It was a Thursday evening, and Emma, Roxanne and I were heading for the drop-in clinic on Taylor Street. It’s the place where they help girls like I was: the ones having under-age sex – whether willingly or not – the ones who might be risking STIs and pregnancy.
Girls like these would call in at Taylor Street for advice, a bit of affection sometimes and, mostly, condoms. Certainly in Emma’s case, and Roxanne’s.
Emma had effectively been abandoned by her family, and Roxanne too. She spent so much time at Harry’s because her mum didn’t give a damn about her. I suppose we were all, in our own way, looking for love; all of us listless and directionless. All of us, for whatever reason, were scraping along near the bottom of society. And, all of us were targets for men with no consciences.
Even now, I find it really hard to sit here and write down the full truth, the absolute, cross-your-heart truth, even though it’s there in a dark corner of my mind, and probably always will be. But Jane knew, or at least, she came to know: Jane at Crisis Intervention. She was based at Taylor Street and, after every one of my visits, would jot down a page or two of notes and then write up a report.
She’d been long enough in the job and was good enough to spot the signs. She’d tried in the past to help lots of other kids like me. She’d also tried to tell some of the people who had the power to intervene. Like Social Services. And the police. She made notes on my case and would be making notes for all the coming months in which I was in the grip of the gang; passing on the information to the powers-that-be if she thought it could help other people to help me: discreetly, of course, and on a completely confidential basis.
Unlike me, she had no need either to cover things up or disguise things, or make things look not quite as bad as they were. What she wrote down was the truth as she saw it every time I turned up: a thin, waif-like girl with a troubled life, who, she suspected from very early on, was being abused by the most evil of men. Of course, Emma would never allow me to let on what was really going on, building up a smokescreen of us having fun with our boyfriends. But even so Jane was suspicious. She cared. And right from the start she tried her hardest to help me.
This is her very first report on the young girl the media would come to know as ‘Girl A’:
Crisis Intervention Team Report,
August 7th, 2008
Hannah came into Taylor St clinic with friends Emma and Roxanne. Hannah is going out with Jake who is nineteen. Hannah wanted to talk about contraception and asked to go on the pill. Advice given and Hannah went to see the nurse.
You could be forgiven for thinking that that report might have applied to any one of a thousand under-age girls in Britain.
But appearances can be deceptive.
Jake was my other secret. He was one of Emma’s friends, and lived in Harry’s house too. In the middle of all the degrading sex I was having with the gang, I’d started to sleep with him, too.
Ricky now had a girlfriend, so didn’t want me in his room. And I’d found out that Emma was now sleeping with Harry in his double bed, and I didn’t want anything to do with that.
I had known Jake would come on to me at some point, but when it happened, it didn’t really seem to matter. The way I had seen it, my life was filled with abuse, and one more man using me wasn’t going to change anything. He wasn’t actually my boyfriend, as I’d told Jane, but at least he was more my age. And it gave me another smokescreen to hide behind at Crisis Intervention.
Emma would take me to Taylor Street most weeks. The teenage part was always open between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursdays. She’d been a regular for years, having pregnancy tests, being checked for STIs and eventually walking back into the night with a smug smile and a bag full of condoms. She wanted her new recruit, her new meal ticket, to be looked after in the same way. She was taking care of her goods.
That first time I joined her, just after talking to the police, I didn’t know where to look. There was a front desk, and the receptionist gave each of us a form with little boxes so we could tick the things we wanted. The form was then given to the relevant sexual health worker. In Emma’s case it was Jane, and when it was her turn, we both went in.
It was another chance to escape, another chance to get help. But I’d already gone to the police, and it seemed pointless to involve this woman as well. Plus, I had Emma with me, so I knew I had to stay silent.
Emma set off the same way she would do on every other occasion: talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, making up lies about her boyfriends, my boyfriends, everything. She’d describe the men we knew, but give them different names. She couldn’t stop herself showing off. She never let on about what was actually going on, but talk about the sex she’d have with them like it was the best ever. ‘I love shagging Pakis,’ she said that first time. ‘They’ve got bigger dicks.’
Looking back, Jane must have seen a few girls like Emma in her time. She’d heard it all, I suppose, and wasn’t easily shocked. All she could do was to listen to all the girls she saw, to reach out to them, to try to ‘save’ as many of them as she could.
Chapter Ten
A New Master
The local police do their video interviews in a specialist police suite in Manchester.
I did my first one there within twenty-four hours of my arrest at the Balti House, but they had to abandon it. They’d run out of time, they said; the room was needed for someone else.
My rescheduled video interview was held on 15 August. Thankfully, Emma was asleep as I crept away from Harry’s house and back home, so Dad could get me to the station by 10 a.m.
We drove into the city in silence, but as we walked in towards the interview suite Dad took my hand and squeezed it. I responded with the faintest of smiles.
I certainly didn’t look like a girl who was being abused, but then, I suppose I wouldn’t. I’d gone along in the same sort of clothes any other local teenager might have worn at that time: a light grey tracksuit and black T-shirt, my hair pulled to one side, my favourite, huge, heart-shaped earrings swinging every time I moved my head.
The interview was carried out by a detective constable from the local CID called John with a colleague, Tim, in the monitoring room checking the recording equipment that would capture my words of evidence. My dad was in the waiting room.
As I say, it was a specialist unit. The room itself was bare but for two cream sofas and a round table. John sat on one of the sofas; I was on the other. One camera recorded the whole of the room, the other just me.
I started fidgeting pretty much straight away. I was nervous – understandably, I reckon, given what I’d told them, and what I thought they’d be thinking about me.
John asked about Daddy, and then moved on to Immy. How had I become his ‘treat’, he wondered.
I went through the story once, and the detective, pen in hand, a pad resting on his knee, went through it for a second time. Slowly.
‘Why go upstairs?’ he asked.
‘Daddy kept telling me he’d given me a treat, so I’d got to give his nephew a treat. He said, “We’ll just go upstairs and chill for a bit.”’
‘Why not just leave?’
‘I don’t know.’
I was looking down, desperate to avoid the camera and its inquisitive gaze. ‘We could have walked out of the front, but the customers and everything were there.’