I had agreed to affirm to tell the truth, rather than swear on a Holy book, so this done, the prosecuting barrister stepped forward. I stared at her. I’d seen the name ‘W. Jones’ written down a few times and assumed it would turn out to be ‘Wyn Jones,’ a middle-aged Welsh guy. But she wasn’t Welsh and she wasn’t male and she wasn’t white. Ms. Winsome Jones was a big busty thirtyish black female with hair cut short into sculptured angles with shaven sides. I immediately relaxed. She smiled reassuringly at me, and started the questioning. I kept my eyes fixed firmly on her face. I still hadn’t allowed myself to look around yet.
Her line of questioning though, was a shock. She asked me to look along the line of the accused and identify Hussein. I stared at her. She looked firmly back at me. “Look along the line of men and tell me which one is Hussein.”
Reluctantly I raised my eyes and swept them as fast and as unfocused as I could manage along the line. And the first face I saw was Mohammed’s. My heart lurched and I tasted bile in my throat. Don’t for God’s sake throw up, I told myself, swallowing hard.
I looked quickly back at Ms. Winsome Jones. “The third one from the left,” I muttered.
“Speak up so that the whole court can hear you,” she said. “Which one of the men do you identify as Hussein?”
“Third one from the left,” I said loudly after a momentary pause while I gathered up my guts and dampened down my temper. God, I hope she isn’t going to turn out to be a complete cow, I thought.
She looked me in the eye. “Tell me what happened between yourself and Hussein five years ago when you were only sixteen,” she instructed.
I stared at her. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might come up. But of course it was relevant. It showed that Hussein was already violent and a danger to young women years before the crimes in question. I tried to think how to frame it.
“When I was sixteen, Hussein was a bouncer at the ‘Golden Disc’-”
She glanced down at her notes. “A night club in this town, recently shut down,” she clarified, looking back up at me for confirmation.
“Yes, that’s right,” I agreed. Shut down now was it? I hadn’t known that. It had always been shite. It had only ever seemed intoxicatingly exotic when we were too young to legally get in. Once they started implementing proper age-checks they’d probably gone bust!
“Continue,” she reminded me with a sharp look.
“Ok, so he used to hang out with the other bouncers who were called Luke Beck, Sy Davis and Tino.” I went on to briefly tell the court about them turning up and accusing me of something I hadn’t done, bundling me in their car, hitting me, taking me to an isolated set of garages, where they threatened me with rape and started taking some of my clothes off, then threw me into the boot of a car along with my next door neighbour, Adam Quinn, also only sixteen, and left us locked in the boot of that car with the car locked into a garage. Then I detailed how when they came back they hauled us out, doused Quinn in petrol and threatened to set him alight, finally punching Quinn around a bit before driving off. She kept stopping me to identify exactly which guy had done what – trying to draw out of me which actions were specifically by Hussein.
“And now tell the court what happened a few days later?”
I explained how Luke Beck, Sy Davis and Hussein turned up at the garage and beat me up, leaving me unconscious in a pool of blood in below zero temperatures.
“Anything else?” She asked. I wasn’t sure if she knew about something that I ought to be saying, or whether it was just speculative to give me an opportunity to speak out.
“Yes,” I said suddenly. “Yes, I was always seeing his car parked outside the set of flats I lived in when I was eighteen. The basement flat under us had been turned into a sort of brothel, though I didn’t realise it until it had been going on for months.” I went on to explain that we’d found two trafficked girls in the basement flat, who were being used as prostitutes, one of them handcuffed to the bed, that we’d had to rescue in the floods that happened in the November of that year, who would have drowned if we hadn’t heard their cries for help. “After the girls were taken away by the police, his car stopped parking outside,” I said. “And then, a couple of years later I went into a newsagent and saw Hussein in there, talking to an Asian guy who tried to kerb crawl me and my flatmate, Daisy, when we were coming home from a jog back in the days when I lived there.”
One of the other lawyers, presumably Hussein’s, stood up and complained about the line of questioning, saying what I had said contained no facts, but merely implied slurs based on circumstantial evidence. The judge told Ms. Jones to move on, but I saw her hide a flash of triumph in her eyes as she turned back to me. I’d have put all sorts of doubts into the minds of the jurors about Hussein’s role with the trafficked prostitutes, which although disallowed, couldn’t be unsaid.
From that point on Ms. Jones took me onto the main story. From what Jessica had initially confided in me, through to me finding Jessica alone in that carload of older Asian men, through to me deciding to go undercover, and getting in contact with the investigative reporters who set me up with the recording equipment and GPS locator. And then the Judge stopped us for a mid-morning break.
Out in the victims and witnesses safe room, Ms. Jones came to find me curled up defensively in a corner chair, a polystyrene cup of tea in my hand.
“Do you have anyone with you supporting you?” She asked after her eyes had flickered briefly round the empty room.
I shook my head.
“What, no-one at all?” She established. “Not even a Victim Support worker?”
“Apparently I’m an adult and don’t count as a victim, so don’t qualify for any special measures,” I said expressionlessly.
“You’re doing well,” she encouraged me. “Keep up that calm approach. But don’t be afraid to show distress when you remember something – it helps the jurors connect with you, reminds them how upsetting and shocking the events are. Otherwise you may come across as cold and calculating and they’ll start thinking this is just a vendetta.”
“It’s so humiliating,” I muttered. “I don’t want to give those men the chance to see me upset and to feel like they’ve succeeded in hurting and scaring me.”
“Don’t think about what the men are thinking. Think about what the jurors are thinking. They’re the ones you need to get on your side. They need to think that those men are so disgusting and dangerous that they need to be put away.”
I screwed up my now emptied polystyrene cup. “And we haven’t even got onto the sexual stuff yet – it’s all so humiliating!”
“Nothing actually happened to you though, right?” She established, her eyes efficiently dissecting my face.
I glanced briefly at her and quickly away.
That was enough for her to know. “Tell me,” she ordered, with swiftly narrowed eyes.
I told her.
“You didn’t put that in your statement, so they’ll say you added it later,” she predicted, with a momentary flash of irritation crossing her face.
“It was too embarrassing,” I muttered.
“You’re muttering again,” she said sharply. “I know you thought I was a bitch at the beginning, but honestly, I just needed you to get used to speaking up. And you needed to overcome the hurdle of taking a look at those men right from the off. Because you’re going to have to confront each one in turn over the next few days, and you can’t be scared of them.”
She glanced at her watch then turned towards the door, then she paused and glanced back at me. “Actually, I spotted Sahmir in the public gallery,” she told me. “So maybe you’re not completely on your own after all…”
This time I glanced up at the public gallery when I re-took the witness stand. Sahmir was seated up at my end. He was looking fixedly at me as though willing me to look up. When I caught his gaze he smiled at me. God, he was brave. In the public gallery he wouldn’t be protected from the family of the accused and he’d be hav
ing to sit next to some of the ones who had threatened him, and yet he was willing to do that to support me.
Ms. Jones got my attention and ploughed on.
First of all she insisted I rolled up my sleeve and show the court the burn marks on the inside of my elbow and asked me how they had got there. I explained about the girls being marked according to which gang they were being run by, and that I had made the first mark myself which would signal I belonged to Kaz’s group.
“We’ll get to the other scars later,” she said. Then she took me through my initial meetings with Stacey, a girl who was being controlled by Hussein’s gang, and the revelations that came out those conversations that made me turn to the Acharyas to try to ascertain the truth of her claim that an injured girl was dumped outside the hospital by Kaz’s gang. And she went on to get me to explain the supervisory role that the Acharyas took with me.
It just went on and on. I became increasingly exhausted. Lunch time came. I curled up in the private room and didn’t bother to eat. Every time I mentioned someone new I was made to look at him and identify him. The worst moment was when I was made to identify Mohammed. I tried to blur out but he looked straight at me and I found myself focusing. My heart lurched momentarily and then I looked back again and stared. Was Sappho right? Did he look like Nish? He stared in a hard intimidating way back at me. I frowned. Not sure. Sort of. To me, Nish was Nish, but I guess he did a bit. But Nish was definitely better looking. And Nish had an open, honest, clean-living sort of face. Actually that moment helped. In my deliberations, I had unconsciously stared straight at him for quite a length of time, studying him closely and forgetting to be intimidated. In the end it was he that looked away first.
It was afternoon before we got onto the sexual stuff. I was grilled in embarrassing detail, made to identify the two men who’d I’d been watching, invited to say what age the girls looked and whether it appeared consensual on their part. And then she jolly well made sure that I had to tell the whole court that Mohammed had a hard on and made me sit on it and whenever I tried to squirm away, he manoeuvred me back on it.
“But this isn’t on your statement,” she confronted me, sounding outraged. “Why not? Why are you telling us now in court when you didn’t tell the police?”
I kept my eyes on hers so I didn’t have to look anywhere else. “Because it’s a humiliating and embarrassing thing to have to admit to, and I felt so contaminated afterwards I wanted to pour boiling water over myself and burn all my skin off, because showering just didn’t make me feel clean enough. And then, because I went into this surveillance operation voluntarily, the police didn’t appear to consider me a victim, so they often didn’t bother to make sure I had a female police officer interviewing me. And when I was interviewed about both these occasions there was more than one male in the room, so I didn’t feel able to speak about it.”
She nodded, and momentarily a look of sympathy came into her eyes, and also speculation. She’s wondering what else I held back because I wasn’t interviewed carefully enough, I thought. And then I remembered something.
“Actually, I have been recorded speaking about this at the time,” I remembered suddenly. “Dr Acharya recorded every supervision interview with me. She started out doing it to cover her own back, but later she decided to make a training package about how the process of grooming works, and how it affects the victims, and I told her in detail about it. You could ask her for access to the recordings if you like.”
Ms. Jones looked at one and the same time, cross that she hadn’t known about these before, and triumphant that we had definitive proof to hold up when the defending barristers started accusing me of making things up after the event.
She made me show the court my arm again, and the second mark that Mohammed had made. “And how did you react to him doing that?”
“I’m ashamed to say, I burst into tears.”
“Why ‘ashamed to say’?”
“It’s not my style. But he took me by surprise. I was so shocked when he just suddenly did it without asking permission. I wasn’t ready for it. He ignored my repeated refusals to be marked as his and just did it anyway, I felt betrayed.”
Unfortunately, when she asked me to identify the men that were there from Kaz’s group who had taken us up to Glasgow, I had to let her down. I looked hard at the faces of the men I didn’t know and then had to admit that I couldn’t say for sure that those were the same men.
“But you were in their company for many hours!” She exclaimed at me. “Why can’t you recognise them?”
I frowned and bit my lip. “Within minutes of dragging me into the car they forced some sort of drug down my throat and washed it down with vodka and I wasn’t aware of anything after that until we arrived into Glasgow. And then, when we were at the flat, it was the middle of the night and they woke me up from sleep to make me line up with the rest to be picked, so my memory of their faces is vague.”
I assumed that I’d completely cocked it up for her with this, but she told me afterwards not to beat myself up over it. She explained that there was a plus side to it. I’d shown I was willing to admit when I couldn’t remember something, and that I was willing to be truthful about when I couldn’t definitely confirm something.
She made me show my arm for a third time. “Explain to us what that third scar is on your inner elbow.”
I explained about cutting open a vein so I could bleed on a thirteen year old girl’s underwear to try to save her from a rape by pretending she was on her period. I heard a bit of an intake of breath around the public gallery and from the jurors’ seats.
“One of the other girls suggested that they must have brought her along because someone had asked for a virgin,” I said. “So I had to take a punt on them wanting vaginal sex with her, and not substituting it with some other orifice.”
Finally it was nearly over. The Judge was glancing at the clock and conferring with Ms. Jones who asked permission to finish the Prosecution questioning today.
“Finally, Ms. McGinty,” Ms. Jones said. “Would you say that you were a racist?”
I stared at her. She stared back at me. In my head I thought, you’re black and I’m as white and blonde as they come and I bet you’re thinking, ‘of course she’s a racist, everyone is racist’.
“No, I’m not,” I said firmly.
“So you weren’t racially motivated to discredit the Pakistani community of this town due to some pre-conceived prejudice?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“And yet you helped Nasim, the older sister of Sahmir, twice run away from home to escape an alleged forced marriage, and as a consequence had your house firebombed by Nasim’s older brother Tariq? Didn’t that make you feel angry and prejudiced against the local Pakistani community?”
I hesitated. “Nasim, Sahmir and Tariq are British, not Pakistani.” I asserted. “So are most of those men standing there. If you’re born in Britain, you’re British.”
“But they’re not following British cultural norms are they?” She pursued.
I frowned. “Obviously, by being Muslim, they are out of step with some of the values of a secular western country, but I would say that those men are not being good Muslims either. The Qur’an doesn’t tell you to rape and torture little girls for fun, profit and sexual gratification, and I’m sure that the majority of other Muslims in this town will condemn what they have done as ‘un-Islamic’. Criminals and paedophiles come in all colours and nationalities.”
“Thank you, Ms. McGinty, we’ll leave it there,” Ms. Jones said.
Outside the court room she told me that I’d done well, but to brace myself for some unpleasant and intrusive questioning for the rest of the week once the Defence barristers started on me. I felt so drained I could barely speak or respond. She squeezed my shoulder briefly and told me to eat properly and get a good night’s sleep. “Shall I ring for a taxi for you?” She offered.
“I’m not very keen on taxis at the moment,” I said in du
ll tones.
We were standing just into the public area of the court buildings and I saw Sahmir come out of a door and then look around and see me. He walked over.
“Do you want a lift back to Suki’s?” He asked me. Suki is what her immediate family called Chetsi, but I preferred to stick to the name she’d asked me to call her.
Ms. Jones smiled and moved off.
Sahmir and I walked to his car in silence. I noticed he was on high alert all the time as we walked out of the witness entrance and over to the carpark. We got in and put the seatbelts on, still in silence.
“Thanks for coming,” I said at last. And then I started to cry.
He took his hand away from the ignition key. “It’ll get worse,” he warned. “They’ll accuse you of racism and go into your sexual history.”
“What’s my sexual history got to do with anything?” I snapped, wiping at my eyes. “They can’t have taken that approach with you, surely?”
“No, they said I was targeting Hussein as a vendetta to settle a score due to him being the cause of my brother ending up in prison. They accused me of making it all up to please you because I was in love with you and because I was desperate for attention. And they claimed that because I’d never had sex I’d made it up as a sexual fantasy to masturbate to, based on pornography that I’d seen.”
I stared at him. “Oh my God! Sahmir…” I was appalled. “You had to tell the court that you’d never had sex? Oh my God… And they accused you of being in love with me and masturbating to pornography?” Shit. I sat in silence for a moment then I gave a sort of un-humorous laugh. “God, it just shows the double standards, doesn’t it? When I’m sitting here thinking how humiliating it must be for a man to have to admit to being a virgin, when it’s the other way round for a girl – it’s considered honourable for her to be a virgin and humiliating for her to have to admit to having had sex…”
The Way Back Page 24