Slave Girl (20 page)

And so it was with very mixed feelings that I agreed to go to Leicester and meet up with Eddie’s counterpart in the local police. Detective Sergeant Phill Adcock was a very different sort of copper to Eddie – ‘my Eddie’ as I’d come to think of him. But he was just as good to me – and completely determined to see John Reece brought to justice.

He’d known Reece for years and had followed his career as a regular criminal working his way up the scorecard of offending. He’d even arrested him a few times. But this was something different: people-trafficking – especially for the purposes of turning them into sex slaves – was so far beyond the pale of regular crime that Adcock was single-minded about bringing Reece to court.

But it wasn’t until July of 1997, two years after it all began, that the trial started. Eddie went with me, and both he and Phill Adcock were in the spectators’ gallery at Leicester Crown Court the day I gave my evidence. Sally had already pleaded guilty – and had even given evidence against Reece – so the questions I was asked were all about him.

He sat there in the dock, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. Certainly he showed no sign of remorse. My guts were churning. I was face to face with the man who had put me on the road to hell: I could hear his horrible voice barking out the curt commands to Sally and me; I could see again the coldness in his eyes as he thrust our ‘work uniforms’ at us – and the viciousness of his anger when he thought we hadn’t earned him enough money.

And yet there he sat, dressed in a neat jacket and tie, trying to pretend that he was innocent, that I was making it all up. I wanted to jump down from the witness box and scratch his eyes out.

And then it was over. Reece was told to stand up to hear the verdict read out: Guilty – on all charges. Yes! Got him!

What sentence do you think the court gave him? How long do you think he should have got? When I heard Judge Richard Bray’s order I couldn’t believe it, nor could Phill Adcock. Eddie just shook his gentle head and looked down at his shoes.

Two
years. Two years imprisonment – minus, of course, the time he’d already spent on remand. Factor in the near certainty of early release on parole and Reece would barely spend any more time behind bars. What sort of justice was that?

Sally got seven months: the judge acknowledged that Reece was – as he put it – ‘the prime mover in this scheme to introduce girls to prostitution in Amsterdam’ – and that she was completely under his control. In which case, I thought bitterly, how could it be that Reece only got a little more jail time than Sally?

I was disgusted by the outcome and – not for the first time – completely cheated by the judicial system. Outside the court Phill Adcock gave statement after statement to journalists. The reports in the newspapers the next day made it clear that he, at least, understood what I’d been through, and thought Reece’s sentence far too lenient: ‘The defendants preyed on an innocent victim, dragging her into the world of prostitution without a thought for her wellbeing … It was a nightmare for Sarah and I don’t know how she survived it – even though the current state she’s in is not a good one. The drugs were plentiful. The alcohol was given to her and that was her only food, in effect, for several months: drugs and alcohol and sweets. The situation was truly unbelievable.’

I owe a huge debt to Phill: however extreme and outlandish my story had seemed, I knew he had believed me. Both Phill and Eddie had been rock solid throughout the lead-up to the trial and supported me all the way through. Back in the north-east Eddie tried to cheer me up, constantly coming to see me and making sure I felt safe and protected. But things were about to get worse, not better.

I wanted to know what had happened to the five men who’d been charged in Amsterdam. Come to think about it, I hadn’t even been told their names. Was Gregor one of them? What about Pavlov? I asked Eddie to find out.

The Dutch have a funny way of looking at justice – at least to my way of thinking. When a person is charged with an offence – no matter how serious – the law states that they must be given some degree of anonymity. Only their first names – and sometimes only an initial – can ever be released by the police or the court. Maybe that makes sense before they come to court; perhaps it’s better that they stay anonymous until they are convicted and sentenced. But the Dutch legal system goes way beyond even that. The five men charged with trafficking in women, guns and running God knows what else organised crime throughout the Red Light District had all pleaded guilty. Yet under the law their identities apparently had to be kept secret. I never found out who had been brought to book for my ordeal – nor even what sentence they received.
16

I wanted to know – I
needed
to know – that the men who had imprisoned and exploited me were behind bars: how else could I feel safe from them?

I needed to know that solid stone walls and electronic surveillance cameras would ensure they didn’t get out and come looking for me, determined to exact revenge and – as with poor Par – make a final big payday out of my death.

I needed to know all of this and Eddie did his best to find out for me. But no matter what he did, the Dutch refused to release any information. It seemed like one final kick in the teeth.

I
can’t say I’m proud of the next few years.

I left the clinic in 1997, just after Reece and Sally’s conviction. The doctors decided that they had come to the end of what they could do to help me. My dependence on crack was broken and I no longer craved the temporary comfort to be found in a joint.

I was, though, chronically addicted to morphine and utterly reliant on the daily doses of methadone I swallowed to damp down the fires raging inside my body. It was a bitter irony that I’d only developed this dependence on opiates as a result of escaping from the Red Light District. But by the time I had been in a position to speak up and try to explain it was far too late – the poison had done its work and my body wouldn’t function without it.

So the day I walked out of the clinic I took with me a prescription for 120 milligrams of methadone a day – a very high dose indeed. The staff also handed me a second prescription for diazepam – a powerful tranquiliser – and explained that I would need to take this for the foreseeable future. I asked why, and was told that the doctors had diagnosed me with something they called PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This was a shock in itself. I realised – obviously – that I had some form of mental scarring from my months in the District, but I’d assumed that in time it would somehow fade into the background and I’d be able to resume a normal life. From what the doctors told me, this PTSD was a long-term and possibly irreversible condition – similar to shell-shock or the psychological damage caused to soldiers who had been captured and tortured in war. When I left the safety of the clinic and moved back into the real world I was apparently going to need daily doses of diazepam – and heavy doses at that – just to be able to get through the day. As the taxi pulled away down the drive I felt the vicious grip of panic take a deep and relentless hold inside me.

Social Services had found a little flat for me to live in – back in Gateshead, not far from where Chris and I had once bought our house and tried to live the normal life of an ordinary, loving couple. God, how long ago that now seemed. The flat was pleasant enough – one bedroom with a little sitting room-cum-kitchen and a basic bathroom. I knew the social workers were trying their best to help me and I must have been a very difficult client for them –
drug-addicted
, wrung out with stress and completely unable to trust anyone.

I found it impossible to settle into this scary new life of ‘freedom’. I was terrified of anything and everything, hopelessly dependent on medication and utterly unprepared for being out in the big wide world. And so I created my own little prison inside the four sad walls of that council flat. I sat there, day and night, only venturing out for my prescriptions and the essentials of my new ‘life’ – a little food – and a lot of cigarettes and booze. Drink and fags became my new crutches. If I couldn’t have crack or hash – and at that stage I honestly didn’t want them – I wasn’t yet ready to face reality sober. The empty bottles began to mount up inside the flat.

My already-fragile state of mind wasn’t helped by the return of a bitter echo from my past. I had just about forgotten about the police who had come to see me a few years before, at the house Chris and I had bought. So much had happened since then that even the memory of their investigation into the sexual abuse of children at care homes across the north-east had been pushed into some deep, dark corner of my mind. But it turned out that the statement I had made, detailing the abuse I suffered and identifying the men responsible, was just one of many. More than 200 former children in care had made very similar allegations about what they had endured in homes which were meant to be places of sanctuary. Many of these complaints dated back to the 1960s. The police investigation – ‘Operation Rose’ – had taken three years to complete and cost £5 million. They had written to more than 1,800 former residents, carefully explaining that they were looking into the homes where they had once lived; 61 separate care institutions were investigated and an astonishing total of 277 people made allegations against 223 care workers, accusing them of offences including rape, buggery, indecent and physical assault.

But somehow it had all gone wrong.

Because I was one of the victims, the police felt they had to come and tell me that very few court cases were actually going to take place – and that I shouldn’t get up my hopes of seeing my abusers brought to justice. It seemed that – just as had happened in Cleveland ten years earlier – too many influential voices had been raised in Parliament and the press, criticising the way the investigation had been handled.
17

The police were being kind and trying to be as sensitive to the needs of the people who had made the complaints. They wanted, I think, to let me down gently. They weren’t to know that I had managed to suppress the memories of the abuse for the past few years – or that in trying to be kind they were actually being cruel in bringing these terrible memories back to the surface; that far from making things better, they were actually making them worse.

Because however gently they tried to let me down, the fact remained that it was just that: letting me down. It felt – once again – as though no one cared, not really, not enough to make a real difference to the lives of abused children. I wasn’t in any position to know how many of the men who had been accused had actually done anything. I only knew what had happened to me and the other children in my home. But I found myself growing angry when the police explained to me that in many cases it had been a child’s word against that of an adult – and that an adult’s voice always seems somehow louder and more important.

Above all, though, the sensation that ran through me wasn’t anger: it was depression. Because after the police had made their polite noises and left – and they must have done so with hundreds of other complainants, not just me – I was left to pick up the shattered shards of my emotions. It was that thing about hope again – it is always more cruel to raise hope and then dash it than never to have raised it at all.

And so, as the weeks dragged on and I sat there in the lonely little flat, I sank deeper and deeper into despair. Perhaps that explains what I did next. Perhaps. But even if it did, it wouldn’t – couldn’t – be an excuse. Because what I did was so terribly self-destructive that I know from the outside that it must look like an act of monumental stupidity: I started seeing Sally again.

I honestly can’t remember who got in touch with whom first. She had been in Holloway prison in north London and I know we wrote to each other sometimes. Why? Because I felt guilty and responsible for her being there. Whether it was Stockholm Syndrome or something else entirely, I hadn’t wanted Sally to be punished like Reece had been.

I knew – of course I knew – that she had played a vital role in what happened to me. But I knew too that she had done so at Reece’s instigation and because in some weird, twisted way she thought she was in love with him. I don’t have any of the letters we wrote to each other and can now only vaguely remember what we told each other, but it was general stuff about our own lives, I think – the prison routine for her, my daily battle to stay afloat on the tidal swell of my medication. And then, when she got out, one of us must have suggested we meet up again.

She had moved to the Midlands – not back to Leicester, but to a major town halfway between there and London. I don’t want to name it because, as far as I know, Sally still lives there. But one day, one fateful day, I got on the train and made the journey down there.

And you’re wondering why. Looking back, so do I.

In the end it was a combination of things – a whole host of pressures and feelings all coming together at precisely the wrong time. The first was loneliness: I didn’t have any friends – who on earth could I speak to who would understand where I had been; who would be able to understand – much less talk about – the experiences I had been through? No one normal, that’s for sure.