Monday 12 May 2014

Story Episode 4


I had managed to escape my confinement, along with a fellow prisoner.  We found that we were in Dorset, quite close to Dorchester. This was welcome news as I know the area well. I lived and worked down here for a while and my wife and I also still come down here quite often for short breaks.
My companion and I had stopped by the roadside at the crossroads and I had used the guard's mobile phone to contact my wife Penny. She will drive down and meet us at our favourite pub where we can stay, hopefully out of harm's way, for a day or two while we look into what has been going on.
As well as the food and drink that I took from the guard's room I have the files that I removed from the filing cabinet in the interview room. It was time to take a quick look. One will presumably be for my new companion so I can find out who he is and he can be reminded too as he is still currently suffering from memory loss.
Picking out the file with his photo on it I see that his name is David Graham. So I say to him "Hi David".  After a brief look of incomprehension he replies "Oh God, yes. But you can call me Dave." I introduce myself as Gray (short for Graham) and run through the plan I have agreed with my wife.  It will take her a while to get down to Dorset but I think we should get on our way in case our escape has been discovered and people are coming after us.
However I just want a quick look at the other two files to see who else has been kept at the prison hideaway. What I see in the next file makes me shudder. It is for Tom Smith who is one of my Master's degree students at the University of the South of England where I work in the Computing Studies department.  I have been supervising Tom's dissertation, although I haven't seen him since before Easter.  This hadn't worried me until now because Tom is a highly self-motivated student who doesn't need constant advice and guidance on his work.
But now I think I am beginning to understand what might be going on. Tom was working on a topic about stolen online payments when he thought that he had tracked down a rogue group from the security group G4S who were cheating their own company.  Now I don't particularly like G4S. They failed to provide the staff they had promised for the 2012 London Olympics, in 2013 they charged the government for tagging people who were not actually being monitored, including tags for people in prison or out of the country, and a small number who had died, and had done so since 2005. Worse than that, in 2010 G4S guards were responsible for the death of an Angolan deportee as he was over-zealously held down on the British Airways plane that was to take him out of the country. But it was interesting to discover that some of their employees might be ripping them off too. 
Because of my supervisory role I had started to look into the issue too and presumably the rogue G4S guys had realised that both Smith and Jones were on their case and had taken action against us.
The fourth file was for someone called Ken Miller. When I showed it to Dave he went white and told me that it was his line manager in the special investigations section of Barclay's Bank where they both worked. Ken had gone missing a few weeks ago and the bank thought that he had absconded with a large chunk of their funds. But before he had disappeared Ken had told Dave about the investigation he was carrying out. Probably the bank now thought that Dave had also been cheating on them. The rogue G4S guys could make the four of us look like the villains of the piece.

I said to Dave that we should be moving on. We could look at the files more closely once we got to the pub. So on we went, arriving at the pub rather tired but more confident that we could do something about our fate. We had rediscovered who we were and what we did, and we had a pretty good idea why what had happened to us had come about.
Stan, the landlord at the pub, knows me well and greeted us warmly. I told him that Penny was coming down and that we needed two rooms for at least one night. We had some food and drink and then went to Dave's room to take a closer look at the files. What we saw there was pretty scary and made us very concerned for the welfare of Ken and Tom.

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