Slave Girl (19 page)

I didn’t actually feel that lucky at the time. ‘Lucky’ wasn’t a word I could have used then to describe my existence in the District, and it would be a long time before I really grasped the truth of what Helène was saying. But I wasn’t paying that much attention to Helène anyway: my mum was there, her eyes glistening with tears and with love, and all I wanted was to be with her.

Throughout that day and the few that followed it – and in between the tablets and the regular periods of sleep I still needed – I told Mum everything, from the moment I stepped off the plane at Schiphol airport to the mad, frantic run from Gregor’s house. I’m sure it came out jumbled and messed up, with no real coherence as to what happened when or even where, but I don’t think I Ieft anything out.

Poor Mum. From being out of her mind with worry all those months, and then being given the news that her daughter was safe and alive, suddenly she had to absorb a concentrated dose of pure misery.

She’d been through a lot in her time, what with Dad’s violence and all the ducking and diving, but she’d never known such evil could exist. How would any normal person know about men like Gregor and Pavlov and the vile, debased world of the Red Light District? Her mind must have reeled under the onslaught of horror that poured out of my mouth. She cried – we both did – and felt sick, but not once did she ever think of not believing me. And for that I cannot thank her enough.

But as well as burdening her with my sorrows, there were questions I needed to ask Mum. What had she thought when my promised phone calls never came through? Why hadn’t she raised the alarm – after all, she’d been the one who had warned me, time and time again, about how dangerous Amsterdam would be? Surely when I simply disappeared she must have known that I was in danger and would have reported me missing?

But Mum looked at me blankly: ‘What do you mean you never phoned? Of course you phoned. I spoke to you several times. Don’t you remember?

‘It was always night-time when you phoned, and it was always really noisy so I could barely hear you. You always explained that you were in a bar – you’d gone there after work, after the crèche, with some of your friends. You never stayed on the phone long – you said it was too expensive. But you did ring me – of course you did. Do you think I wouldn’t have flown out here to look for you myself if I hadn’t heard from you?’

I was completely floored by this. I had absolutely no memory of making any phone calls to anyone, and there was no way, in any event, that Reece or Gregor would have allowed it. The risk to them would simply have been far too great. So who did Mum speak to?

In the end, we found the clue in what she’d said about it always being noisy and difficult to hear ‘me’ during the phone calls. Perhaps someone had called up pretending to be me and all the background racket had made it hard to recognise that my voice was so different? It seemed, on the face of it, rather unlikely, but then again, what other explanation could there be? Mum was adamant that she’d had the phone calls and I was equally certain that I hadn’t made them.

Of course these weren’t private sessions. Helène and Leon sat in on every minute of our talks, asking questions, prompting, pressing me for information. I found myself constantly surprised by how much they already knew – obviously they had other informants inside the District, tipping them off about the Mr Bigs who ran it, warning them when something major happened.

It was down to this that they were able to answer a question which had been nagging away at the back of my mind for the past few days. How had I been able to escape so easily from the sleeping room? What had happened to the other girls in the room – and where had Gregor and Pavlov gone, leaving me alone in the house for the first time?

Helène and Leon said there had been a rumour flying around the District – they didn’t know where it came from – that some arrests were about to be made. A lot of the major pimps and drug dealers – Gregor and Pavlov included – had suddenly found it advisable to get out of Amsterdam, leaving their henchmen to keep the windows running. They would be back – of course – but their unplanned flight had allowed me to get away. As to the other girls who had been in the room with me, Helène and Leon assumed they had made a run for it before I woke up.

Whatever the source of the rumour that had so scared Gregor and Pavlov, Helène and Leon told me their unit was very close to being ready to make mass arrests. They also warned me that I might be needed as a witness – but if that happened, they promised I would be given
round-the
-clock protection.

And then – the days had gone so fast – it was time to leave. Time to return to England, to Gateshead, and a normal, ordinary life. Suddenly, I was scared again. I wasn’t sure I was ready for normality – and what was normal for me anyway? I’d not exactly grown up playing Happy Families: abuse, care, more abuse, abortion … Not what you could call a wonderful childhood and adolescence.

And what about work? Who would want to employ me now? A woman who had spent the past few months exhibiting herself in a neon-lit window and fucking men for money? A crack whore. What sort of employer would look twice at me? Even if I could get through the day without my little white pills. Thankfully Helène understood – and said she had made arrangements.

‘You won’t be going back to work, Sarah – not for a long time. You’re a drug addict and what you have been through will have left terrible scars on your mind. We have arranged for you to spend some time in a hospital. It will keep you safe and they can help you with the drug dependency.

‘We have also arranged for the police in England to take care of you. They will be responsible for protecting you and making sure no one tries to contact you. It’s important because we want to catch the men who did all this to you. ‘Don’t worry. It will all be okay.’

She was kind and caring, and everything she said turned out to be true. Except for the last bit.

Eddie was a big, warm and lovely man; he was kindness itself and had the patience of a saint. But then again, with me he needed it.

Eddie was a sergeant in the Northumbria Police. He was assigned as my protection officer and I met him almost as soon as we landed back in Britain. But the first time he came to see me in the clinic where I was to stay I cowered down in the corner of the room refusing to speak to him, refusing even to look at him. Why? Because he was a man and a stranger – and I’d been trained to be terrified of strange men. But he persevered with me, coming to see me often and giving me his pager number.

‘Any problem – night or day – and I want you to call this number. I’ll be on the phone back to you
straightaway
. Understand?’

He was lovely and he cared, and I felt safer knowing that he was looking after my protection. But even Eddie couldn’t stop the time bomb that had been set ticking away inside me by those little white pills.

I still don’t quite understand how or why it happened, but the clinic kept me on the morphine-based medicine. Inevitably, it wasn’t long before I was hooked on them: from crack whore to smack
15
addict in less than a month.

By the time anyone realised, it was far too late. Maybe because my system had been weakened, and maybe because it was used to needing regular intakes of poisonous drugs, my body became dependent on the pills incredibly quickly.

The treatment for opiate addiction is methadone, a synthetic opiate, which lessens withdrawal pain and also partially blocks out the psychological need an addict feels for the comforting rush of their drug. The downside is that it tends to be seen as a solution in itself. Many recovering drug addicts are stuck on methadone for the rest of their life. I certainly have been.

Mum and my brother regularly came to visit me in the clinic. It was wonderful to see my brother again and to spend time with him – even if I must have either shocked or bored him rigid with accounts of my existence in the District.

And from time to time Eddie would show up, mostly just checking I was okay, sometimes with a titbit of news about the Dutch police investigation. One day he arrived with a look of grim excitement on his normally happy face.

‘They’ve made some arrests. Five people have been charged with very serious offences – people-trafficking,
gun-trafficking
; they’ve even got them for running a huge stolen car ring. That’s the good news.

‘The difficult bit is that they want you to go back over to Amsterdam, to take them round the Red Light District and identify a number of locations and places. And they want you to give them a very detailed statement which they can use in court. You might even need to give evidence. It’s a big ask – I know how scary it must seem. But I’ll be with you, and the Dutch police have promised to give you serious protection. Do you think you can do it?’

Could I? Was I strong enough to make the journey back to hell? Even with Eddie beside me and a contingent of armed policemen keeping guard? The more I thought about it the more terrified I became. I’d only just got out of the District with my life. How could anyone ask me to go back again?

The next few days were like being back in that police station on the day I escaped from Gregor’s. My body shook and I cried with fear – real, paralysing fear – and I made myself promise I’d say no. I was safe in the clinic; I was under medical supervision. Surely the Dutch police couldn’t make me do it, couldn’t make me go back?

But in the end I agreed. I had to; there was no other choice. Someone had to bear witness to the evil that Gregor and Pavlov carried out, and if it had to be me, then so be it. After all – or so I reasoned – I’ve been through the worst. Going back couldn’t be as bad as what I’d had to do there, and maybe it would be a chance to bring some sort of closure to that chapter of my life.

And it wasn’t so bad – though I was terrified throughout. Eddie and I flew to Schiphol together – how strange it seemed to be getting off a plane again there. The police met us at the gate and whisked us away to a hotel well outside the city centre; and then the interviews began.

Many of you will have witnessed a road accident. Maybe some of you will have seen a crime taking place. You’ll know how difficult it is to get even the simplest story right; how complicated it can be to give an account which accurately sets out the order in which things happen. Above all, you’ll know how long the process of giving a statement can be – much, much longer than seems likely at the outset.

Now imagine trying to do that through a haze of drug dependency. And try to picture attempting to make chronological – let alone logical – sense of months of almost random abuse, degradation and terror. Maybe that’s why relatively few court cases are ever brought against the men who control and make millions from the trade in human flesh. Maybe the sheer, mountainous task – a task which rests inevitably on the shoulders of women who have stared into the face of evil – is just too much to bear. Maybe that’s why there are so few convictions.

It took days to get through my interviews. Days of struggling to focus, to take my mind back, to recall my existence in the District and to make some sense of the madness I had endured there. It wasn’t easy. How do you put into words the numbing terror and longing for death? How can biro marks, scratched on a piece of plain white paper, ever convey the horror of watching the face of a fellow human being, blown to pieces a few feet from your own?

But somehow we got through it. And then, after the interviews were finally over, came the most difficult part of all: going back there, tramping through the streets of de Rosse Buurt again, coming face to face with the pimps and the pushers, and the poor, broken women imprisoned in their little glass cages with nothing but a bikini between them and the incessant stares from the punters. Nothing but the fear of their owners and the prospect of a hit on the crack pipe to keep them standing there like cattle, waiting to be sold.

Because nothing had changed in the time I had been away. Why should it? The whole vicious, inhuman business was still flourishing. Even the faces on the street – the running boys and the ‘Loverboy’ pimps – were the same.

‘Hey Little Princess, you come back. Looking good, Princess, looking real good. You ready for a little action again?’

But good came out of that evil. A lot of good, as it happens.

I was back in the clinic, a few weeks later, when Eddie came to see me. He was grinning: ‘I’ve got some good news and some fantastic news. Which do you want first?’

The good news was that the court case against the men arrested in Amsterdam was going ahead. Better still, I wasn’t going to have to testify against them: they’d all pleaded guilty – whether because of my statements or those of some other victim, Eddie didn’t know.

The next piece of fantastic news took my breath away: police in Leicestershire had arrested John Reece. The Dutch investigation had uncovered his role in trafficking women into the District – and had yielded enough hard evidence to round him up, bring him in and charge him. He was now on remand awaiting trial on two counts of causing prostitution and one count of living off immoral earnings.

There was, inevitably, a sting in the tale – two in fact. Firstly, and because all the charges related to what he’d done to me, I would have to make a statement and – unless he pleaded guilty – give evidence against him in court. As if that wasn’t enough, the second sting sent a strange shiver running through me: Sally had also been arrested and charged with the same crimes. My evidence would be used against her too.

Why did this shake me up so much? After all, Sally had played a full – a vital – part in tricking me; she’d helped lure me to Amsterdam and also been my minder in the early days, the physical barrier to any thoughts of running away. Why then did it seem so terrible to make a statement that could see her punished for what she had done?

Maybe it was because I knew she had been Reece’s pawn; maybe because of what she had been through with him – the beatings, the abuse, being forced to rent out her body to give him money … Maybe it was that. But there had also been a connection between us based not only on sympathy: the connection made by two human beings who saw in each other – whatever their circumstances – some hint of genuine friendship.