by Girl A
To go with the alibi, he’d made up a story of how he and Emma would meet up in secret so people wouldn’t think he’d ‘infested’ his own community by sleeping with a white girl. ‘You see, we are racist too,’ he beamed.
He said he’d always told Emma to wash before they had sex, and afterwards he would go home, shower, say two units of prayer, and ask Allah to forgive him for doing wrong.
He’d never raped me, and nor had he told me he’d get someone to kill me the night he’d got me into his car at Morrison’s.
We were all prostitutes working for Emma, he said, and her ‘business empire’ stretched as far as Leeds, Nelson and Bradford. ‘The police know,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened, it happened with the blessing of the police.’
His problem, though, was that the final forensic test proved beyond doubt that Emma hadn’t been near the knickers I’d been wearing when he’d raped me.
And under cross-examination by Miss Smith, he started contradicting himself.
‘Nobody did anything to anybody,’ he said now. ‘You should look in the mirror at your own community. Where’s school? Where’s Social Services? Where’s everybody else?’
Things got really interesting when he was told about me describing his body as really hairy. Was that accurate?
He must have guessed the question was going to come up, because suddenly he started pulling his T-shirt over his head.
‘She would have seen this,’ he said, triumphantly, displaying his incredibly hairy torso. Then, to the court usher, sitting horrified a few feet in front of him: ‘Don’t be nervous. I lose hairs.’ And to prove it, he tugged at the hair on his chest and threw a clump of it into the well of the court.
It landed on the carpet just in front of the witness box, where it remained for the rest of the session and presumably until the cleaners arrived to vacuum it up.
The public gallery got a matinee performance at court that day, as the two female interpreters also got told off for giggling at another part of Daddy’s evidence. They were hauled up by the judge and told to behave. One of them apologised, but as soon as she’d turned away from the judge her face broke into a smile. Those who saw it cringed.
It wasn’t just his hair that Daddy was having trouble with. He told another of the defence barristers, Ahmed Nadim: ‘Sex didn’t take place every day because of my age, you know.’
But that only confirmed the way he’d been with me sometimes; sometimes he couldn’t physically do what he wanted to do.
As he left the witness box for the last time, Daddy flashed one more of his greasy smiles to a female juror and walked slowly, swaggeringly, back towards the dock.
By then, every scrap of detail about his attacks on me, and the way he’d trafficked me for sex, had been aired before the jury. But it wasn’t everything, not by a long way. I had no idea at the time, but months later I learned something that underlined just how violent and disgusting he could be.
It turns out that shortly after Daddy’s arrest, back in March 2011, another of his victims had come forward: a girl who had been abused two decades before he attacked me.
As a different jury, in a different city, would discover, she had been raped from the age of three.
This little girl, Lanika, was Pakistani and because Daddy was well known to her family, he would often come and stay.
The first time he raped her, she was so young and so small that afterwards she had had to push a chair towards the bathroom sink before climbing up and washing the blood from her knickers. She was only able to turn off the bathroom light because it had a cord that hung down.
When she had come back to her bedroom, she recalled him watching her in the darkness as she stuffed her knickers into a drawer.
She couldn’t actually swear that the time with the chair was the first time, but it felt like it. Maybe it was earlier. Daddy raped her so many times that the memories of each attack just merged with the rest. And it was actually only when she opened a copy of Roald Dahl’s The BFG that all those hideous memories came rushing back.
She was about seven at the time, still at primary school, and The BFG was that week’s reading book. In the first few pages, she read about how the little girl in the story had tried to scream as a giant figure loomed over her bed, but no sound had come out.
It jogged the worst of memories.
The girl, now a woman, would scream again as she gave evidence against him – scream at him via a video-link, just as I would like to have done. And this time the sound did come out.
‘He ruined my life,’ she yelled at the camera above her, ‘and I will never forgive him. Not ever. Nothing will ever make up for what he’s done to me.’
She told the jury, the jury in her court case, how he liked to make her kneel on the floor in a pose called the murgha, ‘chicken’, with her arms threaded through her legs and touching her ears. He’d then beat her with a cricket bat.
Once, when older, she’d whispered, ‘Sex maniac,’ under her breath, and he’d giggled, saying: ‘Yes, that’s what I am!’
Like me, the girl had been too frightened to tell anyone. She got as far as telling a policewoman in 2005, but then had backtracked, refusing to give a full statement for fear that it would bring dishonour to her community.
But the officer’s notes had stayed on police files, and they were still there three years later when I made my own complaint about Daddy.
The detectives involved in my case, or at least someone in Greater Manchester Police, should have known about those notes, or been able to access them. Maybe it was as simple as someone typing two words – his real name – into a police computer. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t done, and so no one made the link between what he’d done over all those years before, and what he’d done to me in 2008.
If they had, they would surely have realised the first time around that I was telling the truth – or that it was highly likely that I was. Whatever they’d thought at first, the police could have gone back to the girl in Oldham who had told them he’d been abusing her but had then got scared; scared because of the pressures of her own community, the pressure not to tell.
She would have been interviewed – properly, I hope, and they might have thought, This all fits together. He started off by attacking a girl in the Pakistani community, and then later turned to the only other kids he felt were available to him: white kids. A kid like me.
Actually, I reckon the fact that I was white was pretty irrelevant, really. It was just that I was available. And once you’re a rapist you’re always a rapist, whatever the colour of your skin.
One Operation Span detective would sum up this part of the case against Daddy perfectly, in four words: ‘A total cock-up.’
The girl Daddy had attacked wasn’t lacking in courage, no way, and eventually she did something about it again. She came forward in 2011, after Daddy had been questioned and then released over his attacks on me.
When Lanika’s case came to court, she said she couldn’t ever imagine having a normal relationship, because every time a man came near her she thought of Daddy. But I think there is hope for her. Once she’d given evidence, she told the detective who’d guided her through it that maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to find a way to a happiness she deserved.
I hope so – if she can, then so can I.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Judgement Day
It was around the time of Daddy’s cross-examination, as the trial stretched on into March and April, that the police rang to say they’d identified three more suspects and wanted me to do another VIPER parade.
There were three of them this time, though I could only identify one guy. Operation Span officers carried out a dawn raid on his last known address a few days later, but he’d already fled to Pakistan.
But I was oblivious to it all this time, because I finally had some brilliant news: Chloe was coming home!
Rochdale Social Services still had a care order in place, but from the day in late April t
hat she came back to me, I was given joint responsibility for her.
The appointment with the social workers was set for dinner time and I got everything ready. I’d bought all sorts of new things for my little girl – clothes, toys, everything. And I was cooking corned beef hash for her tea because she loved it.
I was still living with the foster couple, and I was waiting in their living room, dead nervous, heart beating like a drum, when I heard the doorbell go.
It was the social workers who came in first, two of them, carrying the papers that I had to sign; then, two minutes later, there was another ring at the door and this time it was Chloe, standing there, holding the hand of her foster carer, but beaming up at me then flinging herself headlong into my arms.
‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she cried. I just dissolved. Finally, finally, she was back with me.
She sat on my knee, munching a chocolate biscuit and stroking my face, while I filled in all the forms, telling the social workers I’d make sure that this time she was home for good.
Chloe’s foster carer was about fifty, and looked nice. Once she’d brought in the last of Chloe’s things we went through the routine she’d got her into. It sounded so weird hearing about my own daughter’s routines from a stranger, but I knew I had to listen and take it all in.
When it was time for her to go, I gave her a box of Thorntons chocolates I’d bought her. Well, it wasn’t her fault, was it? She gave Chloe a kiss and a hug, then turned to me. I thanked her for everything she’d done, saying I felt like I was going to cry.
‘Don’t,’ she said, her face beginning to crumple. ‘You’ll set me off.’ And, of course, we both started crying.
Once they’d gone, I sat playing with Chloe for ages, overwhelmed, but happier than I’d ever been in my life, thinking to myself, Everything is finally over. I’ve got her back!
* * *
Just as the trial was nearing its end, and the day before Chloe was returned to me, Greater Manchester Police held a preverdict briefing at their new headquarters. People from the CPS were there, too, and from Rochdale Social Services. I heard about it later from journalists who were there.
The briefing began, they said, with an apology from Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood. ‘We do understand that we could have dealt with the issues better than we did,’ he told the thirty or so reporters who’d turned up.
‘We apologise to any victims who have suffered because of any failings on our part, but at the time we did what we thought was best. We have learned a lot of lessons.’
The issue was genuinely about vulnerability, he insisted, and it ‘just happened’ that the men involved in the trial were all Asian.
‘We did not sweep it under the carpet,’ he continued. ‘We didn’t understand the problem. We do understand it a little bit more now and we have it at the top of our priority list. We are open to ideas about how we can do it.
‘Hindsight being a wonderful tool, we will probably look back and say we could have done things better.
‘This is cutting edge stuff and we are dealing with it legally, investigatively and technically. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it is that we are in a better place and in a wider partnership to deal with these issues.’
Never mind that they’d had ‘partnerships’ at the time girls were being abused many years earlier. Never mind that the ‘hindsight’ was actually there in front of so many people, so many officials, in scores of documents that had been left to gather dust.
Mary Doyle, the chief superintendent who ran the later, and ultimately successful Operation Span, said the sort of abuse I’d suffered was a ‘hidden crime’ and a ‘hidden issue’.
John Dilworth, head of the CPS complex case unit in the north-west, said the original decision not to prosecute Daddy and Immy had been reviewed ‘in the light of further information’.
The CPS had simply reconsidered the decision and taken a fresh view. ‘Clearly we regret any decision that is perceived to be wrong, but it was made on the evidence available at that time,’ he said.
The reality, of course, was that the evidence hadn’t actually changed. It was all there: the interviews with me, the forensics, everything. All that had happened was that the CPS decided against taking it to court because they didn’t think I’d make a credible witness, and the police hadn’t bothered to appeal the decision.
So a trial that should have come to court in 2009 didn’t actually make it there until three years later.
And now they just wanted to apologise!
Mr Dilworth was still trying to fight his corner. ‘You cannot say the decision was wrong,’ he blustered. ‘We simply reconsidered the decision and took a fresh view. Clearly we regret any decision that is perceived to be wrong, but it was made on the evidence available at that time.’
Mr Dilworth was asked what was at the root of the decision not to prosecute. Floundering by now, he would only say: ‘The lawyer said that there was not a realistic possibility of conviction.’
It was too much for his boss, Nazir Afzal. Mr Afzal, a British Pakistani and the region’s chief crown prosecutor, rose from his seat away from the panel, beside the assembled media, and took charge.
Reporters craned their necks, surprised by this sudden intervention and sensing that an unexpected hero was about to write himself into their scripts.
He certainly seized the moment, telling his audience: ‘The original decision was based on evidence from the victim in this case. Initially the lawyer formed the view that she would not be credible.
‘I came here last year and I reversed that decision. I decided that she was entirely credible and that two suspects in relation to her should be charged.
‘It is very rare for us to reinstate prosecutions and I exerted that power and the two men were charged.’
The original lawyer had made a judgement: ‘I looked at it completely afresh without any prior knowledge and formed a different view.’
Mr Afzal was asked whether he thought I’d been betrayed. He paused, momentarily, before answering: ‘I have no difficulty in apologising to her,’ he said. ‘She was let down by the whole system and we were part of that in some respects. But we reacted to that as soon as possible.’
As soon as possible, that is, after the Operation Span team had put pressure on the CPS to re-instate the Girl A case.
Because they’d known precisely how strong it was – that for all they’d clustered other cases, other girls, around it, mine was the one that would form the cornerstone of the entire trial. Mr Afzal realised that and I think, too, he saw the justice of it finally coming to court.
* * *
In Liverpool, the defence was in full swing. After Daddy had been in the witness box, next came Immy, then Tariq, then the rest, all of them denying the ‘lies’ of their accusers.
Then came closing speeches from Rachel Smith and all eleven main defence lawyers and, after that, the summing up of all the evidence by Judge Clifton.
Finally, on 1 May, the jury filed out of Court 3:1 to consider their verdicts, almost all of them looking away as they passed the glass-screened dock to their left.
I’d been told that after such a long case it would take them a while to make their minds up. I crossed my fingers that they would make the right decisions. I knew the men who’d attacked me were all guilty, but would they?
As it turned out, the process wasn’t anywhere near as simple as it should have been.
The far-right protestors had tried to make trouble right from the start of the trial, and now, as it moved towards its conclusion, they were trying one more time.
At first it was just the usual, with seven of them getting arrested outside the court complex. But two and a half days into the jury’s deliberations their idol, Nick Griffin, posted a notorious tweet that would cause legal carnage.
The press tend to have a nose for trouble, and that afternoon they started twitching when the lawyers were called back into court while the public and media were held back at t
he outer doors.
The media people protested, of course, but it was no use. The ‘Court in Chambers’ sign went up with a flourish from a court clerk and they were left outside to fume.
When the barristers finally came out, reporters sidled up to the ones they knew best, hoping to get a steer. For once, that didn’t work – all they got were mutterings: ‘It’s a scandal,’ said one barrister. ‘We’ve been stitched up,’ snapped another, as he headed towards the lifts.
On a bench, Andrew Norfolk, a reporter from The Times, was sitting with an A4 pad resting on his iPad, putting the final touches to a note to the judge, demanding that the press be allowed into the next session.
It all became clear – well, sort of clear – when the court reconvened, press included. The jury seats, though, were conspicuously empty.
The scandal, it turned out, was this: at 1.53 p.m. Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, had posted a comment on Twitter that read: ‘News flash. Seven of the Muslim paedophile rapists found guilty in Liverpool.’
He later backtracked on Twitter after being told the jury hadn’t officially returned any verdicts. But by then the damage had been done.
Judge Clifton was livid. He brought the jury back in, and behind closed doors, asked if any of them had passed on any information about their deliberations. They all said no.
The problem was, though, that Griffin’s tweet about seven convictions was exactly what the jury had decided up to that point.
One by one, the defence barristers rose to say that any convictions now would be tainted. They argued that the jury’s impartiality must have been compromised. The only solution, they said, was to discharge them all and start the whole trial again.
Mr Nichol led the charge. ‘The most reasonable inference,’ he said gravely, ‘is that the confidentiality of the jury’s deliberations has been breached and that someone outside the jury who has an improper interest in the outcome of the trial has been receiving communications from within the jury room.
‘It seems at the very least that if such communication has taken place then it will be two-way traffic. If there has been such improper communication, the independence of the jury is compromised and there has been a breach of their obligation to reach an impartial verdict.’