Slave Girl (18 page)

I felt sure I had seen this man before. I felt sure he knew me, knew who and what I was. I started to cry, blurting out my story despite feeling certain that it would do me no good. I was so terrified. I feared this policeman would drag me outside, march me back through the dirty alleyways to Gregor’s drug café, and deliver me straight back into his clutches. And then I would be chained up in a warehouse, killed like Par, butchered and fed to those awful dogs.

But, as it turned out, I was wrong.

When I wouldn’t stop crying, the policeman stepped round the counter and stood right in front of me, trying to lead me off. Then, suddenly, the woman with the book got up from her seat and spoke to him.

‘What do you think you’re doing? Where are you taking this girl? Can’t you see that she’s in some kind of shock?’

I stared at her with a look of what must have been pathetic gratitude. She was English, she was normal – not a pimp or a pusher, or a prostitute like me. And she was trying to help me.

The policeman told her that I was one of those English girls who were known for living rough on the streets and stealing passports. But she was having none of it. Something in his manner seemed to have made her suspicious.

‘This girl is English and she’s very obviously in trouble. So I suggest you get on the phone to the British Embassy right now. I shall wait here until you do.’

I could have hugged her. Calmly, but firmly this stranger – this
wonderful
English stranger – was standing up to this brutal policeman. No one had ever done anything like this for me before; no one had stood up for me, put themselves in the firing line, or – frankly – done anything good for me ever in my life. And yet here she was, facing down the cop without a thought for her own safety. And suddenly I knew: it was all going to be alright. This brave and astonishing woman was saving my life in a way she couldn’t possibly have known.

With that, the policeman went back to the counter and picked up the phone, motioning for me to sit down on one of the adjacent seats. And it seemed like no time at all before two people I had seen many times before stepped through the door and into the room: Leon and Helène.

They took me upstairs into a large, heavily padlocked office. Inside, I was astonished to see photos stuck neatly all over every available bit of wall: each picture was a shot of one prostitute’s window in the District – complete with names written in marker pen underneath – as well as every sex shop, brothel, live show and drug café. It was like a
full-colour
relief map of hell, with each vicious, brutal corner clearly delineated. I don’t think there was a nook or a cranny they hadn’t photographed and annotated. And then Helène spoke: ‘We were watching you for a long time, Sarah. We knew it was you – don’t ask us how; I can’t tell you that. But we knew you were the girl people were talking about – the nursery nurse tricked here from England. But when you wouldn’t talk to us, all we could do was sit back and wait.’

It turned out that Helène and Leon were part of the special unit we’d heard so much about, the unit investigating the whole dirty mess that was the Red Light District. They were completely separate from the police units that Gregor had corrupted – in fact, that corruption was one of the things they were most interested in.

But top of their agenda was the murder of Reuben. I got the impression that Helène, in particular, was determined to find out who was behind the killing. The way she spoke about Reuben made it sound as if she had feelings for him. All in all, it seemed that I was to be a vital source of information.

But all that could wait. For now they needed to get me somewhere safe and secure. And they needed to involve the British Embassy because although I had been working as a prostitute for many months – and showed all the tell-tale signs of chronic drug addiction – Leon and Helène could see past the present to the girl I used to be: Sarah Forsyth, a vulnerable young English nursery nurse who desperately needed help.

But finding a safe house took a long time. Leon and Helène were adamant they couldn’t trust anyone inside Amsterdam; they were even nervous about keeping me in Holland. But transporting me to another country needed a whole series of permissions; in the end they would be forced to bring in the Dutch equivalent of Special Branch to get me across the border into Belgium. The negotiations dragged on all afternoon and well into the night.

As each hour passed I grew increasingly frightened. I was stuck here in a police station – not too far from Gregor’s café, Pavlov and all their men, not to mention their guns. I knew – and Leon and Helène knew – that Gregor had infiltrated and bought half the police in the area, and I’d be able to identify most of them – especially the seven who had raped me. It didn’t take much to realise that I was in a very dangerous position.

And of course I was getting desperate for drugs. My body was so used to regular rocks of crack followed by heavy hits of hash that every minute I spent inside that police station felt like an hour away from my much-needed fix. The desperation and deprivation fuelled my paranoia. By the middle of the night I was climbing the walls.

In the end a decision was taken to bring in a specialist doctor. It would be something of a first – even in
drug-tolerant
Holland – but I was to be given a medically supervised fix inside the police station itself.

While the doctor was dug out of his bed, the British Embassy had been working feverishly to track down the person whose voice I most wanted to hear: Mum. It must have been the early hours when they finally told me she was on the phone. My hands shook uncontrollably as I took the receiver from Leon. I can’t remember what we said. How many days, weeks and months had she been waiting to hear from me? She must have been out of her mind with worry, and yet all I can recall is the kindness in her voice. I had been a long, long time without kindness.

I do know that Mum told me she would book a flight first thing in the morning – the Embassy was going to help – and that she’d see me tomorrow night. The words didn’t sink in properly. See Mum? Tomorrow? How could that be? I was a whore and a drug addict. Mum wouldn’t want to see me. But that was my body – my aching, crack-starved, shivering, shaking body – trying to confuse me. My mind knew the truth: Mum was coming; I was going to be safe.

And then the doctor walked in. As soon as I saw him I began to worry: what if he were a punter – a regular visitor to the District? And if he was, how could I trust him?

I started to scream, to warn someone – anyone – but all I felt was strong hands holding me, a needle sliding into my arm … and then total and sweet oblivion.

It was a funny way to start out on my road to freedom.

I
woke up in a bed – a real bed, with clean sheets and comfy pillows and a pretty pattern on the coverlet. I couldn’t believe it.

It had taken about two hours to get from Amsterdam to Belgium. I’d been bundled up in a blanket, then carried down to the car and put in the back with Helène; Leon drove. I’d woken up halfway along the road and been terrified. I was convinced that Gregor and Pavlov would be following and would snatch me back at any moment. Helène had tried to reassure me. She’d told me that both she and Leon had been specially trained to spot a car tailing them – and that only they and their immediate boss knew exactly where I was being taken. I wasn’t convinced – and wouldn’t be till I was securely locked up inside the protective walls of the safe house.

Which turned out to be no more than an ordinary house in an ordinary little street. It didn’t look much like what I thought a safe house should be. I’d been expecting big, heavy gates, with security cameras and guard dogs, but this was just a nondescript two-bedroom house with a distinctly
flimsy-looking
lock.

Helène took me upstairs and got me undressed. Before she put me into bed she handed me a tablet that the doctor had prescribed.

‘Take this now; it will help you sleep. Leon and I will be here all the time. No one will come for you – you’re safe, Sarah, safe at last.’

I lay in bed the next morning, looking round the room and trying to take in all that had happened. A nun came into the room and tried to make me comfortable. My befuddled, confused mind struggled even more.

‘What’s a nun doing here? I thought I was in a police safe house, not a convent. Oh God, what will happen when they find out what I am, what I’ve been? They’ll say I’m too dirty, too bad to be in a house with nuns. They’ll kick me out and Gregor will come for me …’

Thoughts like this exploded inside my brain, one after the other, barely having time to register before the next one elbowed its ugly way into my consciousness. At the same time, my skin was alternately sweaty and covered in goose bumps; it was also incredibly itchy and I felt an overwhelming need to scratch it, to rake my fingernails across every inch of flesh on my body.

I was – of course – going cold turkey.

Withdrawing from chronic drug abuse is a difficult and sometimes dangerous business. Most rehabilitation clinics wean a user off the poison gradually, giving the body a chance to get used to working on smaller and smaller amounts of the drug every day. They also typically try to substitute a safer, synthetic alternative to the often contaminated street drug to which the user has become accustomed. These can be carefully calibrated to ensure that the addict gets enough of the effects without adding to the dependence or poisoning the body with dangerous impurities. That’s the theory, at any rate.

So sudden had been my physical withdrawal from Amsterdam – and so great the need to isolate me quickly in a safe house – that I wasn’t going to have the luxury of a phased rehabilitation. All I was going to be given to help me through withdrawal from long-term dependence on crack cocaine were the little white pills the doctor had prescribed in the police station, whatever they were.

Helène came in and sat on the bed. She explained that the nuns were there to look after me and nurse me for the few days I would be staying in this safe house. During that time I would probably sleep most of the day and night – helped by the little white pills – but she and Leon would also need to interview me and discover all I knew about the people who ran the Red Light District. She also told me that my mum would arrive within the next few days. It was the best news I could ever have had.

As Helène predicted, I did sleep for much of the next 48 hours. I was barely awake for more than a few minutes at a time and generally when I did wake up one of the nuns would silently hand me a glass of water and a pill, then I’d drift back into sleep again.

I know now that rehabilitation clinics often use this technique – powerful sleeping tablets or sedatives – with chronic drug addicts and alcoholics. It essentially gives the body a chance to recover a little of its strength and allows the mind a chance of some kind of peace. Both mind and body go through hell in the early days of getting clean – so giving them a brief window of uninterrupted rest is seen as vital. The difference is that these clinics are thoroughly trained in choosing and managing the right medication to help the addict sleep. Because getting it wrong can merely replace dependency on one type of drug with an equally powerful addiction to another.

I didn’t know it – how could I have done? – but those little white pills the doctor had prescribed were based on morphine, the same family of opiate drugs as heroin. I’d never used – much less been addicted to – any form of opiates, but as I slept an insidious change was taking place inside my exhausted body: it was gradually becoming hooked on morphine.

It was a catastrophic mistake – one that is still with me to this day – but I don’t blame anyone for it. Everyone involved in giving me the tablets – Helène, Leon, the nuns and the doctor at the police station – thought they were doing the right thing for me at the time.
14

They couldn’t have known that, far from helping, they were turning me into a different type of junkie: one who would spend the next 12 years addicted to a drug I’d never tried until my escape from the District.

After two days Helène came into the room and gently told me it was time to get dressed. ‘We’re going on a little journey – are you up to it? Just across town, to a hotel. There’s someone waiting for you there. It’s your mother.’

Was I up to it? Of course I was! I couldn’t wait to throw myself out of bed, pull on my clothes and rush downstairs. My mum had arrived. I had been dreaming of this day for many long and horrible months. At last I was going to see her, be held by her, be told that everything was okay. Oh yes, I was ‘up to it’.

We drove across whatever little town the safe house was in (no one ever told me – and my mum wasn’t allowed even to know what street it was in, let alone visit me there). At the hotel I was shaking – but with excitement, not fear – as we got in the lift and it climbed slowly, so slowly, to the second floor.

Then there was a corridor, and a door and suddenly my mum was standing there with her arms up and a look of such love on her face. She put her arms around me and held me, and for the first time I could remember I felt safe – completely safe and happy. I didn’t care what else happened – I just wanted my mum, and to stay like that forever. And the pair of us cried and cried until we couldn’t cry another tear – or so we thought. Because we did, of course we did.

At some point Helène led us over to the little bed and sat us both down, and told my mum that it was important for me to tell her everything that had happened, everything I’d gone through in Amsterdam.

‘It isn’t going to be easy to listen to this. Sarah has been to hell and some terrible things have happened to her. It will be very difficult for you to hear – just as it will be very difficult for her to say it to you.

‘But I want you to remember something – both of you: Sarah has been lucky. There are other girls like her who haven’t survived, and even more who are still there. So however terrible the things Sarah has been through, it is important that you and she both hold on to the fact that she is one of the lucky ones.’