Alan drifted away from home in his 20s and, for 26 years, we didn’t even know if he was alive. Then we discovered the awful truth – for that whole time, he had been kept in modern-day slavery

I was at work when I got the call from the human trafficking unit. I work for the health service and occasionally need to carry out database searches for the police. This call was from an officer who asked if I could search for a possible former patient who used to live locally.

A receptionist had taken the original call and I remember being slightly irked as she had interrupted me as I was interviewing for a new staff member. But thank God she did. What happened next was extraordinary and still feels like something out of a film.

The name the officer gave was that of my brother, whom I hadn’t seen for more than a quarter of a century. But I still assumed it was a coincidence as it was such a common name. It was only when I asked for the date of birth, and it matched Alan’s, that I felt as if my heart had stopped.

I knew in that instant that we had found Alan. Desperately trying to stay composed, I blurted out his middle name, and asked whether it matched.

“How did you know that?” she asked.

“I think this is my brother. He has been missing for 26 years.”

Both of us were stunned. What were the chances of a professional call about a missing person coming through to his own sister? But the real shock was still to come – the reason that Alan, my big brother, had disappeared for all that time was because he had been held by a slavery gang. It was beyond comprehension.

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My maternal instinct kicked in. More than anything, I was desperate to see Alan.

But it would be weeks before that wish was granted. The officer explained that she would speak to Alan and call me back, but also warned that she might need to talk to my mum.

I drove straight to Mum’s flat. As soon as she saw my red, puffy eyes, she knew something was wrong. And that is how I had to tell her: Alan wasn’t dead, he was alive, but had been held captive as a slave for 26 years. The blood drained from her face. Like me, she struggled to take in this monumental and distressing news.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The people enslaved by the Rooney family lived in basic caravans with no running water or toilet facilities. Photograph: Lincolnshire police/PA

It was all so far from the years when we were children, running through local fields, playing hide and seek, without a care in the world. Back then, I thought our endless days of playing in the sunshine would last for ever.

I know now, though, that life is never that simple and uncomplicated, but not for one minute could I have envisaged the way our lives would change beyond anything we could ever truly understand.

We grew from kids to teenagers and while my life and that of my other brother continued on a fairly normal route towards establishing careers and buying our first homes, Alan started to stray from the path. He had always been such a happy boy, the joker of the class and always smiling, with a huge affection for animals. In many ways, he was quite gullible but we always put it down to his sensitive and caring nature.

However, we soon learned that his easy-to-love persona masked problems. Not long after having the whooping cough vaccine at four, Alan had started having seizures. Consequently, his education suffered and, despite Mum’s desperate pleas to health professionals that Alan had been left with mild learning difficulties, she was told she was being over-anxious and there was nothing wrong.

While Mum could protect him as a child, it was very different when he became a teenager. Easily manipulated, he got in with the wrong crowd and what started as dabbling in substance abuse quickly escalated to much harder drugs.

We were all devastated. When did we lose the little boy who would run up to us all for cuddles? He would turn up to the house so high that Mum often feared for her own safety.

He drifted away from us, coming home less and less. It was in the days before mobile phones, so we relied on the odd sighting from friends – he was spotted at soup kitchens and drop-in centres. As much as it left us empty and incredibly sad, we resigned ourselves to the fact that Alan had made a lifestyle choice, and we all just hoped that one day he would turn his life around and come back to us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the caravans in which the Rooney’s victims lived. Photograph: Lincolnshire police

But by the time he was 25, the sightings had stopped. There was the odd rumour had moved to Brighton, but, in reality, none of us had any idea.

By the time Mum was 76, we had all but given up hope of ever learning what had happened to Alan, or that we might one day get a knock on the door from the police with news of his death. What I could never have envisaged was the way in which I got that call in June 2015, and what we would subsequently discover.

After the initial contact, we gradually learned the truth – that Alan had been kept as a slave by a family in Lincolnshire who targeted homeless people and men with learning difficulties, taking them off the streets with the promise of work and shelter. In fact, he was held captive the longest.

All 18 vulnerable victims were denied access to money, beaten into submission, given false identities and stripped of all their dignity. While their captors, the Rooney family, lived in luxury on a Traveller site, the people they held captive were made to work seven days a week laying drives, and lived in basic caravans with no running water or toilet facilities. They were paid in cheap cider, which promoted alcohol dependency, giving the Rooneys another way to control them.

The judge at the trial of 11 family members, Timothy Spencer QC, described their behaviour as “chilling in their mercilessness”.

After being rescued, Alan had been kept in a safe house, then a hostel, where he had received medical attention and support to help him readjust back into society. With the sketchy family details Alan could recall, the police had been trying to find us.

Two days after the initial call, we spoke to Alan on the phone. Initially, he was monosyllabic and talked in a monotone. I knew that victims were left extremely withdrawn after years of being institutionalised. But when I handed the phone to Mum, Alan said: “It’s so good to hear your voice.” Somehow, we all managed to stay composed, but once we had said our goodbyes, the tears came.

Over the following weeks, we spoke more and more and I emailed Alan, filling in him on the years he had missed. I even created a photo album of his childhood to try to help him reconnect to his roots.

I thought my heart would break, and I felt an overwhelming guilt for not trying to search for my brother sooner. But despite our regrets, Alan never appeared to hold it against us.

Two months after that first phone call, we finally got to see him. My husband and I, along with Mum and our other brother, drove to a pub for the meeting. It was an agonising journey. My stomach churned the whole way and all I could do was gently grip Mum’s hand – none of us had any idea what to expect.

As Alan was led into the pub, it took every ounce of energy I could muster to stop myself falling to my knees and sobbing. That is not how I wanted him to remember the reunion – I wanted it to be a happy occasion; a new and positive start. So, instead, as I held him in my arms, my face crumpled into his shoulder. I never wanted to let him go again.

Once we had all had as many hugs as Alan could cope with, we talked and talked – mainly about our children and the rest of the family. But it was very evident that Alan’s time in captivity had only added to the problems he had had when he vanished all those years earlier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Rooney family who were jailed for 79 years in total for modern day slavery and fraud. Photograph: Lincolnshire police/EPA

He ate a salad with his hands, laughed inappropriately and too loudly and was not in very good shape physically. He had missing teeth and the few he had left were rotten, and he was extremely gaunt with greying skin.

I wanted to fix him, to make him better and to smother him with love.

That Christmas, Alan came to stay at our home and we soon discovered another problem when we found the bin full of empty beer cans.

In January last year, Alan agreed to come and live with us. I yearned to mother him, to give him a life he had missed out on, but I had to respect his need for independence and accept his way of living. He still drank too much and his learning disabilities meant he had many childlike attributes – he would laugh nervously and get very excitable.

Psychological testing revealed that Alan also had Stockholm syndrome. He saw his captors as “nice blokes, who looked after me and stuck up for me”.

In the six-month trial that began in November 2016 at Nottingham crown court, it soon became evident that was part of the ringleaders’ modus operandi. The Rooney family may have beaten their victims and left them to live in squalid conditions, but they gave them a place to live – something many of them had previously lost.

The Rooneys themselves lived a life of luxury in palatial homes, holidaying in Barbados and driving high-performance cars, using drugs, alcohol and violence to entrap their victims. Judge Timothy Spencer QC told the head of the family, Martin Rooney Senior, that the gulf between the lives of his relations and their workers was “akin to the gulf between medieval royalty and the peasantry”. He said the victims had been “stripped of dignity and humanity, and confined to a life of drudgery” that they had no way of escaping.

In total, the perpetrators were jailed for 79 years for modern-day slavery and fraud.

Was it any compensation? In some ways, yes. The case brought modern day slavery to the forefront. I hope it means people will now be more aware that human trafficking does exist.

In other ways, no. Alan will never get those years back – he has lost a huge chunk of his life. We are slowly trying to help him readjust. He now has his own flat, he cycles to see his friends and comes to have dinner with us whenever he wants. My mum got her son back, we have our brother, but Alan will never be the carefree spirit we lost all those years ago.

Names have been changed