To a law-abiding person like Marlon Dingle (Mark Charnock) in Emmerdale, when you’re the victim of crime you go to the police and they help you, and the criminals end up in prison. Or, taking a more Dingle approach, you get Cain (Jeff Hordley) to give the bad people a slap and all’s well that ends well.
The situation that Marlon and his family currently find themselves in is not so easily solved, however. Basically they’re trapped in an absolute nightmare from which there doesn’t seem to be a way out because the bad people in this case are Ray Walters (Joe Absolom) and his boss/mother, the totally unscrupulous Celia Daniels (Jaye Griffiths).
April Windsor (Amelia Flanagan) became caught up in Ray and Celia’s web when she agreed to do some drug drops for her boyfriend Dylan (Fred Kettle), who had already been groomed by Ray into working as a drug dealer.
Soon April found herself in debt to Ray thanks to him arranging for a package she was delivering to be stolen – ensuring he had total control over her as she worked to pay off the debt.
April was also hired out to men who’d paid Celia to have sex with her. On one occasion when April realised she was about to be raped, she hit the client over the head with a bottle. She believes she killed him, although we’ve seen that he’s alive and well.
Marlon and Rhona (Zoe Henry) have tried everything they can think of to escape the situation, including putting themselves into significant debt to pay off the money Ray said April owed him.
Nothing has worked, and as a warning of how far they’re prepared to go, Celia arranged for Ray to run Dylan over, as April and her parents watched footage of the incident in horror.
In Monday (December 15)’s episode, Dylan was being woken from his induced coma by the hospital staff who’d been looking after him – and Marlon was pinning all of his hopes on the boy being able to tell the police that it was Ray who’d deliberately run him over.
As Dylan came round, April was sitting at his bedside. He told her that he was going to tell the police everything, including some information April doesn’t know about – which is that Celia and Ray are using slave labour on their farm, including Paddy (Dominic Brunt)’s dad Bear (Joshua Richards).
But when DS Carter (Lisa Diveney) went to interview Dylan, she came out of the room having learned nothing more. Dylan had told her he couldn’t remember anything.
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Marlon was desperate. He told the police officer that his family were being extorted for money – surely that was enough to arrest Ray and Celia?
She said that she could have them arrested, but there was so little evidence that they’d be back on the streets within hours. She begged Marlon to bear with the police as they try to build a case.
But Marlon, who knows exactly what dangers his family has already faced and what might happen to them in the future, was in despair.
‘We’re on our own,’ he realised.
