by Girl A
‘The police asked her how the men had got hold of her mobile number. She told them: “When you’ve got Asian friends, numbers get passed and they pass them on to their friends and they pass it on to their friends and you end up with a massive circle; everyone’s got it.”’
Miss Smith, already tall, seemed to rise even higher when she said, ‘The prosecution says that what Roxanne was describing was the group activity of a number of adult men, including these defendants’ – she gestured at the men in the dock – ‘who had spotted the opportunity to sexually exploit children who were vulnerable to that sort of exploitation.’
To Roxanne, Miss Smith explained, the men were her ‘good friends’ who bought her vodka and other gifts because they were ‘nice people’.
She’d drink a litre of vodka, but that was only so she could feel ‘loud and good’. The men were so nice that they’d wait until she was sober before ever having sex with her. And she was the one that wanted it. She was the one who suggested it, not them. And, anyway, she had told the police, they all thought she was sixteen.
The prosecution blew that lie away by showing the jury a photograph of Roxanne when she was thirteen. Poor kid, she looked younger.
Miss Smith then told the court that somewhere in this drunken haze Roxanne had got pregnant by Billy. He denied it, but because she had had a teenage abortion, and certain procedures had had to be followed, the police were able to prove the baby was his. Apparently, Roxanne had started off by saying she’d had a six-month ‘relationship’ with him. Then she said she’d only had sex with him the once. Then that it was four or five times. And, finally, that she was the only one of the girls to have ‘chilled’ with him.
Miss Smith looked over to the jury and said: ‘You will have to decide whether Roxanne was telling the truth at first and that she did have sex with him over several months. If so, you may feel that the accounts she gave later were an attempt to protect him.’
She brought me back into it then, telling the jury how I’d seen Roxanne being abused by the men, and also being hit by Emma if she resisted.
‘Roxanne also told Hannah that she was having sex with Billy and that she was in love with him.’
Girl B, or Leah, had been in a children’s home when the gang got to her. I never met her, but she’d heard of me from Emma. I’m guessing she was one of my replacements, and the thought made me shudder. The gang had kept asking for younger girls, and she was only fourteen when she came to Rochdale.
She used to walk out of the children’s home and not come back for days. And where do you think she went? She went to Harry’s house, and from there, just like me, she’d go out into Rochdale and beyond with Emma. The gang first got to her in the months after I’d escaped.
Again like me, she had lost count of the number of times she was forced to have sex. She’d try to blank it out the same way I’d done – by getting hammered on the vodka they gave her. Sometimes she was so drunk she’d wake up to find men having sex with her. It had got to the stage where she had to have a shot of vodka as soon as she woke up in the morning. The rest of the day, every day, she’d drink more vodka, along with Sambuca, Jack Daniel’s and Lambrini.
In her video evidence that was played to the court, she told police how she and another girl from a care home had been picked up in Manchester by three men in a car, who’d taken them on to Oldham. She had got so drunk she had blanked out. But she knew she’d been raped.
Leah told the court how Tariq liked to slap her face a few times when she got into his taxi, just to make sure she knew not to mess with him.
She was finally rescued after scribbling a note and dropping it down the stairs of her care home for staff to find. It read: ‘Asians pick me up, they get me drunk, they give me drugs, then have sex with me and pay me not to tell anyone. I want to move.’
After that, Social Services sent her off to another place, in the south of England. She’ll be out of there by now.
Girl C was Roxanne, Girl D was Anna. Next, we heard about Girl E, Alicia. Saj, who, it turned out, came from the same village in Pakistan as Tariq, and, of course, his cousin, Aarif, was twenty-eight when he got to her, in 2005. She was thirteen, and they had sex in Nelson once he’d got her drunk on vodka and cola.
It was only a one-off with Alicia but, three years later, he was mauling me. Some time after that, it was Leah’s turn to satisfy his craving for under-age girls.
The really clever thing about Rachel Smith’s opening address was how she made it sound as though the abuse I went through was part of one, almost seamless case. That yes, there were two conspiracies, but that the five victims were all linked. Well, we were, to an extent, but it was only when you looked at her speech in detail, and took in the various dates on the indictment, that you realised my part of the case was historic, and that the suffering of the other girls had either been much more recent or else had come to light more recently.
And what the jury would never have fathomed was that some of those other girls might have been rescued had my case gone ahead when it should have done. In 2009.
Miss Smith was doing her best, quite properly, to convince the jury that the men in the dock were guilty. And it would have made no sense for her to let on that the CPS had initially decided against prosecuting over my own abuse. But looking back, you can sense how relieved the senior people at the CPS must have been to hear the detail of that opening address because, rather conveniently, it glossed over their failure.
The police, too, were spared their blushes. There was a single, brief reference to the failed first investigation. ‘Regrettably,’ Miss Smith told the jury, ‘the police officers who looked into the matter didn’t take the investigation further at that stage.’
The trial would carry on for three harrowing months but, for that first day, Miss Smith was almost done. She turned to the jury and said, ‘This is as much as we feel we can assist you at this stage. The first witness is Hannah…’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daddy in the Dock
I was brought to give evidence that day – 21 February – in an unmarked police car. Social Services had let me stay with Mum and Dad for the five days I was needed at court, but after that I had to go back to the foster place they’d put me in. A detective who introduced herself as Liz knocked on the front door of Mum and Dad’s house at 7.30 a.m., and Mum and I got into the back.
Mum spent the journey chatting to the police; I just sat pressed against the door, thinking about it all, wondering what they’d be asking me, wondering whether, having finally got to this point, I’d ruin it all by saying something to the lawyers that stopped it all and would let them all off.
We pulled into the car park at the side of Liverpool Crown Court just before 9 a.m.
Two more police officers met us, both of them in uniform, and they walked with us into the building to a witness waiting room. It was just a plain white room with a window looking out onto the Albert Dock across the road. It felt like being at the doctor’s: sitting in a room, not speaking, while my mum flicked through the magazines on the table.
I didn’t read any of them, either that day or the other four that I went to court. I just sat there, worrying.
Rachel Smith popped in to see me. She didn’t have her gown on then, just a black suit. She was really nice, trying to get me to relax and saying well done for coming forward. As she left to go up to Court 3:1, she turned, smiled and said, ‘Good luck, Hannah. You’ll be fine.’
Mum and I continued to sit there until an usher came to collect me. She took me to the video suite they always use for kids, so you don’t have to actually go into the courtroom. They base it on the age you were at the time things happened to you. So even though I was nineteen by now, I was protected as I would have been at fifteen. It was a relief to know I wouldn’t have to see Daddy and the rest, but it also felt a bit lonely, sitting there with just the court usher and the cameras recording my every move.
The usher checked that the sound was wor
king and that the people in court could see me when it was time. There was silence again for a few moments before I saw the judge, Mr Clifton, appear on the video-link monitor in front of me.
He introduced himself, then said he’d introduce me to Miss Smith. There was a few seconds’ delay while the camera angle was changed in the court, and then I could see her. They’re very careful about what exactly you see as a witness. You never get even a glimpse of the defendants or the press, or even the jurors; just whichever person is speaking to you.
Then it was back to Judge Clifton, who said we were all going to view the video interviews I’d done with the police, back as far as the very first one in August 2008.
This was now four years before, and it was weird to see the image of the fifteen-year-old me appear on the monitor, the date at the top of the screen and the timer reeling off the seconds.
I knew the men would all be watching, and the defence barristers, with their instructing solicitors behind, all taking notes, looking for ways they could try to defend people I knew had no defence. In my own head, I was trying to think beyond the actual words to the way I’d felt that first day, telling the police exactly why I’d blown up at the Balti House, when I’d been wondering all the time whether the detective believed me.
I’d given so much detail in all those interviews that it would take a couple of days to get through them all, and then it would be time for me to be questioned, first by Miss Smith and afterwards by the eleven defence barristers. That was going to be the hardest part. I shuddered at the thought of it, even then, because they were all slick, smart lawyers and I’d be trying to remember things from nearly four years ago. What if they somehow tripped me up? What if at the end of this whole process, Daddy and all the other rapists were set free?
But Mum had been right when she’d hugged me in the waiting room. ‘Just tell the truth, Hannah,’ she’d said. ‘It will be enough, I promise.’
They were tough days. I was fine when Miss Smith took me through all the horrors I’d been through and how trapped I’d felt. But once she’d finished with me and there was a short delay, I started shaking at the thought of how the defence lawyers would try to twist everything I said.
They tried, of course, and there were times I must have looked a real idiot to them, because I just couldn’t remember some of the things they were asking. Like what I’d been wearing on a particular day, what colour a car was, who’d said what. I didn’t even know the men’s proper names. For me, it had always been nicknames; either the names we girls had given them or the names they told us. It was only because Emma had kept so many names and numbers on her phone that the police had been able to link them all up.
I’d been through things so many times before that, actually, I managed to stay pretty calm. I got annoyed with some of their questions, mind, and with the way they’d ask them – all smooth voices, trying to make me feel I could trust them but all the time circling me with their clever words.
The police told me later that Daddy’s barrister, Simon Nichol, is a really nice guy, but he got me to snap when he tried to make out that I’d tried to frame his client by swapping knickers with Emma. ‘What, when she’s about five sizes bigger than me?’ I asked him, to laughter from the court.
On it went, barrister after barrister, all trying to make it look like I was lying or it was mistaken identity. But I wasn’t, and it wasn’t, and they knew it.
The worst part of the whole five days was seeing two of the men who’d raped me in the public areas of the court complex: Cassie stared at me from the end of a corridor, but when I looked back he turned his head, and I started walking away as quickly as I could; then, another day, I saw Immy walking down the stairs. He didn’t see me because Liz shoved me into a doorway so he couldn’t catch sight of me.
Eventually, after all those days of watching tapes and being cross-examined, it was finally over and I was free to go.
The court usher that day was great. She said I’d done brilliantly and should be dead proud of myself. Liz smiled and just hugged me. ‘You were really strong, Hannah – the best witness I’ve ever seen in a case like this. The jury have just got to believe you.’
Dad had come to court that final morning and so joined in all the hugging, before we headed home.
The trial would carry on until May, but for me it was over.
* * *
Daddy didn’t do a lot to help himself in court.
At home, I kept hearing stories about him falling out with everyone: the jury, for being white; and the judge, the police and all the girls he’d abused for being racist.
His first tirade from the dock was to complain about the fact that there were no Asian, black or Chinese people on the jury, just twelve white people. There was indeed a conspiracy, he said, but it had nothing to do with him and the rest of the men in the dock. It was a white conspiracy intended to persecute the Asian minority. No white people had been brought to court because if they had, ‘You would not get your all-Asian trial.’
The people in the public gallery loved it. Daddy would sit there for a while, arms folded, a smirk on his face, and everyone in court would know that any minute he was going to kick off.
He managed to put everyone’s back up, and I’m guessing that reflected on the rest of the gang as they gave their own evidence. The media people would gather in little huddles, reflecting on how things were going and how the body language among some of the jury suggested he was going down and maybe taking a lot of the others down with him.
He also managed to fall out with another member of the gang within three weeks of the trial starting.
Cassie liked to pray while he was in the dock. Liz said that normally the sound of him muttering prayers to himself was drowned out by the two women interpreters – one of them specialising in Mirpuri, the other Pashto. But all the chanting eventually got on Daddy’s nerves. He apparently kicked off during a lunch break, just as the defendants were being led away from the dock.
‘Fucking shut up,’ the man I’d once thought of as a jolly Father Christmas lookalike yelled at the taxi driver, ‘or I’ll sort you out later.’ Then straight away he had punched him full in the face.
Cassie’s barrister, Zarif Khan, was the one to make a statement when the court reconvened, telling the judge, ‘My client was extremely shocked. He feels intimidated and threatened, and the interpreters are also worried because he made a comment to them about talking too loudly.’
Liz gave me chapter and verse that evening. Judge Clifton had glared at Daddy, she said, and warned him that if he did anything like it again, he’d spend the rest of the trial down in the cells.
‘Daddy raised his hand to speak,’ Liz chuckled, but the judge had stopped him and said, ‘No, none of that. And don’t say you haven’t been warned.’
The police in court reckoned that for all his patience Mr Nichol must sometimes have wondered why he’d agreed to represent Daddy. Most defendants take the easy route of doing everything their legal team tell them, but not Daddy.
He started off OK by pleading not guilty when the court clerk put all the charges to him but, after that, he did everything to ruin any slight chance he might have had of getting away with it all. To use one of the phrases he’d once thrown at me, he was like ‘a bone in a kebab’: he’d snarl at the detectives in court, claiming they’d framed him because of his colour, and accused the judge of being ‘more of a prosecutor than a judge’.
He was the first of the gang to give evidence, and it was apparently like watching stand-up – except that the ‘comedian’ in the box was actually a paedophile rapist. There was a bit of a delay though, before he started his testimony, and Liz told me about it later.
Mr Nichol said Daddy couldn’t take an oath on the Koran as he hadn’t bathed. A washbasin wouldn’t be enough; he’d need either a bath or a shower – neither of which was available at the court. So in the end he had to affirm or promise to tell the truth rather than take an oath on a religious book. The
judge was apologetic, telling him: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve done my best, but short of bringing in a bath myself I can’t see that there’s anything else I can do.’
Daddy, who said he’d settled in Oldham after coming to Britain as a boy in 1967, denied everything, of course. Nor did it take long for people to realise that he hated Rachel Smith. Maybe it was because she was a woman, I don’t know, but from what I’ve heard, he just kept trying to embarrass her with the things he’d say about sex – and even about her barrister’s wig. ‘If you didn’t have that sheep on your head, you might be my equal,’ he said once. She wasn’t having any of it, though, and would usually wait till he’d run out of steam and then just say wearily, ‘Just answer the question, please.’
Daddy’s contempt for women wasn’t confined to the prosecuting barrister. Vicky Crook, a CPS case worker, came to court one day wearing a trouser suit and a low-cut – but still perfectly respectable – white blouse.
He probably meant it as a distraction, but he suddenly burst out: ‘This woman is sitting half-naked in front of me. How am I supposed to look at Miss Smith with her bloody tits coming into my eyeline?’
He made out the case against him was all white lies, of course, made up by me and the other girls he’d raped and trafficked. ‘They were intelligent, they were clever, they knew what they were doing,’ he told Miss Smith. ‘If they’d gone on Lord Sugar’s Apprentice programme, they would have won.’
It was the white community who’d ‘trained’ girls like me in sex and drinking, he said. ‘When they come to us they’re fully trained and they start their own business. They start their own business and then the police very conveniently in 2008 pick me up.’
In all my time as his victim, I’d never known Daddy to have sex with Emma, but in court that’s what he claimed. It was the only way he could even try to explain his DNA being in my knickers – that it was actually Emma he’d slept with, and that I’d then come along and switched her knickers with mine.