‘Was there anything to stop you walking out the front or the back?’
‘Daddy said we couldn’t leave. There was nothing apart from that.’
I told him about the room where Immy attacked me: the window with its tatty, dirty curtains that were held on by nails, the orange quilt on the mattress. It also made me think about the children’s clock with the little angel on it, in the other room.
At first there had been four of us in the room, I said: Daddy, me, Immy and Emma. Then it was just me and Daddy’s nephew.
John asked me what each of the men was wearing, but I couldn’t remember. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘What was going through your mind?’
‘That I’m going to have to do it.’ I told him how he’d bent over me and pulled down both my leggings and my knickers. How I could see his erection and hear him saying, ‘Come on, please, you’ve got to do it now.’
‘How did you feel?’
I was suddenly aware that my right hand was pressed against my face, resting against my cheek. How did I feel? ‘A bit scared, I just lay there with my legs open. He put it in with his hand.’
‘Was he wearing a condom?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’ It had hurt, I said, and at the last moment he’d withdrawn and ejaculated over the grubby sheet I was lying on. I told him about him leaving and about Emma coming back with some money.
Then John asked me about the time – less than a fortnight earlier – when Daddy had met Emma and me outside the Balti House and he’d taken us to a flat in Rochdale.
I told him that Daddy had taken me into a room and ordered me to have sex with him. I’d protested, I said, telling Daddy that Emma had said it would be her he had sex with that night.
Feeling the same shudder go through me as it had those two awful weeks ago, I recalled Daddy’s answer: ‘Emma’s lying,’ he’d said. ‘You have to do it.’
I told the police officer I’d not wanted to go to the Balti House that night. The expression on his face gave nothing away. ‘Why did you go, then?’ he asked.
‘Emma wanted to,’ I said.
‘Didn’t you think you were putting yourself in a compromising position, bearing in mind what’d happened previously?’
I knew the answer, of course I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to say it. But I did.
‘Yeah,’ I said. And then added: ‘Emma was telling me to go, so I just did.’
‘Why didn’t you say “No” to her?’
‘I don’t know.’
As I said it, I realised I had unconsciously slipped my hands into the sleeves of my tracksuit, as if I wanted to hide, hide all of me, from these questions.
Then I was recalling how Daddy said I had to have sex with him again, and that I felt I had no choice but to go into the bedroom with him. There was a mattress on the floor, I said, and I was trying to finish the vodka they’d given me when Daddy had come up behind me.
I’d moved away from him at first, but eventually pulled my leggings down so he could get it over with.
I was so embarrassed at admitting to that that my stomach was twisting into knots. But I tried to keep going.
‘He had to play with himself to get an erection,’ I said. ‘I told him to get off me, and I was crying. But he was just ignoring me. I felt dirty, and I was worried because he didn’t wear a johnny. Afterwards, I went into the bathroom to wipe myself with a tissue and put my knickers back on.’
‘Had he come inside you before?’ the detective asked.
‘I don’t know.’
When we moved on to the time Daddy raped me in his car, John had to ask me to take my hand away from my mouth. Instead, I locked my arms in my lap. By the time we’d gone through my rapist’s entire repertoire of abuse, I realised I was running my fingernails back and forth across my mouth, as if I wanted to block the words that were coming from it.
I told John how afterwards, Daddy had driven me back to Emma, who’d waited for me in Morrison’s car park, and she had asked where he’d taken me. I also told him that she’d said she’d been there too.
John asked how long the whole business had taken, from start to finish.
‘Twenty minutes,’ I said.
We were getting towards the end of the interview and I was telling him how Emma liked all the free food and the beer. And how she liked having sex with all these men.
‘How come you’d gone with her?’ he asked.
I was still too frightened of Emma to tell this policeman everything. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t go with her, she’ll fall out with me.’
Perhaps the strain of the interview had taken its toll on him as well as me, but as he asked his next question, about an address we’d been taken to, he suppressed a yawn. I heard it, and it must be on the tape.
John went on to ask what happened at this address, a place I didn’t know but which was about a twenty-minute drive from the Balti House.
‘What did you think was going to happen?’ asked the detective.
‘I don’t know. I had an idea they were going to want sex.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Because they always did. Everywhere he takes us.’
Then John asked whether anything had happened in the eight days since I’d first made my allegations to the police.
So I told him how the day before I’d overheard Emma taking a call from Daddy, who was asking where I was, and then, knowing I was in the background, screaming: ‘She’s a bitch! Tell that Hannah she’s a bitch! I know people in Oldham. They’re going to get her!’
As I spoke, the fear I’d felt at hearing his voice again came back to me, seeping through the walls of the police station and into the interview room.
But there was something I didn’t tell him; something I was holding back, which I’ll explain later. Yes, Daddy had rung Emma, and he had screamed abuse at me down the phone. But what I couldn’t tell the detective sitting patiently in front of me now was that at the time of the call, Emma and I were in someone else’s car; the car of a man even more sinister than Daddy, and someone – even in the few hours I’d spent with him – I was even more frightened of betraying.
Worried that John might guess that I was holding back on him, I kept my head down and began playing with my nails. He took it as a sign I had nothing else to say, and a moment later was asking if I was happy to finish the interview there.
‘Has anyone else given a statement?’ I blurted out.
John said something about things being under control, but I wasn’t really taking it in. I wanted to know whether they’d spoken to Emma by then, but I didn’t dare ask.
The interview was over, the recording ended. As I stood up from the sofa, John glanced up at me and said, ‘Look, the tapes are off now. Did you just do this for a bit of money? You might as well admit it if you did, because why would you have kept going back?’
I could hardly believe what he had just said. It made me feel sick and angry at the same time: as though I had been violated all over again. Why on earth would I have sat through all this if it wasn’t true? Why, for nearly three hours, would I have given him the sickening detail of what Daddy and his gang had done to me?
Through gritted teeth I told him as much. ‘Every word I’ve told you is the truth,’ I said.
‘OK, let’s leave it there for now.’ And with that, he led me out of the room.
Dad was waiting near the front desk when I emerged. As we left, he told me of a conversation he’d had with one of the investigators. ‘This happens all the time,’ the officer had told him. ‘We get lots of it around here, and it’s always Asian men and it’s always young white girls. Never Asian girls.’
On the surface everything seemed to be vaguely normal. Mum and Dad at least knew of the rapes by Daddy and Immy and were trying to be supportive; the police were investigating; and Emma hadn’t battered me, despite both Daddy and Immy being taken in for questioning.