Ben (30 page)

Back in England, it was easy to imagine nothing had been done. Athens was meant to be liaising with Berlin via Interpol but it was taking for ever. I had the distraction of Leighanna to stop me climbing the walls but my parents didn’t have that luxury and their stress showed itself in different ways. While Mum quietly withdrew, Dad grew more and more restless, chain-smoking and drinking coffee by the gallon. He couldn’t stop talking about the possible outcomes and different scenarios. Mum admits she got sick of it. She said living with Dad was like having a drill pounding
into her brain. My brothers also tried to avoid him and even I didn’t always have the stomach for another round-the-houses telephone call full of ‘What if …’ and ‘Why aren’t they doing that?’ But Dad was wired on caffeine and nicotine and guilt. If there was something else to talk about, he didn’t know what it was.

A month after we returned from Greece, he realised the time for talking was over.

‘I’m going back to Athens. I can’t wait for them to get off their backsides.’

‘Don’t be stupid, we can’t afford it,’ Mum insisted. ‘The fund’s nearly empty.’

‘There’s enough for a flight.’

‘What if another sighting happens in the meantime?’

‘Well, I can’t stay here and do nothing!’

Back in Athens, his first stop was to visit Bedzios. He wanted to know more about the Germans. Where were these receipts? What were the names and addresses? Bedzios would only give one name and the city of Munich. Then Dad went to the Ministry of Public Order to check up on progress. There wasn’t any.

‘How long does it take to get pictures of three men?’ he asked.

‘Soon. Soon.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow, then.’

Without the money for a hotel, Dad found a secluded part of the beach and spent the night there. The following morning, he returned to the ministry and was met by the same story. For three weeks he travelled back and forth like that. Utterly frustrated, he decided to pay the British Embassy a visit. Their track record for helping our family so far had been pretty poor. That’s how desperate Dad was.

The smart building on Ploutarchou Street looks similar to the home of the British government in London’s Whitehall. For a moment, Dad let himself think that as a UK citizen he might get a decent reception. After his previous conversations with the consulate, he wasn’t betting on it. When he was told that there was a new man in town, he couldn’t have been more relieved.

Gordon Bernard was a dynamic man in his early forties and as different from his predecessor as you could imagine. Not only did he say that he would personally hound the minister for the pictures Dad had requested, he was also horrified by Dad’s living arrangements.

‘There’s a guest apartment at my official residence,’ he said. ‘I insist you stay there.’

Even under Gordon’s pressure, the Greek authorities seemed to have their fingers in their ears. So when Dad came across two men planning to drive to Germany, he decided to cut his losses and hitch a ride. He had nowhere to stay, no idea where to start looking and not a single word of German in his head. But that had never stopped him in Greece. Somehow he’d always got his point across.

Eventually he ended up in Munich and, armed only with a man’s name, went straight to the British consulate. When an initial search proved unsuccessful Dad took it upon himself to work through local phone directories. It worked. With a name and now an address, the German police could do something. They tore the man’s home inside out but found no trace of anything to link him to Bedzios’s accusations.

Disenchanted, penniless and exhausted, Dad returned home.

The stress on everyone comes out at different times in different ways. My breakdowns have been very public. Whether Simon was
driven to do what he did by the pressure, I don’t know. Mum and Dad found themselves at odds with each other over almost every little thing. Her way of coping with the guilt she still felt all these years later about Ben’s disappearance was to throw herself into domesticity. She found comfort in housework and took solace in friends. She wasn’t running away, she was protecting herself.

Dad’s approach was the opposite. Before his German trip, he’d already been a livewire. Now he was in a constant state of agitation. He was obsessed, he admits it. He dialled the same numbers every day to be told the same things time after time. He paced up and down the house, couldn’t concentrate on his scrap-metal scavenging and bent the ear of anyone who came near. Mum begged him to calm down, to focus on himself, on his children and on her. He couldn’t. Finally, after another blistering confrontation, Dad packed a suitcase and walked to the front door. He opened it, went to step out and stopped. He had nowhere to go.

We were all at our wits’ end. The revelations from Andonis Bedzios had promised so much and delivered nothing but heartache and disappointment. Even though I believed him, where had it got us? We’d uncovered lies in Veria, in Thessaloniki, almost certainly in Athens and probably now in Munich. It was as though there was a conspiracy to keep us in the dark. If that was the case, then who was pulling the strings?

Dad just wanted to know why more wasn’t being done. We all did. If we weren’t ordinary working-class people then the authorities would have paid more attention, we were convinced of it. Instead, we had been ignored for six and a half years. I think certain people were just waiting for us to give up. They should have known that was never going to happen.

Not everyone was against us, even if often felt like it. Gordon Bernard rang one day to say he’d received a call from Bedzios.

‘Kerry, this could be it. Bedzios says they’re going to hand Ben over.’

I could picture Gordon’s lovely kind, round face beaming as he broke the news.

‘Is Bedzios serious?’

‘He says deadly.’

The man who once claimed to have Ben in his hands was going to give him up.

Sometimes you’re better off not knowing what’s going on. This time I begged for information the second Gordon learned it.

The consul was summoned to Veria to meet Bedzios’s lawyer, Fanny Zahoo. He could have sent an underling but Gordon went personally and made it as official as possible by travelling in his black limousine with the consular flags and diplomatic licence plates. He wanted to show the lawyer and anyone else that the full weight of the British government was behind him. It wasn’t – not in my opinion – but no one else knew that.

The lawyer explained what she knew. There was going to be a handover of Ben. Whoever had him needed to be 100 per cent sure that he or she would not be arrested, so there would be a test to ensure Gordon was alone.

‘What kind of test?’ Gordon asked.

‘You’ll be given an address,’ Zahoo explained. ‘We will go together so I can ensure there is no police involvement.’

‘Fine,’ Gordon said. ‘What’s the address?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Well, who does?’

Right on cue, Zahoo’s mobile phone rang. She answered and passed it to her guest.

‘Gordon Bernard?’ the caller said.

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘I am Andonis Bedzios. I have an address for you.’

From that point on, it was like something out of a spy movie. Bedzios gave Gordon the address of a café and said, ‘I will ring this number again in ten minutes. You should be outside waiting. Don’t be late.’

Gordon went to argue but Bedzios cut him short.

‘The clock’s ticking.’

The black sedan screeched to a halt outside the café with seconds to spare. The phone rang exactly on ten minutes. How Bedzios was pulling the strings from a public phone in prison I don’t know, but he seemed remarkably well informed. Someone was clearly helping him.

‘You made it,’ Bedzios said. ‘Now …’

Gordon assumed he would be told where to find Ben. What he actually got was another address and another deadline.

He found the restaurant in good time. Then he was directed to a bar, then a kiosk in the street. Each time he threatened Bedzios not to mess around. Each time the prisoner told him to focus on the job in hand. Any foul-up, and Bedzios’s own son could suffer.

Five times this happened. Five addresses, five high-speed dashes across the city. Five tense phone calls. By the sixth time Gordon was losing patience. He was hot, sweaty and out of breath. Clearly Bedzios had eyes on the ground, because he always knew where Gordon was. By now, he must have known there were no police anywhere near the operation and yet he was still playing
this stupid game. Only one explanation made sense: Bedzios was stringing Gordon along. He had to be.

As if sensing the change in the consul’s voice, Andonis had a different message this time.

‘Listen very carefully, Mr Bernard. I have the final instruction.’

Gordon has told me how he could barely hear the voice on the phone for the sound of his heart pounding away. I know that feeling, what he was going through. This was it. This was the moment we had all been waiting for.

Gordon was given the name of a road, as usual. Instead of a building, however, he was told where to find a parked black Mercedes.

‘The back door is unlocked. On the back seat is a red blanket. Underneath the blanket is your Ben.’

Gordon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was this really it?

‘What are you waiting for? Go, go, go!’

Six minutes later, Gordon leapt out of his car, engine still running. Fanny Zahoo was still unbuckling her seat belt while Gordon was yanking open the Mercedes’ door. In one movement he tugged the red blanket out of the car and stared, open-mouthed.

The back seat was empty.

Gordon looked at the lawyer then back at the seat then up and down the street. The car hadn’t been locked. Could Ben have wandered away?

He knew that hadn’t happened. Someone had been monitoring them every second of the journey. It was impossible Ben would have been dumped here and abandoned. Not after so much elaborate planning. No, that hadn’t happened. Which only left one alternative.

‘He was lying right from the start.’

I’ve never heard Gordon angry but I bet Fanny Zahoo did. She told us that she was as every bit as furious as Gordon was.

‘So what, then?’ Gordon said, absolutely distraught. ‘Where is Ben? What has Bedzios done with him?’

It was a slow and sombre journey back to the lawyer’s office. After several attempts at calling Larissa prison, the phone rang. It was Bedzios. When Gordon had finished telling him what he thought of him, Bedzios put forward his defence.

‘You are a victim, I am a victim,’ he said. ‘Ben was there, I swear. And then they got cold feet. They worried about Ben identifying them to the police and so they took him away. I have been stabbed in the back. We all have. I’m sorry.’

Bedzios was sorry, Zahoo was sorry and Gordon was sorry. But not like me.

I had not moved more than an inch from my phone since Gordon’s call earlier that day. Anyone else who called I told to get off the line immediately. When it rang and I heard the distinctive hum and delay of an international exchange connecting me, I knew it was the call I’d been praying for.

Gordon began to speak. His normally rich voice was hollow. He was a powerful man with a position of strong authority but at that moment he sounded beaten.

‘I’m sorry, Kerry. Ben wasn’t there.’

To this day I still think Bedzios was telling the truth. I remember the way he looked me directly in the eyes when he spoke from his cell. Gordon, when he’d calmed down, also agreed that Bedzios sounded genuinely confused that someone had double-crossed him. The police, however, are convinced it was a con from start to
finish. As far as Athens is concerned, Bedzios’s testimony is tainted. If they thought he was a mythomaniac before, what they think of him now is unprintable. Why can’t they see that there’s nothing in it for him? His little boy, his own flesh and blood, was being looked after by the people he was accusing of having Ben. What sort of a warped mind would accuse those people with no proof?

As far as I’m concerned, Bedzios’s story is still a live investigation, even if the police don’t agree. He still gets in touch occasionally, although I refuse to see him until he promises me Ben.

But there is a twist in the tale. Two twists, actually. A few years later, the private detective Bakirtzis sued Christos Kerimi in court. I flew out with Dad to see it because I wanted to witness Kerimi under oath. I’m glad I did. When Bakirtzis got him onto the topic of Rabo, Kerimi admitted there were two boys in the camp. But, he claimed, he didn’t know who the other boy was.

And he wasn’t forced to say.

The lawyers just left it hanging. I wanted to shout out, ‘It was Ben! It was my Ben!’ but my mouth wouldn’t work. I realised I was scared of Kerimi. If the gypsy king had my Ben, or even knew where he was, I did not want to rile him into doing something silly.

Soon after the court case, Bakirtzis died of natural causes. I was sadder to learn that Bedzios’s little boy, Rabo, also did not survive. He was a bit backward when Mum and Dad first met him but he was nice, he had a good personality. When they next saw him he was in a wheelchair. He died before their next visit. I don’t know how Bedzios discovered the news. I just know that when Rabo died, Kerimi’s bargaining power over Bedzios died as well. If the gypsy did have my baby, what was stopping him from handing Ben back now?