat there for a moment, stunned. Then she smiled and said,
“Don’t move an inch.”

Dido disappeared into her bedroom and returned less than a minute later with a thin buff folder.

“Read this after looking at the date when it was written.”

Trish started to say, ‘What’s this?’ when she read the title.

“That’s John’s writing, isn’t it?”

“Read it, darling.”

Trish read the seven-page document twice before putting it down.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“John wrote that while he was staying with Chrissy after the operations to alter her appearance. That was just a few weeks after you knew the truth about me and hadn’t run a mile. He told me about it one day last summer, and as I have just done with you, he gave me the document to read.”

“This is a business plan for a firm of specialists with us at the centre.”

Dido nodded her head.
“I told him that it was far too early to even think about this sort of thing. I still do. I did promise him that if the time was right, I’d show you the file. The time was right, and I’ve done that.”

“You don’t seem too keen on the idea?” said Trish.

“It is not that I am not keen. I am. But I made a promise to Chrissy, and that is one promise I want to keep before I think about life as a post-graduate business owner.”

Trish smiled. Then she leaned over and gave Dido a big, wet kiss.

“That’s the Dido I have grown to love. Life is not just about you.”

Dido laughed.
“It wasn’t always like that. When I was living rough, it was all about me. Then I met John, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“He is a good man.”

“He is, and he has this knack of getting you to do what he wants without actually asking you to do it,” said Dido.

Trish laughed.
“That is a skill that some of my bosses in Durham could do with learning.”

Dido shook her head.
“Thanks to our psychology classes, I have come to realise that skill or whatever it is, is something that you are more than likely born with. Those soft skills can be learned, but for people like John, it is so natural that it has to have been there from birth.”

“That, my darling, I can agree with.”

“You keep saying that!” remarked Dido.

“That, my dear, is because we are on the same wavelength and a team. We have been since you clocked me that first morning. No one else ever got close to seeing the real me so easily.”

“And I was a woman of mystery for almost a year?”

“You were, and believe me, it hurt me every day. To know that you were hiding something, but you are such a good liar, that it hurt me that I knew that you were lying, but I could not pick any holes in that backstory, it was that good. The day that you came out to me was a turning point for both of us, wasn’t it?”

Dido responded with a kiss, but that didn’t mask the tears. Tears of happiness. There was nowhere she’d rather be at that moment.

A week later, Dido’s ‘burner phone’ received a text message. It was very simple. The letter ‘J’ was followed by four thumbs-up emojis. That was followed by 4 mobile phones and a cloud emoji. Dido smiled as she read it. Janus had got the cameras installed and was sending data to the server that she’d set up somewhere. Dido had no idea what the other emojis were for, so she replied with a simple message,

“Why 4 + 4?”

Less than a minute later, Janus responded.
“Four cameras, three burners and a contract phone. Data in the cloud.”

Dido responded with.
“Thx. EOL.”

The “EOL” meant the end of the line for the two numbers that they were using to communicate, and that they should obtain new SIM cards for their phones. Janus responded with a thumbs-up emoji.

The data stored in the cloud showed that Janus had managed to clone the Android phone that their classmate, Ollie Wright, used, plus the three burner phones that he used for ‘other’ purposes. Dido had no idea that he used three extra phones. There was no data available for them yet. That told Dido that he wasn’t using them at the moment or that he’d clocked that they’d been cloned. As his main phone was busy, Dido was inclined to think that he wasn’t planning any ‘operations’ or, as he told his clique, ‘conquests’ at the moment.

Dido wanted to ask Janus this, but until she had posted her new number there and Dido sent a message to that number from her newly reconfigured phone, they were operating in two separate silos.

The more that she thought about it, the more involved Ollie Wright seemed to be. If it was as she suspected, his family was fully involved in the network of dirty vehicle supplies; then it would be natural for him to want to branch out and create or be part of an OCG of his own. Learning all the tricks of the trade as a criminology student was a fantastic cover for him and his crime family. They could anticipate the next move by the cops and always be one step ahead of them.

Dido reflected on the day that Fox was arrested. Ollie was one of the few who poo-pooed the idea that the brilliant Professor Fox had been arrested. She thought about one of their psychology lectures and how people with the most to hide often are the loudest protesters. The lecturer called it ‘deflection’. Point the finger anywhere but themselves.

Dido knew that Oliver had been deflecting attention away from himself ever since the first day of the course, except to his little clique of acolytes who lapped up his every word.

She bought herself a new SIM Card, and after resetting her phone, she sent a coded text to the number that Janus had left on their cloud drive. At first, she resisted downloading the call and text data. Thinking that it could wait for another day, she gave it a brief perusal of some of the data uploaded by Janus. It was sufficiently troubling as to cause her to change her plans.

On the 3rd Wednesday of term, Dido went to visit her friend George ‘the Greek’ Papandreou at the nightclub that he managed. This was the club where Chrissy had been so viciously sodomised more than two years before. She had a photo that she wanted to talk about.

“You are looking good, girl,” said George as they sat in his office.

“Thanks, George.”

“You really socked it to ‘the man’, didn’t you? I followed the case in the news. You had real guts showing him that photo. Not many would have exposed themselves like that. I see that the paparazzi have been making up stories about you…”

Dido nodded.
“They get told to fuck off, or I’ll report them to the police for stalking. So far, they have just done their regular hatchet jobs on me. Tell the story that their readers and viewers want to hear and fuck the truth. I have a really good lawyer on retainer. If they don’t STFU, then we’ll take them to court, where they will have to prove their lies. Don’t worry about the cost; Fox is paying for it all.”

“Good for you, girl.”

Dido sighed.
“Some of their lies are borderline libellous. These rags have good legal teams and know just how far they can go before going over the line. One of these days, they will go too far. A little bird told me that most of them have been to see Fox in prison just before the lie gets spread. Strange coincidence, I don’t think. But, George, that is not why I wanted to see you.”

George smiled as Dido fished out her phone and called up an image.
“Do you know this man?”

George looked at the photo. Dido knew that he recognised the image.
“That’s Hugo Black, or that’s the name he uses on his credit card here and in the other clubs that I manage.”

Dido shook his head.
“His real name is Oliver Wright. I suspect that he is part of the gang who sodomised my friend here.”

George swore and then crossed himself.
“I didn’t know.”

“Don’t worry, George. No one had any idea back then.”

“How do you know him? When Hugo or Oliver comes here, he flashes the cash, if you know what I mean. He is a ladies’ man. Every time he comes, he has a different blonde hanging on his arm.”

Dido chuckled.
“That’s Ollie, all right. He’s married with two kids and a £525,000 mortgage on their three-bedroom semi in Chelmsford. His family is an organised crime gang, or at least that is what the evidence is pointing towards.”

George smiled before saying,
“Some of the people he comes in here with are definitely on the wrong side of the law. We had to quietly throw one out last July because he was carrying, and I mean, a gun. Knives we deal with, but a customised Glock 17 was beyond the pale. Since then, we have installed metal detectors at all our clubs.”

George looked at the photo again.
“I knew that he was married. The tan lines where his ring finger is a dead giveaway, but not like that.”

“How do you know him?”

“He’s a fellow student on my course. At the moment, he does not suspect that I know anything other than what he has told us on the course.”

“I’ll keep our conversation to myself. I did wonder about the people that… that did for your friend. It appeared that they knew where all the CCTV cameras were located. We didn’t get a decent headshot of any of them. Since then, we have taken some additional security measures.”

“Yeah, you said about the metal detectors.”

George shook his head.
“We’ve gone beyond that. None of the staff at any of the clubs know this, but everyone coming into the club has their photo taken when they step through the metal detector. We put them in when we did some redecoration of the clubs this past year.”

He took a deep breath.
“We’ve also put hidden cameras in all the toilets. Not in the cubicles, but they watch the open area around the sinks. The staff at the clubs have no access to the images, and they are deleted after 48 hours. We would only access them if we had an incident like what happened to your friend. I know that it could be like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but we had to do something.”

Dido got up and gave George a friend-to-friend hug.
“You are a good man, George. Please keep a lookout for Hugh Black and his friends. If you do have photos of them, then I know someone who would love to see them. Naturally, I won’t say where they came from. It is his associates that I’m interested in. I know that he is part of a crime family, but I suspect that his tentacles go way beyond his kin if you get my meaning?”

“I will do that, and I’ll send you copies of them. Can I have an email?”

Dido gave George a disposable email address before giving him a big hug and leaving.

Dido left the club with more questions than answers. One of those was, did Ollie’s wife know about his playing around? He came over as someone who loved to play the field and boast about his conquests almost weekly. His family were an afterthought. It was only when he went shopping for a child’s birthday present that he had to admit that he was married and had two children.

It had taken Dido less than an hour to find his home address, and thanks to the Land Registry, she found out that his family lived in a house that was worth over £600,000. A bit more digging via her friends told her the size of the mortgage. She still didn’t know how he was paying the mortgage each month. It had to be either a family or some other illegal source of income. She wondered about who was paying for the tuition and everything else. Flashing lots of cash at a nightclub was also a concern. Where had that money come from? Then there was the Rolex that he always wore. Another bit of searching revealed that it was a Rolex ‘Yacht-Master II’ in gold and was worth at least £25,000. More evidence of him living beyond his means. She didn’t fret about it. It would come in good time. That was a lesson that had taken her a long time to accept, but thanks to John’s persistence, she was content to let it sit, knowing that in time, all the dots would be joined up.

Both Dido and Trish were finding that their final year was a lot harder than the previous two. Their assignments were far more detailed, and the marking correspondingly tougher. At least none of their lecturers sprang unexpected assignments on them, unlike the now-jailed Professor Fox. Dido found the psychology syllabus especially tough. Thankfully, Trish was able to help her out. Dido returned the favour when it came to forensics. Dido’s ability to see what most others would miss was what made her stand out in the class.

Dr Pearson, their forensics lecturer, would almost always call on Dido to observe a staged crime scene and pick out all the points that the others had missed. Reluctantly, she would pick out even the most obscure piece of evidence. Dido hated showing up the rest of her class. After the third such episode, she waited until the class was over before having a quiet word with Dr Pearson.

“I’d like it if you didn’t single me out like that for looking at your staged crime scenes.”

“Dido, you have a skill in observing people and places that few others have. DI Harrison, who is a member of my Bridge Club, laughed when I told him that I had this student who saw stuff that others had missed. He said, ‘Is she named Dido by any chance?’. Then he told me in general terms about the tips that you gave him.”

“Dr Pearson, those tips were confidential, and I’d like them to remain that way. I don’t want to be treated any differently from any other student.”

“Sorry, Dido. The work that you did to relieve us of Professor Fox has ensured that you can’t be like any other student, and it has half the lecturers in the Law department scratching their heads. None of them has seen anyone take on a Barrister like the way that you did. You went head-to-head with one of the most feared legal counsels in the country and beat him to a pulp. That alone will ensure that the name Dido Pleasance is not forgotten in this university. What you did was, in my opinion, to create legal history. The Pleasance defence will be taught for generations; it was that good. In case you don’t know, I watched you tear him apart with a smile on your face from the public gallery. His body language after you showed that photo that was taken by his son told me that Fox was going to lose. After that, he went through the motions. You had broken him into smithereens.”

“Dr Pearson… Please leave me be!”

Dido wanted to tell him to go to hell and never come back, but some of the teachings of John Proudfoot came into her mind. He’d say, ‘Think, don’t react or respond and let the blowhard run out of air. ’

“Dido, you are by far the best student in the class, and in my honest opinion, you are probably the best and easily the most astute criminology student I’ve ever seen, and I had that opinion before Fox’s trial. That was a masterclass in how to withstand a bullying barrister. Then, the Dean does not want you to coast through the year and walk away with a top grade. The same applies to Trisha. While she is not as good as you, any police force with even one eye on the future of crime-fighting would love to have her as part of their team. The two of you combined are a force of nature.”

His words suddenly made sense.
“Dr Pearson, please try to make it less obvious. Several members of the class were rooting for Professor Fox and, since his conviction, have almost totally ignored me.”

“I heard about the incident with Trisha and her revealing herself as a Detective Constable. You two are close, aren’t you?”

Dido felt herself going red in the face.
“Good for you. I wish you well for your future after this year, but there is a lot of work to do between now and your finals.”

“Thanks, Dr Pearson.”

Outside the lecture theatre, Trish was waiting anxiously.
“How did it go?”

“I need some time to think over what he said. It concerns you as well.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you darling. We can talk tonight.”

Dido had just finished the washing up when Trish came and gave her a comforting hug.
“Where’s the Dido I know and love? The one standing right here seems to be on a different planet?”

“Deep in thought, I’m afraid.”

After a brief kiss, Dido said,
“We should sit down and talk over what Dr Pearson said to me about us.”

Trish led Dido into the sitting room and sat her down at the small dining table. This was where all important decisions were made between them.

“He told me that I’m almost certain to get a first, and reading between the lines, so are you. His words were, ‘We don’t want you coasting through the year.’ The ‘we’ is the faculty, including the Dean.”

Trish sat motionless. She was trying to digest the implications of her words.

“His words seem to confirm the idea that has been forming in my mind that they are going to test us and not the rest of the class. Being asked to look at the crime scene and show what everyone has missed is just the start of it. After the Psychology tutorial, I went to see Dr Lang. He said much the same. There might even be extra assignments for us that will be sent by email. Naturally, it is up to us if we do them or not, but I’m sure you don’t need me to expand on what it all means.”

Trish looked a bit shocked.
“Do they want us to fail?”

Dido smiled.
“I think that the opposite is true. I… and this is pure speculation… I wonder if they are lining us up for a job with one or more of the big criminal law firms. We know that those places are very, very selective about who they hire, and all this testing of us could be a stepping stone into them or even the post-graduate world.”

“Shit!” exclaimed Trish.

“Yeah, and the recruitment season hasn’t even begun in earnest. But…” said Dido,
“Try to put yourself in the position of a partner at a top law firm. They want only the best lawyers, paralegals and now criminologists. We… because we are in the City of London, are obvious targets for those companies. At the moment, I don’t want to work for any of them. Billable hours and sixteen-hour days are not my thing, thanks.”

“Nor me,” echoed Trish.

“So, what do we do?”

“I think that we should play along with their game. It will be a good experience for us, but we should be uncommitted when it comes to what we are going to do after we graduate.”

Trish nodded.
“It will be easier for me because I have a job to go to, but what happens after I return is in the lap of the gods.”

Dido started to play with her engagement ring.
“It is all going to get complicated, isn’t it? Life, I mean?”

“I know, and that is something that I didn’t plan for when I signed up for the course,” said Trish.
“Me neither.”

After a period of silence, Dido said.

“We go with the flow, let them test us, keep our heads down and hopefully come out the other side intact. Deal?”

Trish smiled. Then she leaned over and kissed Dido. That sealed the deal.