Girl A

by Girl A

  So that’s what I’d done. I’d gone back home for six weeks or so, and actually managed to give up drinking. But it wasn’t enough, not for Rochdale Childcare Services.

  They had held a gateway meeting and, suddenly, it wasn’t suitable for Chloe to live at Mum and Dad’s house any more. That was it: she would have to go into temporary foster care.

  With a child under five, you only get nine months to prove yourself a fit parent again. At the end of that time, the authorities decide whether they’re going to return your child to you, or else have it adopted.

  The next few minutes shattered my heart into a million pieces.

  There were forms to fill in – they always have forms – and a farewell to make that would tear me to shreds. Maybe Christine found it hard too, but it didn’t show; at least, not to me. I tried to hold on to Chloe, but it was no good. The social worker knew why she’d come, and she knew she had to go through with it. So she scooped my little girl into her arms and headed towards her car. She had a car seat in the back, and Chloe went into that.

  Back then, Chloe had only ever been around me and my family. We were all she knew. She was just beginning to wake up properly and looked up at me, bewildered, as I clicked her in. She could see the tears streaming down my face and started crying herself. My parents, leaning into the car, were distraught. I was beside myself.

  When it was over, Dad wrapped me up in his arms and led me back to the house. I was sobbing, inconsolable, my daughter gone. Social Services had taken her.

  As the car pulled away, heading over the speed bumps towards the motorway, I was swamped with guilt as I knew it was me who’d made it happen. I started to think how confused she must feel, being taken away in a stranger’s car, soon to be finding herself being handed over to a couple just as alien.

  I hung about the house for an hour or so, suffocated by my parents’ sympathy and outrage, feeling all the time that, for all that the gang had damaged me, it was me, and me alone, who’d inflicted this upon my little girl. Chloe didn’t deserve this. Not this. And I felt it was me who’d brought her to it.

  I couldn’t deal with it.

  The thought gnawed away inside me until I reached the point where I couldn’t bear it any longer: I couldn’t cope with the thought of her crying her heart out in that car and then arriving at a stranger’s house, frightened and alone in a new world. Suddenly, I stood up, threw on my coat and rushed out, brushing past Mum and heading out of the back door and on towards the shops up the hill.

  At the off-licence, I bought two litres of White Star, then caught a bus to some local woods, thinking about Chloe all the way.

  They’re a bit minging, the woods, but everyone knows them around my way, and as a little kid I’d played there in the days before we moved to the seaside. I remember thinking about that as I looked for a bench to sit down on, and it reminded me of Chloe – that she should be there, playing, picking flowers, something she loved to do. But today, all I had was a bottle of cider to keep me company.

  The more I drank the guiltier I felt, and the more hopeless and lonely and torn up inside. I wanted all the feelings to end because I just couldn’t cope.

  I was drunk by the time I staggered onto the bus heading back towards home. This time, though, I didn’t get off at my normal stop; I carried on to the one by the shops so I could buy some paracetamol.

  They only let you buy two packets at a time, so that’s what I did, washing them down with the last of the cider. Then I walked on to the shop closest to home, and bought another two packets.

  I took those once I’d sneaked in and gone upstairs. Then I lay on my bed, pretty much out of it, waiting, hoping to die, clutching a photograph of my little girl, the girl whose life I’d ruined.

  But the pills and the cider just made me feel sick and I had to rush into the bathroom. My sister, Lizzie, heard me throwing up and ran in. She saw lots of the pills floating in the bath and screamed for Mum and Dad.

  When Dad got there he grabbed me around the waist and started to squeeze my stomach so I’d throw the whole lot up. Mum ran downstairs to find her phone and dial 999. I was going in and out of consciousness by the time the ambulance arrived.

  It was a pathetic attempt, I know, but, just like the other two times, I really did mean to go through with it. I really did want to die.

  But I regretted it as soon as I came round in hospital. Susan came to see me that night. She was off duty, but she still felt close enough to me to come. She sat there, asking why I kept trying to kill myself. ‘You’ve got so much to live for, Hannah,’ she said. ‘You really have.’

  In the days that followed, I promised myself that I’d get back on my feet and try, finally, to grow up. I knew I had to, if there was any chance of me getting Chloe back. It wouldn’t happen overnight, though, that much I knew.

  * * *

  With Chloe in care, it was left to the police, not Social Services, to press for me to be moved out of the immediate area; away from Rochdale. Susan and her colleagues knew that it wasn’t just a question of guiding me through video interviews and VIPER parades. It was about helping me to cope with the day-to-day traumas of my life so that, come the trial, I could go to court and give the evidence that would put my abusers away.

  They found a supported flat for me in a different area, and I moved there a couple of weeks later. That’s where I met Richie, a lad I went out with for a few months through the summer. It wasn’t a proper relationship, really: me damaged and pretty much a down-and-out; him homeless if he hadn’t got a place there. He didn’t really have anything going for him apart from being funny.

  Richie didn’t drink as much as me – I don’t think many people did. We never really went out, we’d just spend our time together in the flats, his or mine, getting drunk all the time. Sex with him was OK, but it wasn’t great. At least it wasn’t abuse.

  It ended in September after we’d gone to a christening and got hammered. I took a fiver out of his pocket to go to the chippy and he found out once I’d got back home. He got mad at me and retaliated by robbing my phone.

  Because I was drunk I punched him in the face. A few times. The staff heard the row kicking off and called the police. They arrived just in time to see him head-butting me in the face, so they jumped on him and carted him away. I had blood pouring out of my nose, but I still laughed because it seemed so funny to me, for some reason.

  They took me to hospital for treatment, but when they checked the CCTV and saw the earlier bit with me punching him, I got arrested too. I got a caution for it, and Richie and I split up.

  Just after that, I got an email from UCAS – the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service – saying the university that had offered me a place was withdrawing it. I suspect Social Services had something to do with it. Maybe they’d said I’d be a liability.

  * * *

  It was another massive blow, but somehow I started to pick myself up. Maybe I was helped by the people around me trying to drag me back into some kind of normal life ahead of the trial that was expected to start in the following February.

  Social Services decided they wanted to monitor me 24/7 so they moved me to a foster place, to live with a couple. That way they could keep an eye on me and get reports from the family I was staying with. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and went to another parenting group.

  Jane was still sticking up for me with Social Services. She said I was under a lot of pressure because of the new police investigation. I saw one report in which she’d written: ‘Chloe is a delightful little girl. This has not happened by chance and shows that on the whole Hannah is doing a good job as her mother.’

  In another she talked about the loving relationship I had with her. ‘She is affectionate with her and whenever I have seen her with Chloe I have noted that she responds to her needs in an appropriate manner.’

  I think it was 21 September 2011 that I stopped drinking: well, mostly. They’d put me on a drug called Campral to help me, and it seemed to wo
rk. They say it restores the chemical balance inside your brain, helps it work normally again. I moved into more supported lodgings the next month, still trying as hard as I could to get my life back.

  I didn’t have a drink on Christmas Day, nor on New Year’s Eve. I was having contact with Chloe three times a week – even Social Services could see that I was finally coming back from the bad times, and they started talking about giving me a second chance with the little girl they’d taken from me.

  Things were looking better than they had been for a long time.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The First Witness

  The ‘Girl A’ trial – my trial – was supposed to start on 8 February 2012. The police put me on stand-by and I changed my contact times with Chloe to the weekend, to fit in around it. As usual with Social Services, who were still being obstructive, the police had to push for it for me.

  Then I heard it had been delayed. These things often happen, the police told me. Don’t worry. It was only later that I found out the reason for the delay – that two defence barristers, both of them Asian, had suddenly withdrawn from the case. They’d done so because of intimidation by far-right protestors: one of them had been punched by a protestor just outside the court complex, the other illegally filmed in one of the corridors.

  They’d only been doing their jobs, just like all the other barristers, some Asian, some white, but they were both terrified that images of them would start appearing on the usual racist websites.

  Those same websites had already been telling their followers that the trial was coming up, and newspapers and TV had carried reports of the arrests and charges. The difference between the two is that, at least on a good day, people in the media know about the law, and that everyone deserves a good trial; whereas the racists hiding behind their websites either have no idea, because they’re stupid, or else don’t care because all they’re looking for is hatred and blood.

  Mr Justice Gerald Clifton – the judge for the case, who’d be retiring as soon as the trial was over – was furious, not least with Merseyside Police who’d put extra officers in the square outside Liverpool Crown Court, but hadn’t reacted quickly enough before the barrister got thumped. A high-ranking officer was called in to get what I heard was a real telling-off. From that point on, the square looked like a chessboard of coppers in yellow fluorescent jackets while, inside, security was even stricter than normal.

  The thugs from the British National Party and English Defence League thought they’d struck a blow for justice, but I can’t work that one out. You don’t get justice by waving placards comparing white girls to halal meat, as they were doing outside the court. You get it by letting us get into court so we can give our evidence.

  Anyway, the original jury was discharged and it took two weeks to get new barristers.

  Once they’d been found, the judge sorted out a seating plan in the dock: he wanted the defendants to be directly in line with each of their legal teams, but every time a plan was supposedly finalised it had to be changed for one reason or another. By the time Rachel Smith, QC, finally rose to give her opening address, the eleven defendants had played a series of games of Musical Chairs, but the judge and all the lawyers had print-offs of the final seating plan – necessary, in a trial with so many defendants.

  Susan went to the court with quite a few of the other detectives involved in Operation Span, but because she, too, was giving evidence, she had to stay away from the actual courtroom. For the same reason the two of us weren’t allowed to even meet up, so instead she introduced me to some of her other colleagues.

  The detectives in court would vary, because if any of them were giving evidence they weren’t allowed to sit in until they’d gone into the witness box. Whichever one of them was free would sit in the public gallery, taking it all in. The policewoman in Court 3:1 on Day One was there to see the defendants, over to her left, the eleven of them sitting in the glass-panelled dock with two interpreters and an assortment of security guards.

  Apparently, Daddy had been seated in the front row as the jurors filed in. His arms were folded and he had had a smirk on his face.

  When I heard about that first day the bit that amazed me the most was that one of the jurors was young, a girl, and apparently Daddy had focused in on her and given her a huge smile as she sat down. She was so flustered she went red, but then looked away and concentrated on looking at Judge Clifton.

  Miss Smith’s laptop was open on the desk in front of her, its screensaver the image of a snow leopard. On the press benches reporters fidgeted, skimming the copies of the opening address they’d been given, pens poised over pads or fingers resting over their iPhones, ready to tweet the best early lines.

  Miss Smith – who at first meeting had seemed almost as scary as the snow leopard on her screen – started by telling them how me and the other four girls all knew Emma. I was the eldest, while Roxanne, thirteen when she was attacked, was the youngest. All of us, she had said, were the sort of kids who were easy to identify, easy to target, and easy to exploit. And we’d all been procured for the gang by Emma.

  She gave each of the jurors a piece of paper that gave the defendants’ names, nicknames and addresses. It would help them get to know them as the case unfolded, she explained.

  Daddy was the first to be mentioned, then Immy, Tariq, Cassie, Saj, Billy, Tiger, Car Zero, The Ugly One, Shah and Hammy.

  Aarif wasn’t there, of course, because he’d run off to Pakistan, but he still got a mention. In fact, I only found out on that first day of the trial why I’d first been taken to Aarif’s flat in the first place: it was because he and Saj were bored with Emma and wanted a new girl.

  Chef wasn’t there either, but not because he’d done a runner. It turns out he was less than five miles away, at HM Prison Liverpool, serving fifteen years for rape and indecent assault. His real name was Anya Miah, and at the time he’d been molesting me he was on the run.

  He should have gone on trial in 1998 but failed to turn up at court. The police finally caught up with him in 2011. He was fifty-two years old when the jury at Liverpool Crown Court put him away on 3 February. At the time I knew nothing of this.

  Only a few days later, in the same court complex, Miss Smith was moving on to talk about the two conspiracies – the one that Daddy was involved in, and the later one with Tariq. The case involved chains of men, she said, and they all wanted one thing: under-age girls for sex.

  ‘Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing,’ she went on. A female juror on the back row had looked nervy, like she wished the case could have been about a robbery or something. ‘The events and circumstances described by the girls are at least saddening and at worst shocking. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were.’

  She started with my story. At first, Miss Smith said, I’d liked the idea of living at Harry’s house. I’d had no money but was given food by Harry and allowed to stay there.

  But then I’d been exploited and raped – first by Daddy, then by the others he took me to. One thing she couldn’t say was that eventually I’d been abused by Harry himself. She couldn’t say it because the things he’d forced me to do to him would be the subject of a separate trial much later in the year. For now he could only sweat it out at home.

  Miss Smith then got to the part where I’d kicked off in the Balti House. She knew how much I’d told the police at the time, and the detectives across the aisle from her – the ones from Operation Span – knew, too. But all she said about the failure to get the first Girl A case to court was this: ‘Regrettably, the police officers who looked into the matter didn’t take the investigation further at that stage.’ She could have gone on to make the point that it took nearly a year for the file to reach the CPS, but of course she didn’t: she knew the jury would have enough to think about. Not least that Roxanne, having been handed to the gang by Emma, became so brainwashed that she had actually fallen in love with Billy. And how I had been so brainwashed
that I’d felt flattered at first; that I thought they saw me as pretty. But then how I got trapped and so scared that they were all able to rape me.

  They hadn’t always hit me, she said, and I hadn’t always cried or protested. But they still forced me. Daddy had raped me when I was dead drunk, telling me he just wanted to talk. ‘“It’s part of the deal,”’ said the barrister, echoing Daddy’s words. ‘“I bought you vodka, you have to give me something.”’

  At one point Miss Smith paused, then said, ‘Hannah estimated that she was having sex with several men in a day, several times a week. There are many men she describes who have not yet been positively identified and who are not therefore on the indictment.’

  And so it went on. Mulla, Immy’s ‘treat’, all the others. Dozens of them.

  The jury heard how Roxanne was different from me: very different. To her, according to her statements to the police, she was just going ‘chilling’ with the men. But she’d been thirteen, and she was lying. There was enough, though, for the jury to know how it actually was: that she was being raped and passed around just like me. Only she said she liked it.

  ‘Roxanne described herself as having lots of friends,’ said Miss Smith. ‘She said her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area. A situation developed where she would get calls from men she did not know who would ask her if she wanted to go ‘chilling’. She’d go to the petrol station or Morrison’s car park and the men would call her and describe their car so she could find them and get in.

  ‘She said, “Most of the time, I didn’t know who it was. They’d just ring me and say are you coming and I’d go ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t care who they were. I didn’t know them, didn’t know where we were going, I just got in the car with people and then they took me to wherever.”

  ‘She said she was also taken to houses where men would either be waiting or would arrive afterwards and they would want to “chill with me”. She said sometimes she was persuaded to kiss them and she pretended “to be with them”.