Slave Girl (8 page)

‘Not a word or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

He made Sally get out of the car and go into the hotel. A few minutes later she came out with a small thickset man smoking a cigarette. He nodded at Reece. It was obviously a signal for us all to get out of the car. Reece looked at me and gestured menacingly with the gun.

‘Just remember what I’ve said. One wrong move and you’re dead.’

We all climbed out of the little car – it seemed to take an age – and began to follow Sally and the man into the hotel. The other girls went first; Reece came behind me.

Should I have made a run for it at this point? Probably. Could I have done so? I really don’t know. I don’t even remember whether the thought crossed my mind. I just remember being almost frozen with fear, terrified Reece would carry out his threats and use the gun on me. And then again, where could I have run to? I hadn’t a clue where I was – other than a guess that I was in The Hague. It was dark, the street was empty and running wildly into this desolate place seemed almost as terrifying as obeying Reece. And if I had run, would he have shot me? Could I have got more than a few steps before he fired? Somehow I doubt it.

Reece seemed to know the man from the hotel pretty well. I stood helplessly in the lobby while they started talking very fast in low voices. I saw the man gesture at me and overheard a snatch of the conversation.

‘What about this little one?’ he asked. And Reece replied, ‘No, I’m not selling this one. This one’s mine.’

I barely had time to register the idea that these two men – one a complete stranger, the other someone I’d only talked to on the phone before meeting him at the airport this afternoon – were talking about selling me: actually selling me, as if I were a sack of potatoes or a secondhand car. Then, just as their words were sinking in, Sally abruptly ordered the other girls to go to their rooms.

‘Their rooms?’ I thought. ‘They must have been here before if they have their own rooms.’ Call me naïve if you will, but it still hadn’t clicked what sort of hotel this was. There didn’t seem to be any other guests, or any staff. I watched the girls climb the old and tatty spiral staircase up to the first floor.

Reece and the man finished whatever business they were doing. He grabbed me by the shoulder with one hand and grabbed Sally’s arm with the other. He pushed her in front and then half-dragged me behind him as we set off up the same staircase. He didn’t say a word to me.

Upstairs, Sally opened the door of a dirty, smelly bedroom. There were two single beds in it, both unmade and covered in stains. The room itself looked like a mass brawl had broken out in it: half the fittings were completely smashed. Reece pushed me inside with Sally but didn’t enter himself. Instead, I heard him turning the key in the lock on the outside. And it was then, in that horrible little room in that rundown hotel, that Sally told me what was going on.

‘You’re going to be put to work in the Red Light District. John’s a pimp. He runs a lot of girls, both here and in Amsterdam. He brings them in from all over Britain. Some he sells to other pimps, some he keeps for himself.

‘They’re pretty rough, most of them. They’ve all been on the game before and know what the score is. You’re different: he wanted a girl like you – an innocent girl, a girl who’s never been a prostitute – because he’ll earn a huge amount of money from you. He may pimp you himself or he may sell you to one of his contacts: they’re mostly Yugoslavian and – though you may not think so now – you’ll count yourself lucky if John hangs on to you.’

She paused, looking at me, waiting for me to say something, I suppose. I opened my mouth and the words stumbled out.

‘But I can’t be a prostitute. I can’t do it; I
can’t
! I don’t know what to do. Why can’t he get someone else? Why did he have to pick on me?’

Sally looked at me, staring straight into my eyes. Just for an instant I saw something there – a spark of sympathy, pity perhaps, maybe even recognition. Then it was gone. She took my hand and spoke slowly to me.

‘You will do it, because you have to. You have no say in this. John has got your passport – I gave it to him in the car. You’re his now to do with as he wants. Just like he does with the others; just like he does with me. If you refuse, he’ll kill you – believe me, you wouldn’t be the first prostitute to disappear here. If you don’t earn enough money, he’ll beat you. If you try to run away, he’ll kill you. Those are the rules.

‘I’ll show you what to do. It’s hard at first, but there are things which can make it easier. But you’ve got to understand what I’m telling you: you are going to be a prostitute. You will start work tomorrow. You have no choice. So if I were you, I’d get some sleep before he comes back again.’

She moved away from me and lay down on one of the beds. She was obviously going to take her own advice. I sat there in the silence of that lonely room desperately trying to make sense of what she had said. I was a nursery nurse, not a prostitute: how could this be happening? Surely there had been some kind of mistake? Maybe they’d got me mixed up with another girl?

But deep down I knew. There was no mix-up; the only mistakes had been mine – for answering that advert, for not listening to Mum, for not turning round in Schiphol airport when all my instincts were trying to warn me. Tonight was my last night as a normal, decent person. Tomorrow I was going to be made to have sex for money. And somehow it was all my fault. I thought back to what Dad had done to me and the abuse I’d endured in the children’s home. I thought about Steve, and the abortion; I thought about Chris and the break-up and losing our little home – our safe, neat little home – in Gateshead. I thought about Mum and my brother and my sister. I even thought about my dad’s girlfriend and her poor little kids. It was my fault that everything had gone wrong in my life. And I was sure that I’d never see any of them again.

I walked over to the door and tried the handle. It was locked. I knew it would be, but that didn’t stop me trying to open it. I pressed up against the keyhole and called out, hoping against hope that someone would hear me, would come to rescue me. Nothing.

I tried to open the window but it, too, was shut tight. By the look of it someone had painted over the whole frame a long time ago; it didn’t look to have been disturbed for years. Forced to accept that I was trapped, I sat on the bed and cried for what seemed like hours. Eventually I lay down on the dirty sheets and fell into the blank, dreamless sleep that comes with absolute exhaustion.

Sally shook me awake the next morning.

‘Get dressed. It’s time. He’ll be here any minute.’

I stared at her, searching her face for a sign of what I thought I’d seen the night before but there was nothing. Her face was blank – an expressionless mask with no hint of sympathy or kindness.

‘Just get up, get dressed and get ready. And do it quickly.’

An hour later I was getting back into Reece’s car to be taken – along with Sally and two of the girls from the airport – to a flat in the Hague’s Red Light District. As we all squashed into the car I could see the heavy black gun lying on the passenger seat next to Reece. He seemed totally unconcerned about driving around with a gun on open show.

For a fleeting second I thought about making a grab for it. If I had the gun maybe I’d be able to turn the tables and make Reece take me back to the airport? Then reality kicked in: his hand was no more than six inches from the handle, whereas I would have to reach through between the front seats to get it. Even if I did get my hands on it first – and even if Reece, Sally or one of the other girls didn’t try to wrestle it from me – what on earth was I going to do with it? I’d never even seen a real gun before, much less pointed one at somebody else. Didn’t they all have some kind of safety catch? Where would that be? And anyway, I knew that I’d never be able to pull the trigger: shooting someone – even someone like Reece – would be completely beyond me.

The flat had two rooms – a bedroom and a sitting room – and a bathroom, all leading off a little corridor. It stank of dirt and cigarettes and stale sweat. The two girls headed for the bedroom, where they changed into skimpy underwear and settled down on the sofa ready for their first customers of the day. I sat on the floor in the lounge, my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped tightly around them. Sally perched on the edge of the sofa. She was clearly my minder, and wasn’t going to let me out of her sight.

We sat there all through the day and the evening. Several times I heard a phone ring and voices from the bedroom; half an hour later there would be a knock at the front door and the sound of a pair of stiletto heels making their way to answer it. After that, a few minutes – no more than a quarter of an hour – of grunts and groans and the sound of a bedhead banging against the wall, then the heels in the corridor and the door opening and closing once again.

As each hour passed I became increasingly scared of the phone ringing. I became convinced that the next call would be someone demanding a new girl – and that I would be summoned into the bedroom. It was like waiting for a terrible accident to happen, one I knew was certain and unavoidable. And as I sat there I slipped back into the awful memories of what Dad or the men at the care home did to me. This was just the same: waiting for the inevitable pain and misery to find their way back to me.

From time to time Sally tried to talk to me. She told me about Reece – how he had been a petty criminal back home in England since he was a teenager; how he had a long criminal record and how he was well-known to police in his hometown of Leicester, as well as further south in the Home Counties. The car he had been driving when he met us at the airport had been stolen in England. He was going to sell it to one of his contacts over here.

Despite the feelings of dread and panic racking my body, my mind seemed to be capable of absurdly rational thought: as Sally told me all of this I remember thinking: ‘Oh, that explains the right-hand-drive.’

It seemed as though Sally needed to talk. I wasn’t very communicative – I was far too terrified to make much in the way of conversation – but she didn’t seem to mind. There was a lot she wanted to say, and somehow I was the one she felt able to confess to.

She had met and fallen in love with Reece more than a year before, not realising what sort of man he was. She discovered that soon enough: within a month or so he had persuaded her to go on the game in Leicester – just to earn them some money while he sorted out a ‘business deal’ he was working on. Of course, there was no business deal – or if there was she never saw it. Instead he carried on pimping her – and getting involved with any other bit of petty crime he could make cash out of.

In the end, I gave in – mainly for want of anything else to do – and talked to her. How old was she? Where did she come from? What about her family – what did
they
think she was doing? How did Reece get away with it?

She smiled as the questions tumbled out. She was 21 – two years older than me; Reece was 29. She had grown up in a small town in the Home Counties, about an hour north of London. She didn’t want to talk about her family, that much she made plain, but grimly said that no one had ever been sufficiently interested in her to be concerned about her welfare. As for Reece, well, the less I knew about him the better. He was bad news – she knew that first hand. As she said this she bunched her fist and I realised that she meant ‘first hand’ literally.

Why did she stay with him, I eventually asked. She looked at me hopelessly and shrugged. ‘I love him, I suppose. I know it seems mad – he’s a complete bastard and I know he doesn’t care about me. But I love him.’

There was nothing I could say. She was obviously completely under Reece’s control. And anyway, suddenly I didn’t want to talk to her, to hold a normal conversation with this stranger, in this disgusting hotel. I remembered – how could I have forgotten? – she had helped trap me. She was just as bad as him in my eyes, worse probably. I had trusted her and she had deliberately got me into his clutches. I was suddenly angry again and I raged at her.

How could you do this to me? How could you set out to trap an innocent girl and turn her into a prostitute? How could you talk to me on the phone so nicely, promise to meet me at the airport – and then betray me like this? How could you hand me over to him, help this evil man in my kidnapping?

Kidnapped. The moment that word ran through my mind, my whole body shook and I began to cry uncontrollably. Nobody knew where I was – no one that cared about me, anyway. No one would be looking for me either: I’d told Mum I’d call her in a few days, so she wouldn’t be expecting to hear from me yet. I was trapped here in this grotty flat in The Hague, with a never-ending stream of dirty, disgusting men coming in to have dirty, disgusting sex with prostitutes. And I was about to become one of them.

As I cried my heart out, Sally shrank somehow deeper into herself. It was as though she was wilting under the onslaught of my anger and my grief. Without looking at me she began to speak in a small and fractured voice.

‘I know. I know what I am and I know what I’ve done. I’m really sorry, honestly I am. I should never have agreed to get you into this – it was John’s plan and he made me do it. But I shouldn’t have said yes. The moment I spoke to you on the phone I knew you were a good person and I knew you trusted me. I hated myself for tricking you; I hate myself now for what’s happened to you. I promise I’ll try to get you out of this. I don’t know how – Christ, John would kill me if he heard me saying this. But I will, I promise I will – I’ll find a way of getting you out. Please believe me, I’m not a bad person. Not really. It’s just John and what he does, who he is. Please, Sarah, you have to believe me: I’ll try to help you escape. Just don’t make any more noise; it could cause trouble.’

I can still feel the sobs ripping through my body as she spoke. I had no control over them – I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. Not that I did; I just wanted to get away from her and this room, and I didn’t care what Sally thought of me, or whether any of the other girls – or their ‘clients’ heard me. And I didn’t care how guilty she felt: why should I? Why should I say or do anything to make her feel better? Nor did I believe her when she said that she would help me get away. Oh, I wanted to, alright. I wanted to believe that escape was possible and that Sally would somehow engineer it. But believe her? How could I when she was so obviously enslaved by Reece?