Ben (28 page)

Undeterred, Mum and Dad agreed to return later in the year to participate in another documentary – actually, in another two: one for English television and one for Greek audiences. The Greek programme began filming in October, shortly before Ben’s seventh birthday. Apart from the July date, this was the time of year I
dreaded most. Steeling myself, I managed to give an interview from home, as did everyone, before Mum and Dad flew off to take part in the studio section of the programme in Athens.

When they agreed, we had no idea how it would change our lives.

Shadows In The Mist
is the Greek equivalent of
Surprise Surprise
, which arguably makes presenter Kostas Hardevellas the equivalent of the UK’s Cilla Black or Holly Willoughby. Like
Surprise Surprise
, the programme uses its vast research budget to track down family members who’ve dropped out of touch with the rest of their kin – whether through divorce, estrangement or, occasionally, abduction – and then reunites them live on national television. It’s not my idea of entertainment, but the joy those families experience cannot be denied. It was Hardevellas’s dream when he spoke to us in Sheffield that he would be able to help our family too.

Perched nervously on the guest sofa in the Greek studio, Mum and Dad couldn’t help thinking they’d made a mistake. The programme’s heart was in the right place but it was all a bit too showbizzy for their tastes. Then our interviews were shown on a large screen and translated for the studio and home audiences, and my parents began to relax. Like he’d done so many other times, Kostas Hardevellas started his appeal to viewers for help. He showed the most recent computer update of Ben and, of course, he mentioned the reward. As far as Mum and Dad could tell, it was all going exactly as Hardevellas had predicted it would and, for the first time, they felt a genuine sense that the Greek people were going to deliver something more than shrugs. Their hunch turned out to be right, although nobody could have predicted the source.

The first clue came when Mum and Dad noticed Hardevellas’s expression change and he became more animated, appearing to talk to someone in the production booth. Even with the language barrier, my parents knew something unexpected was going on. The presenter was now addressing the cameras with a massive smile on his face. He ended with a few words addressed, in English, to Mum and Dad.

‘We have a caller on the line who says he has Ben.’

He has Ben?
The words thundered through their heads as they looked at Hardevellas then at each other. But the host had turned back to the cameras and was talking in Greek. Mum and Dad could only listen in shock as a loud, clear, gruff voice boomed over the studio speaker. It was the caller – but what the hell was he saying? Whatever it was, the studio audience had gone completely silent.

If I’d been there I’d have throttled Hardevellas. I’m amazed Dad stayed seated for so long. He must have been in shock. A conversation about their grandson was taking place live on Greek television between a TV presenter and a man claiming to have Ben – and they couldn’t follow a word of it.

Still grinning like the proverbial cat with the cream, Hardevellas said what my parents recognised as goodnight and they realised the broadcast was over. Now Dad could get some answers.

Kostas was bubbling. He knew he had a hit show on his hands. He also knew Mum and Dad were totally in the dark. He poured out everything. A viewer had seen the appeal for Ben, rung in and had stopped the show with six simple words: ‘I have Ben in my hands.’

That’s when the
Shadows In The Mist
studio audience went silent, just as I did when Mum relayed the information. There
was only one potential problem. The caller’s name was Andonis Bedzios – currently residing in Larissa Prison.

‘You have to realise it is a very large reward,’ Kostas said. ‘The temptation to lie would be great for many people. A man like this …’

‘Just because he’s in prison doesn’t make him a completely bad person,’ Dad insisted later to me. I thought of Simon and agreed.

Mum and Dad were desperate to learn exactly what this criminal had said. All the blood drained from their faces when they did.

First, Bedzios had clarified that Ben couldn’t be in his hands because of being incarcerated. Next he said the boy – ‘Mikro Ben’ as so many Greeks called him – was living in a gypsy camp in Veria, about sixty miles from Larissa. Then he told Hardevellas and the studio audience the following story.

Before being captured by the police a year earlier, Bedzios asked a gypsy leader, Christos Kerimi, to take his son Rabo into the camp and raise him in Bedzios’s absence. Being separated from Rabo was too much to bear so, in a moment of madness, Bedzios broke out of the police van switching him between prisons and went on the run. From December 1991 to March 1992 he made his way as carefully as possible to Veria, where he hoped to be reunited with Rabo; at least until the police discovered him. He was surprised to see a younger, blond-haired boy playing with his son. He was even more surprised to learn the boy was the one ‘stolen’ from Kos the year before.

Bedzios’s cousin, Grigoris, was a neighbour of Kerimi’s. He had told Andonis, ‘We need Rabo’s birth certificate to register little Ben and have him baptised.’ The plan was clearly to legitimise Ben’s presence and to wipe his real life from the history books.

Andonis, for all his law-breaking past, was shocked by the mercenary nature of the proposition. When he questioned what Ben’s real family must be going through, he was reminded that his own son’s life could take an unfortunate turn if Kerimi were not to get his own way.

The meeting had taken place on 22 March 1992. I had one question: ‘Why the hell has he waited till now to tell us?’

Kostas Hardevellas had asked the same question on his television programme, to which Andonis had replied, ‘Kerimi had my son. I could not endanger him.’

Of course, if his story was true, that made sense. So what had changed? Why was he speaking out now, when he hadn’t dared before? For that, Bedzios had replied, we were welcome to visit him and discover the truth for ourselves.

At the end of it, Mum and Dad were buzzing. This wasn’t a sighting of a girl who might have looked like Ben in a year’s time or a fleeting description of a child caught out of the corner of a holidaymaker’s eye. This was a sworn statement that a mysterious boy was not only called Ben but that he had been snatched from Kos in 1991. I’m not saying I got the champagne out when they called me soon after, but it was the first time in five years we let ourselves entertain the notion of having something to celebrate.

‘We need to see this guy,’ Dad told Kostas. ‘Now.’

Sensing a coup for his TV programme, Hardevellas agreed. Calls were made, deals were struck and the next day he, Mum and Dad and, of course, a TV crew, arrived in Larissa. Once again, another chapter of our lives was going to be played out on screen for everyone to see. I just prayed that this chapter had a happy ending.

I’d visited Leicester prison enough for one lifetime, but if the barbaric cells at Kos were anything to go by, a Greek jail was going to be a different proposition, and not in a good way. I did not envy Mum having to go inside. I certainly could not entertain the idea of taking Leighanna anywhere near it. For that reason alone, I stayed back home and waited for their call.

When it came, three things stood out for me. Number one, Bedzios had claimed he did not want to see a penny of the reward money. Number two, he had said Ben was living in a house in Patras, a large city in the west. And number three, he had a very personal reason for breaking his silence now: he claimed that Kerimi was mistreating Rabo and he said he wanted revenge. That was the clincher for me. As a parent, I recognised in Bedzios what it was like to feel powerless and yet prepared to do anything for your child. He told them he wanted us to rescue not only Ben but Rabo as well, and have Kerimi imprisoned in the process. If he was telling the truth, we would get our boy, his son would get a new home and his greatest enemy would be removed from the game. Everyone would be a winner.

Dad is usually a good judge of character. I trusted him on this one as well.

‘Kerry, he looked your mother and me in the eye and swore on his son’s life. I believe him.’

That wasn’t the end of it. Bedzios said he’d kicked over the hornets’ nest by calling into
Shadows In The Mist
. He told them that suddenly Kerimi was scared. There was talk of dumping ‘Mikro Ben’ outside the TV studios. He was too hot to keep now.

After so many years of dashed expectations, could this really be the moment? Disappointment when other sightings went
wrong was like losing Ben all over again, so I had to have a very good reason to let my guard down. On this occasion I did. Four reasons in fact, because Bedzios wasn’t the only person who was directing us to Veria.

We could never have guessed how influential Mum and Dad’s appearance on
Shadows In The Mist
would be. We received word from the British Embassy that an anonymous caller had rung, claiming to have picked up Ben and Rabo in his taxi. Unfortunately the man refused to leave a name or make a statement. Then, in December, we were contacted by a private detective called Stratos Bakirtzis who had video footage of a boy he claimed was Ben. It took weeks to get through to us. My hand trembled as I inserted the VHS cassette into the video player. The scene was of the outside of a house. A man in his late fifties walked past, then a woman – and then a little blond boy.

Technology in 1996 was nothing like it is today. It didn’t help that the film had been surreptitiously shot from inside a jacket, with the boy only captured in passing as the detective hunted for evidence of something else. Using pause and freeze frame I managed to inch through the tape to the clearest possible shot of the blond boy’s face. Then I found the zoom button and focused in.

The seven-year-old face staring back at me was the spitting image of Simon.

The video contained another shock. The house where the boy was playing belonged, Bakirtzis said, to a certain sometime criminal family called the Kerimis.

It could not be a coincidence, could it?

Mum and Dad wanted to see Bedzios again, this time with an interpreter and not Greece’s answer to Cilla Black. They also wanted to pursue this new claim with the police, but Ben’s fund was empty. Luckily, a few weeks after Mum and Dad arrived back in England we were due to take part in a Channel 4 documentary called ‘The Lost Boy’, part of their
Cutting Edge
series. Suddenly, there were our tickets back to Greece.

Returning to Larissa, now it was Mum and Dad’s turn for some covert recording. As they sat in the hire car outside the jail, tiny microphones, courtesy of Nick Godwin and his C4 production team, were secreted in their clothes. Whatever Bedzios said in there would be on tape for analysis later. Any discrepancies in his claims would be shot down, and we would know once and for all whether he could be trusted.

In the event, he didn’t disappoint. Via the interpreter, Bedzios reiterated every claim he’d made on TV and in person to them before. When Mum and Dad left, they were convinced he was telling the truth. Now they had to convince the authorities in Veria to act. What they didn’t know as they drove the sixty miles north, was that another ‘coincidence’ was about to make their job very difficult.

Somehow Bakirtzis’s footage had ended up being broadcast on Greek TV. The detective denied any involvement, blaming one of his men. Whoever was responsible, the result was devastating for us because suddenly everyone in Veria was aware of the attention heading their way. Yes, the town had already been mentioned by Bedzios on TV but who really, outside our family, was taking the word of a convict seriously? This, by contrast, showed the authorities meant business. By the time Mum and Dad had arrived, there would be plenty of time for a guilty party to prepare – as they
discovered when they entered the police station, and learnt that Kerimi had beaten them there.

Mum and Dad studied a photograph the gypsy had left for them. It was a boy with a shaved head, about eight years old.

‘This is the blond boy from the film,’ a policeman informed them. ‘This is Rabo.’

As soon as Kerimi had become aware of the speculation about his family, he had brought the boy to Veria police station to be examined and photographed. This, the policeman explained, should be an end to the gossip about the family.

While Mum scrutinised the photo, Dad asked, ‘Why has his hair been shaved?’

The policeman shrugged. ‘Because of head lice.’

A suspicious person might think it had been shorn to hide the fact it wasn’t as blond as the hair in the video – and Dad is a very suspicious person. The policeman, on the other hand, appeared not to be. When Dad demanded the police search Kerimi’s house, he was shot down.

‘This is Rabo.’ The policeman tapped the picture. ‘There is no other boy.’

None of it made sense. According to local information, Greek gypsies suffered endlessly at the hands of the police. Yet here was a golden opportunity to get a warrant and search the house, and they were turning it down. Another coincidence?

On paper, the police’s story might seem very plausible apart from two factors. One, we had experience of trusting the Kos police force and look where that had got us. And two, even as they arrived in Veria, Mum and Dad heard a very different tale.

The man seemed to step out of nowhere. One minute Mum and Dad were walking along a deserted road, the next there was
an agitated guy alongside them. Mum’s immediate thought was of personal safety. The way the stranger was acting made her think he was a mugger, possibly on drugs. As he leant in nervously to speak, she nearly screamed. If she had, she would never have heard what he had to say.

‘I’m the one who called the British Embassy,’ he revealed. ‘I know Kerimi has little Ben.’

The man was a taxi driver who regularly carried Kerimi’s family. One day in January 1994, he’d noticed in his rear-view mirror that among the usual children was a blond boy.