Slave Girl (7 page)

I’m going to call John’s assistant Sally. It isn’t her real name and I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should actually name her. There’s absolutely no legal reason why I shouldn’t and some people may be surprised – given what happened – that I’ve decided to protect her by giving her a pseudonym. There are reasons why I have done so; as this story progresses you can judge for yourself whether you think they’re good ones.

Sally told me that I’d start work at the beginning of September and that she’d shortly be sending me my plane ticket to Amsterdam. Since we wouldn’t actually meet each other until I arrived at Schiphol, she asked me to give her a good description of myself. I gave her chapter and verse about what I looked like – how tall I was, what colour my hair and eyes were, what clothes I’d likely be wearing. She gave me a rather less detailed description of herself, but I was confident that I’d be able to recognise her from it.

My travel date was only a couple of weeks away, but the days dragged by so slowly. I was in a state of constant excitement, desperate to put my old life behind me and feverishly looking forward to exploring Amsterdam. I’d never been to Holland, so I went to the library and borrowed guide books listing just about everything anyone would ever want to know about Amsterdam.

I was surprised to discover that although it was the capital city of Holland (or The Kingdom of The Netherlands, as the country is formally known) it wasn’t actually the place where the Dutch government and all the major official organisations – the police, the law courts and all the foreign embassies, for example – had their headquarters. They were all located nearly 100 kilometres away in The Hague. Amsterdam, the books explained, was primarily a cultural and business centre. And above all, it was a tourist destination – the so-called ‘Venice of The North’ and the fifth most popular city in Europe, especially for British visitors.

I pored over the books and their photographs. I fell in love with the architecture – the 17th-century wooden buildings lining Amsterdam’s famous four semi-circular canals looked like something out of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. I imagined myself living in one of them, cycling to work along the canal towpaths as every real ‘Amsterdammer’ seemed to do. And I smiled at the coy references each book made to the city’s two most famous tourist attractions: the cafés which sold – semi-legally – marijuana and cannabis, and the infamous Red Light District with its hundreds of prostitutes brazenly touting for business from full-length glass windows.

I’d never taken drugs and thought the Red Light District looked distinctly seedy, but the books stressed that Amsterdam was a city of tolerance and freedom. The city even had a motto – ‘Heroic, Determined, Merciful’ – and since the Dutch government had allowed both the cafés and the glass windows to operate for many years, what right did I have to criticise?

Mum, of course, saw it differently. She was increasingly anxious about me leaving Gateshead and doubted that I was sufficiently mature to cope with a city as colourful and potentially dangerous as Amsterdam. She was also desperately worried by what she saw – rightly – as my naïve and glib responses whenever she brought the subjects up. Drugs, prostitution, the temptations of a big city nightlife … Already I’d managed to mess up more than once in the past few years – and that was in the relative safety of Gateshead. What on earth did I think was likely to happen once I was away from her discipline and influence? I would end up partying the nights away, smoking pot (as she quaintly put it) and getting myself fired for being a bad employee. And – no doubt – I’d then expect her to step in and bail me out.

‘Well, thank you very much, Sarah, but I’ve had quite enough to deal with – what with your father, the abuse, you going into Care, and all the rest of it. I’ve got your sister to think of – and your brother: you might give a thought to them and what they feel.’

Of course I didn’t listen. How could I? My ears were blocked – just as my eyes were dazzled – by the glittering future that lay ahead of me in Amsterdam, Venice of The North. And so I told her that I would be perfectly safe. I didn’t plan on spending much time in the Red Light District – my voice dripped with sarcasm as I spat this sentence out – and I had absolutely no interest in drugs or in the cafés that peddled them. And as for my brother and sister – well, maybe they were simply jealous.

But no matter what I said I couldn’t convince Mum that I would really be safe there. Living with my dad all those years had opened her eyes to the reality that – whatever a woman’s good intentions – bad and manipulative men would always find a way to get what they wanted. And in her experience what they wanted usually revolved around sex and money. Add drugs – and especially an open trade in them – to that mixture and I can now see why she was beside herself with worry about me.

Even on the way to the airport she stopped the car, turned towards me and tried to tell me it wasn’t too late: I didn’t have to go, I could stay with her, get my old job back and work hard to rebuild my life in Gateshead.

But I didn’t listen – I didn’t want to rebuild my old life. I was going to find a whole new and exciting life in one of the world’s most glamorous cities – a place that positively sparkled with opportunity and promise; a place that called itself Mercy.

I
should have listened.

The moment I walked off the plane and into the arrivals hall, something didn’t feel quite right. Call it intuition, call it sixth sense; I don’t know exactly what it was but all my nerves were jangling and something in my head – not a voice, just a ‘something’ – was telling me to find the nearest ticket counter and book myself on to the next plane back to England. As I stepped into the bustling crowds inside Schiphol, every synapse seemed alive to the prospect of some unidentified danger: every stranger, sweeping by me without so much as a backward glance, seemed instantly menacing. The words ‘Don’t do this!’ screamed soundlessly inside me.

I really wish I’d listened – to my mum, to my intuition, to the something inside my head. But I didn’t. I told myself I was being stupid; this was the city where my dreams were about to come alive. What on earth could go wrong? And so I ploughed straight on through the airport until I found the baggage carousel, then I picked up the one small suitcase I’d brought with me and marched out confidently into the public area of the arrivals hall.

The whole cavernous space was painted a sort of dull grey, with occasional flashes of yellow and orange. It made picking out faces in the throng extremely difficult. Sally had said she would meet me there and so I anxiously scanned crowds of people, looking for someone matching her description. There seemed to be hundreds of them: identikit
European-looking
women in sensible clothing. Some were holding up signs for important business people, others were family groups – mostly mothers with children – clearly waiting for a relative. But there was no one who looked like she would turn out to be Sally – and no matter how much I stared and peered, no one paid the slightest bit of attention to me.

For the next 15 minutes I stood in that great big hall, searching for a friendly face in the mass of people. No sign. Of course, with hindsight, that should have rung even more alarm bells. Sally and John were meant to be responsible professionals, working for a well-established child care facility, and responsible professionals don’t leave new employees in the lurch at a major airport in a strange country.

As it was, I waited and waited, telling myself as each minute ticked by that Sally had probably just been held up in bad traffic. Hadn’t the guidebooks said that the motorways around Schiphol sometimes got terribly clogged up? These were the days before everyone in the world had a mobile phone – I certainly didn’t. So there would have been no way for her to call and warn me she was going to be late.

And then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun round and she was there behind me, grinning, bubbly and apologising for being late. A huge surge of relief rushed through me – my body felt suddenly warm all over. I wasn’t alone in this strange place. It was all going to be alright, of course it was.

Maybe that instant rush of relief blotted out the other immediate reaction running through my mind: this woman is no nursery nurse! As soon as I looked at her I knew. She was wearing a very short, tight black skirt with long black leather boots and a long three-quarter length black leather coat. Nursery nurses don’t dress like that. Her hair was blonde: not real blonde but that shade of bright yellow-white that positively screams out that it’s come out of a bottle – and a very cheap bottle at that. What with her clothes, her hair and her make-up – very heavy and overdone – well, I just knew she wasn’t like any nursery nurse I’d ever met. And the way she talked – very quickly, as if she was incredibly excited or really nervous – just amplified the impression. All those instincts and sixth senses, and the little something inside my head which had been nagging away at me since I’d landed, all combined and tried to shout at me ‘get away from this woman – now.’

God, how I wish I’d listened.

Instead, I followed her. Sally said John Reece was waiting in the car outside. He was on a yellow line and we needed to move quickly so he didn’t get into trouble for parking where he shouldn’t. And so I trailed after her through Schiphol airport.

Sure enough, there was a car just outside. And there was a man standing beside it, looking at his watch as if we were late, and then urgently beckoning us to hurry up. This must be John Reece, I thought. But as I got closer I was surprised to see three other girls squashed inside the car. What were they doing there? Neither John nor Sally had said anything about any other girls; they’d made me think I was the only nursery nurse being employed.

But I didn’t have time to ask them any questions. John jumped into the driver’s seat – I remember being surprised that it was a British-style righthand drive – and at the same moment Sally pushed me into the back of the car, then got in the front next to him. As the other girls and I squashed together, the car took off at what seemed a dangerously high speed.

By now I was really scared. What was happening? Who were these other girls? As I turned to get my first good look at them – a real shock: they looked even rougher than Sally – I heard John shout my name. I turned round and found a big black metal barrel pointing at me, just a few inches from my face.

‘Shut up! Don’t move or do anything stupid. Get your passport out. Hand it to Sally. Shut up!’

John was twisted round in the driver’s seat. He was holding the steering wheel with his right hand, weaving through the traffic. In his left hand was a gun – a big, shiny, evil-looking gun. The barrel was pointing directly between my eyes.

Today, 13 years on from that dreadful day, what happened in the car still plays in my mind like a film or a videotape. In slow motion. I can still see John’s lips moving. I can hear every word he said, every curt instruction he barked at me. But the image and the words are somehow disconnected: they don’t seem to be in sync, as if someone had somehow put the film together wrongly.

Or maybe that’s just because I went into shock at the moment I saw the gun, and the whole terrible scene has stuck in my mind the way I saw it then. Certainly I remember feeling as if this wasn’t really happening to me; it was all happening to someone else and I was just being made to watch. And then the mental video speeds up and I’m back in the car and I’m shaking and John is yelling at me to hand over my passport – right now.

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the precious little red passport, then put it into Sally’s outstretched hand. As I did so, I thought, ‘She was in on this from the start. Whatever this is, she was a part of it from the very beginning.’

As soon as she’d got the passport Sally turned back to the front and wouldn’t look at me. John lowered the gun and for a few minutes seemed to focus just on driving the car. He didn’t say anything for some minutes. My mind was racing – what was going on? Where were they taking me – and why? The other girls didn’t say anything either. We all rode along in complete silence. You might wonder, why didn’t I struggle, why didn’t I make a scene or try to get out of the car? But I was so shocked and the car was going so fast that I just sat there. As each kilometre flashed by, I became more and more terrified. And then John Reece spoke again.

‘I’m going to show you where you’re going to be working. But it’s not where you think. There is no crèche and you’re not going to be a nursery nurse. Sit back and you’ll see.’

There were no more words from him or Sally. The other girls started talking amongst themselves – sort of whispering really. I could hear that they were English, but their behaviour seemed really strange: I couldn’t work out why none of them would speak to me. Gradually it began to dawn on me that they might be high on drugs. I tried to catch a glimpse of Reece’s face in the driver’s mirror, but he could see I was looking at him and kept moving his head. Still, I managed to get a good look at his eyes, framed by the black plastic of the mirror: they seemed wild and slightly manic. With a shock I realised that the girls weren’t the only ones in that car who were on drugs.

I turned back to look out the window. I think I had some crazy notion that it was important to remember the way we were travelling so that if – when – I escaped from the car I could find my way back to the airport. Of course that was nonsense, but I kept staring and trying to memorise things as much as I could.

Which was how I saw the sign. We weren’t heading into Amsterdam – we shot past the turn-off for the city and seemed to be heading towards The Hague. For some reason that made me cry. No one in the car paid any attention.

It was dark when we got there. Reece pulled up in a dirty little street outside a shabby-looking hotel. He turned round and pointed the gun at me.