The Way Back

by Dominique Kyle

  Thank goodness for that! I thought.

  When I walked out of the witnesses’ entrance I found both Sahmir and Paul Satterthwaite standing there. I stopped short. “Have you been here all day?” I asked Paul slightly aggressively. I hoped he hadn’t.

  “Yes, I thought I’d better turn up for at least one day to find out what they were putting you through,” he said.

  I was glad I hadn’t known he was there, what with having to talk about sexual stuff.

  “And Sahmir here introduced himself and kindly took me under his wing for the day…” He smiled slightly at Sahmir.

  I looked at Sahmir. “Was that broadly how you thought it would go?” I enquired.

  Sahmir frowned. “Well they were certainly doing their best to imply slurs on you left, right and centre… But I never expected Mohammed to keep getting the giggles…”

  I smiled. “Yes, he did, didn’t he? And then he’d nearly set me off!”

  “I expected him to absolutely hate you…” Sahmir said in puzzled tones, “and glare at you threateningly.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’s just a complete sucker for blondes,” I speculated. “Or maybe he was trying to seduce me into not saying anything bad about him. Some of the girls in the other cases remained in love with their abusers to the end of the trials…”

  Sahmir thought about this. So did I. Maybe that was it? Yet again it was all a clever ploy from him to get me back under his sway. Dammit! And I’d gone and fallen for it yet again!

  “And then you said you liked him!” Sahmir said accusingly.

  I sighed. “Not exactly. I just was honest about the fact that one of his redeeming features is his sense of humour. Come on Sahmir, cut me some slack!” I defended. “The fact that you saw him creasing up in there just goes to prove my point!” I sighed again. “It was one of the things I had to talk out with Chetsi. It was getting me all confused that sometimes I found myself almost liking him… I mean, you expect them to be complete monsters, but they’re not, are they? Some of the time they’re just normal.”

  Sahmir bit his lip and looked away from me into the middle distance. He must know what I was talking about. He’d had a passing acquaintance with Hussein Malik for most of his childhood and still hadn’t realised what the guy was involved in.

  Paul was standing there quietly, just listening in. When I glanced at him he looked severe. “You know exactly what I’m going to pick you up on, don’t you?”

  I opened my eyes innocently wide. It didn’t take him in. “So what did you and my daughter do to his car?”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with your daughter,” I said quickly.

  “No, I’m sure it wasn’t,” he agreed dryly.

  “I made her change places with me.”

  Sahmir looked sideways at me. “So go on then, what did you do to him?” He was grinning.

  “I tempted him into following me fast down a main road then slammed my brakes on. Then I lay in wait for him up a side street and slammed him sideways across the road up onto the pavement and into a wall, and then I drove fast at him from the opposite direction and scraped his Cayman all the way down one side,” I admitted.

  “Awesome!” Sahmir responded admiringly. “Wish I’d seen his face..!”

  “Yeah, Jo said that if he hadn’t wanted to kill me before, he certainly would do now, but he’d have to wait in line until she’d finished with me first…” I reported.

  “Yes, that sounds like my daughter,” Paul directed sardonically at me. “So why did I never see the damage done to her car?”

  I shrugged. “Pete and Jo said you’d take me off the insurance if you ever find out, so we left her car at work and the guys were so made up at the revenge I’d wreaked, they all mucked in to mend the damage…”

  Paul took a slow controlled breath in. “So is there anything else that you two have just happened to neglect to tell me?” He asked sarcastically.

  I thought about it. “Don’t think so…” I said uncertainly. “But I can’t always remember what I’ve told you…”

  He rolled his eyes. “Right you,” he jabbed a finger at me. “When you’re done with the trial, and before you dart off back down South, you, me and Jo need to have a business meeting. So ring me up to arrange it, as soon as you’re available.”

  I watched his retreating back with mixed feelings. Sahmir grinned sideways at me. “Did you get the feeling he was a bit cross?” He suggested.

  “Yes, I did,” I agreed in hollow tones.

  The next day they rattled through the different men at a fast pace. With a lot of them there wasn’t much to be said. They challenged me that I’d got the identification wrong of the two men who I’d witnessed having sex with the young girls because I’d only glimpsed their faces briefly.

  “Well you can have another identity parade and ask all the men to turn their backs, bend over and pull their trousers down if you like,” I suggested sarcastically, “as I saw a lot more than I wanted to of their wrinkly bums…”

  Some of the public gallery and a couple of the jurors laughed so hard at that, the Judge had to rebuke them and ask for silence.

  They implied that I must have got the ages of the girls wrong and suggested that they were probably over sixteen and doing it voluntarily. I pushed my hair back behind my ears again. “The sober one that was obliged to offer services to Faraz Iqbal found it so disgusting that she went out and threw up after, and the girl with Qureshi had her face screwed up and was shouting out in pain, so I don’t think either of them wanted to do it.”

  “Maybe she was shouting out because she was enjoying it. Maybe she liked it rough?”

  “That’s just a pathetic excuse put about by men after they’ve raped someone,” I said firmly. “I’ve never met a girl yet who has wanted to be hurt during sex.”

  “My client says that he was told that they were over sixteen and were happy to do it in return for some money.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “I’m willing to believe that your client had been assured the girls were over sixteen. And I imagine that they’d have been led to believe that the girls were doing it consensually, but they should have checked out the facts better, shouldn’t they? The girls all looked too young.”

  “But it’s so hard to judge ages, isn’t it?” The lawyer suggested slyly. “After all, you were twenty-one and passing yourself off as a fourteen year old, weren’t you?”

  “People see what they want to see,” I said stoutly. “Mohammed wanted to see a fourteen year old. Umrani and his Uncle Iqbal, and Abid Qureshi there,” I nodded sharply at the ugly git sitting on the bench, “wanted to see some over sixteen year olds.”

  “Mohammed says that he knew you were over sixteen yourself but for some reason wanting to pretend to be a virginal fourteen year old and decided to humour your little role-playing fantasy.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “That was big of him,” I said dryly. “What a chivalrous guy he must be! But now you’ve just undermined your own claim about it being difficult to judge ages…”

  By lunch time we’d got through everyone except Hussein. I hadn’t been able to be much use to the Prosecution about the men who’d supposedly trafficked me to Glasgow. The Judge offered me the chance to go and stand nearer them to look more carefully at their faces if I wished. I declined. I had no desire to get any nearer them.

  “Maybe it’s because all Pakistanis look alike to you?” The lawyer slipped in.

  “That’s a palpably silly statement,” I said robustly. “Look at the eleven standing there! Does Iqbal look remotely like Mohammed? No! More likely it’s because I was drugged up to the eyeballs and force fed half a bottle of vodka!”

  After lunch it got a bit nasty again. Hussein’s lawyer had taken up the baton from Mohammed’s to further discredit me as a witness.

  “Hussein says that when you were sixteen you were such an out of control hooligan that you blew up his motorbike, and also the motorbikes of Luke Beck and Sy Davis in an unprovoke
d attack.”

  “Does he now?” I said dryly. “Well, now I understand why the police came calling and accusing me of that very same deed. Unfortunately for Hussein’s claims, the police could find no evidence of my being even slightly involved and didn’t even take me in for questioning…”

  Then they brought up Trevelyn.

  “You claim to only have had two sexual partners, and yet a whole episode of the documentary ‘Thrills and Spills’ that you starred in when you were eighteen years old, was dedicated to the fact that you alleged you’d been raped by Luke Trevelyn whilst he was employed as a mechanic by the repair garage that you worked at. So in fact, you’ve had at least three sexual partners, and you have lied to the court.”

  I made sure I kept breathing evenly. Anytime Trev’s name was mentioned it always seemed like a punch to the stomach. “Since Trevelyn drugged and raped me, I don’t consider him a ‘sexual partner.’ I don’t count him as a ‘partner’ as I didn’t choose to sleep with him. After all, the very word ‘partner’ implies equality and a voluntary relationship.”

  “You are very slippery with your definitions,” the lawyer accused. “How many other slippery definitions do you maintain so you don’t have to count someone you’ve had sex with as ‘a sexual partner’.

  “Just rape,” I said steadily.

  “But Luke Trevelyn has never had his day in court about this alleged rape, has he?” The lawyer pointed out. “Because you never reported it to the police. You made sure it was ‘trial by media’, didn’t you? Because you knew there was no evidence that would stand up in court. So you’ve got form, haven’t you? Of accusing men of rape when what they are saying is inconvenient to your self-image? Trevelyn released pictures he’d taken when you had a drunken fling with him, and you wanted to keep the sympathy of the thousands of people watching who believed you’d never slept with anyone but Satterthwaite, so cried ‘rape’. Isn’t that what you are doing here? Getting revenge on some men you don’t like by falling back on your preferred mud-slinging technique – accusing them of rape because you know that it’s hard to prove either way, but you know that the mud will stick?”

  My fingers were trembling slightly so I clutched the edge of the wooden barrier in front of me. “Luke Trevelyn drugged me and raped me.” I said with a shake in my voice. “I was only seventeen years old and still a virgin. I am telling the truth about that. I didn’t go to the police because they didn’t treat me very well, or believe me about the assaults Hussein and his friends had made on me when I was sixteen, so I didn’t feel I could trust them. After Trevelyn raped me, I wanted to die. And then I just wanted to forget it. So I pretend like it never happened and I don’t ‘count’ it as any part of my experience. When Jessica was self-harming and crying and telling me about multiple rapes at an age much younger than I had been, I felt as though I should help her, because no-one had stepped in to help and protect me when I was her age.”

  “So here we get to the nub of your motivation,” the lawyer crowed triumphantly. “You wanted to bolster your own self esteem by setting yourself up as a heroine protecting abused girls, and it suited you to believe every fantastical tale that Jessica told you. You hit upon an ethnic minority that you knew people would be prejudiced against, that you thought had gained too much power in this town, and you set about systematically constructing a web of lies that would get you petted and feted and acclaimed by the media again, in an cynical attempt to re-instate the privileged position you’d come to assume was your right! You went to the media long before you went to the police, because you knew that if you got all your allegations put out on TV, these men could never stand a chance in court. You were using your tried and trusted technique of ‘trial by media’ again.”

  He sounded so convincing, for a moment I nearly started wondering if he was right. Had I only done this as an attention seeking stunt?

  “That’s not true,” is what I actually said aloud. “I didn’t want to believe what Jessica was saying. At first I thought she was making it up. But when I looked into it I discovered that everything she and her parents had claimed were true.”

  “And yet this so called ‘victim’, Jessica, and her parents, have disappeared and have not come forward to testify against these men. So they obviously believe that whatever they have to say won’t stand up for a moment in court, and they know they will be shown up for the liars they are.”

  “Since they’re not around to answer for themselves because they’ve made the sensible decision to take their daughter away to a safe place to protect her from further abuse, I don’t think you should be speculating about what their evidence would or would not be!” I exclaimed, anger flicking through my tone.

  He looked pleased with himself and sat down. Yep, he’d done a good job of ripping apart my reputation. I was shaking. I felt sick. And I felt exposed. Now all I wanted to do was to blank out and go numb. But another barrister stood up, and I stared blindly through him. He had to ask me his first question twice before I even heard it.

  Thankfully, that had been nearly the end. There was a bit of wrapping up, and then Judge formally stood me down.

  “What happens next?” I asked Ms. Jones in the private room.

  She sighed. “Nothing from your point of view, apart from the fact you can now attend the court in the public gallery if you are so inclined.”

  I wasn’t inclined. I didn’t want to watch some other girl being ripped to shreds and have to listen to more harrowing details of abuse.

  “And then because this case is so complex and involves so many defendants, victims and witnesses, we’ve had to process them in bundles. Get in a bunch of witnesses that have evidence that impacts on a certain limited range of offences, put several of the accused all through in one chunk, get a verdict and sentence them on that particular range of offences. And then, depending on the verdict, they either start their sentence, or get held in custody on remand for other pending trials for other offences, or get released. And then we have to pull together the next group of witnesses and bring some of the same men back again to be tried for a whole new set of alleged offences. But the media is so all over this that it’s hard to find neutral jurors, and it’s easy for the men to claim that they haven’t had a fair trial because of all the pre-publicity.”

  “Is there any chance they’ll get off with it?” I said dismayed. The idea that my collaboration with a TV company in order to bring the abuse to light might be the very cause of the men getting off scot free was devastating.

  She pursed her lips. “We’ll have to wait and see what the jury say. It could be a while yet. There are several more witnesses to come and the Jury have to come to eleven verdicts – they could be discussing it for days.”

  I felt sorry for the jury. How long were they going to have to take out of their own lives for this? How could they afford it? I knew they got a small amount of daily money as compensation for lost earnings, but if they were in a half-way decent job, it wouldn’t by any means cover it.

  And then she dropped another bombshell. “And of course the police continue to make new arrests, and if your evidence holds some relevance to subsequent cases, you may get called back at some later date to testify against someone else.”

  I stared at her, my heart plummeting.

  She stared unblinking back at me. “You started this,” she pointed out, her expression giving me no place to hide.

  I had, hadn’t I?

  She turned to go.

  “How do I speak about all this?” I suddenly asked her in a small voice.

  She turned back. “You’ve been stood down. You will no longer be in contempt of court.”

  “I meant the race element,” I said. “How do I talk about the grooming gangs issue accurately, without causing National Front marches and race riots?

  She placed her laptop and files back down on the table and surveyed me thoughtfully for a long moment. “You’ve used the word yourself,” she said in clipped tones. “Be accurate. Don’t gen
eralise. Don’t say ‘grooming gangs’, say ‘the grooming gang in my home town’. Don’t ever start a sentence with the plural - ‘Muslims’, ‘Asians’, ‘Pakistanis, ‘men’. Each grooming gang in this country uncovered so far - Rotherham, Rochdale, Bradford, Sheffield, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford - will be slightly different. In one case there were two older white females befriending girls and passing them onto the men.”

  “That’s disgusting!” I exclaimed. I meant the women thing, but actually that long list of towns where this sort of thing was known to have been going on, was a shock in itself.

  She shrugged. “Just saying. You can’t even assume that they’re all male, let alone their ethnic background.”

  “But I’ve been told that where there are Pakistanis involved, they’ve all been Mirpuri…” I established cautiously.

  She shrugged again. “Are you aware that sixty or seventy percent of all Pakistanis in the UK are from the Azad Kashmir Mirpuri region? So there’s a statistically high likelihood that if a Pakistani is involved with anything in the UK, good or bad, it’s likely to be a Mirpuri.”

  I stared at her. “I had no idea!”

  “They came over when the British built the Mangla dam, flooded the region and made them all homeless.” She raised her eyebrows significantly at me. “Colonial self-interest, natives be-damned.”

  “Right,” I said tonelessly. Bloody Brits, I thought. Us again.

  Outside the safe area, Sahmir and Chetsi were waiting for me. Chetsi had only been able to get the one day off work, but I was glad now that it had been today. I was relieved that she’d been there to hear the attacks about Trevelyn. It had knocked me right off my axis. It had never occurred to me that anything to do with him could come up! Primarily, I felt humiliated. Later tonight she’d probably offer to talk to me about it.

  She squeezed my arm comfortingly. “Do you want to go straight home? Or would you prefer to go for a coffee somewhere?”