Ordeal: Lauren Caton
The scene could easily come from a dark Hollywood thriller. A busy shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, where a waiter from a fast-food restaurant is taking a break outside. Suddenly a young woman walks past — she's the same woman he saw earlier with an abusive customer who'd sworn and ranted at him over some minor issue with his order.
She makes eye contact, before suddenly dropping a screwed-up paper towel on the table, which then tumbles onto the floor and lands at his feet.
He opens it and reads the following disturbing words: 'Don't make a scene but I am a missing person. Please call police. Please act normal, don't say anything, just call police.'
Is this a joke? He thinks back to the bully and the cowed, silent girl who'd been at his side. He makes the call.
No, this isn't an imagined script, it actually happened.
And the young woman — Lauren Caton, a 19-year-old British girl, just weeks into a foreign adventure working in a bar in Portugal, was lucky to escape with her life after she was kidnapped, raped, beaten and held against her will in her attacker's gated mountain home.
Lauren eventually got away after ten days by convincing her captor she wouldn't try to flee — and accompanying him on a shopping trip, pretending to be his friend.
At a court in Portugal this month, Donald Fernandes, a dangerous, 37-year-old Canadian-Portuguese national with a previous conviction for manslaughter, was jailed — leaving Lauren, from South-East London, free to tell her astonishing story.
Her attacker, it transpired, had a long and disturbing criminal record going back decades.
Portuguese police eventually linked Lauren's case to that of another woman, a Brazilian tourist, who had also been kidnapped by Fernandes and had escaped just a few days before the British girl's ordeal began.
Despite going to police, the Brazilian woman wasn't formally interviewed until June 2019, by which time Lauren had also become a victim.
When officers searched his villa, the passport of another young woman was also found among Fernandes's possessions, along with a 9mm gun, an air pistol and a baseball bat in the boot of his Mercedes car.
In Canada, where he once ran his own construction company, he had spent seven years in jail for manslaughter after acting as a getaway driver in a bungled robbery, during which a 66-year-old man was shot dead in 2003.
Pictured: The Algarve villa
He escaped from jail in the middle of his sentence and spent six days on the run before surrendering during an armed stand-off with police.
In Portugal, where he ran a holiday letting business and worked as an Uber driver, Fernandes had previously been arrested for rape, making threats to kill, fraud and firearms offences.
Lauren has bravely waived her right to anonymity, determined to speak out about her ordeal so that others may understand the psychological complexity of rare and highly disturbing cases like hers, where women are abducted by sex attackers and kept in a state of paralysing fear by mental as well as physical violence.
'You watch films and think you know what you'll do in a situation like that,' says Lauren, who is now 21 and works as a manager at world-renowned show-jumping stables in France.
'The reality is totally different. I was terrified for my life and frightened to do anything that might tip him over the edge. He was clearly mentally unstable and I thought he would kill me.'
Her trip to Portugal was something thousands of teenagers undertake every year. Having left school at 16, horse-mad Lauren was looking to explore the world.
Donald Fernandes
She and a friend had visited Luxembourg, Austria and the Czech Republic before arriving in Portugal in April 2019.
They found work at a bar in the Algarve resort of Vilamoura. It was there, on May 27, that Lauren first saw Fernandes, with a couple of male friends.
Born in Canada, and with fluent English, he told her he'd recently opened a bar. He invited Lauren and some of her female co-workers to visit his new business, with a view to offering them employment.
Gladly, the girls agreed to go. And to start with, it all seemed perfectly plausible.
'We had a drink at a bar he claimed he was buying,' she says. 'It was very much a business chat. I was giving him ideas on how to make it appeal to British tourists. He was quite serious, almost sweet. There was nothing that made alarm bells ring. A girl I worked with knew him.'
When it was time to leave, Lauren realised she had no data left on her mobile phone and had no way to call a taxi. It was nearly 4am and her work friends had already left. When Fernandes offered her a lift home, she accepted.
'Looking back, it was a stupid thing to have done,' she says. 'It's the thing your mum always tells you not to do: accept a lift from a stranger. But I didn't think I had anything to worry about.'
Just a few minutes into the journey, Lauren realised her terrible mistake. Fernandes took a phone call and began shouting.
'I could hear a woman on the other end crying,' says Lauren.
'He hung up and threw the phone on the floor of the car. I started to think I could be in trouble. But I didn't say anything. I just went very quiet.'
Moments later, Fernandes stopped to pick up a woman — she was, it turned out, the woman he'd been shouting at on the phone.
Lauren was ordered to get in the back of the car, but when she tried to open the door to get out, he locked the doors, pulled her hair and pushed her into the back through the gap between the front seats.
'My adrenaline was going through the roof,' says Lauren.
'Then the woman said something that made my blood run cold. She said: 'What girl have you picked up this time'?'
Lauren became hysterical and begged Fernandes to take her home. 'He screamed at me then and said he'd kill me and bury me,' she says.
The woman in the car — later identified as Fernandes's girlfriend — alternated between shouting and trying to calm her down.
'I was petrified,' adds Lauren. 'I had no idea what he was capable of or if I'd see my family again. I thought about trying to jump out of the car but I was afraid that if I did, he'd kill me there and then.'
After a 20-minute journey, they arrived at Fernandes's home in the village of Benfarras, entering the driveway via tall electric gates which shut behind them.
Inside the house, Fernandes and his girlfriend began shouting at each other, a verbal fight which soon became physical.
When he began to beat the other woman, Lauren tried to intervene, only to be beaten by Fernandes.
The woman appeared frightened, beholden and subservient to him. Like a captive herself. Theirs was a strange relationship, she quickly established. 'I've blocked out a lot of what happened,' Lauren says. 'I remember curling up in a ball on the floor and him kicking me.'
After resuming their own fight, Fernandes stabbed his girlfriend in the arm.
'It was bleeding really badly,' says Lauren. 'Then she ran out of the house and it was just him and me. I was in shock. I couldn't believe what was happening.'
Fernandes sexually assaulted Lauren, the first of such attacks and rapes he committed while she was held captive. Afterwards, he ordered her into the car and they set off looking for his girlfriend.
'I tried to signal to the car behind without
