Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade (20 page)

In the horrible little hotel room, Kas stood watching me while I put some clothes into a suitcase and tried not to show how frightened I was. I was acutely aware that I was throwing things into the case in the way that had previously made him so angry, and as I quickly folded a jumper, a piece of paper fell out of the pocket. Kas bent down, picked it up, glanced at it and suddenly reached out and hit me, hard, across the head with his open hand.

‘What the
fuck
is this?' he shouted, slapping me again and then punching me with his tightly clenched fist.

‘I … I don't know,' I stammered, trying to focus on the bit of paper he was holding just a couple of inches in front of my eyes. At first, I couldn't make any sense of the numbers that were written on it – clearly in my handwriting. And then I remembered the night when freezing cold rain had been falling steadily for hours and I'd tried to figure out whether I'd earned enough money to be able to stop work early and find somewhere dry to hide until it was time to go back to the hotel.

‘Are you trying to get me caught, woman?' Kas hit me again. ‘You better straighten up before you come back here.'

Just play the game
, I thought.
Don't say anything you wouldn't normally say. You've got to make him think you're coming back.
And, as if he'd read my mind, he twisted his fingers in my hair and pulled my head towards his as he said, slowly, ‘Don't even
think
about not coming back. I will find you.' But the next moment, his arms were wrapped tightly around me and he was whispering into my ear, ‘I love you. I don't want to be without you. Just get better and come back to me.'

A few minutes later, I walked down the stairs behind him feeling light-headed and disorientated. I still couldn't believe he was really going to let me get into Steve's car and be driven away. But Steve took my suitcase and dropped it into the boot, my mother almost pushed me on to the back seat, and suddenly we were speeding away from Kas, down the hill and along the road where I'd stood every miserable, lonely, terrifying night for the last six months, and I burst into tears.

Mum reached behind her seat for my hand. ‘It's all right now, Sophie,' she said. ‘You're safe. It's all over.' I still couldn't believe it, though. Kas had told me so many times that he had people everywhere who were watching me and that he would always know where I was and what I was doing, that I simply didn't believe he'd just let me walk away.

As we drove through northern Italy, I stared blindly through the window of the car, trying to absorb the fact that I was no longer all on my own.

Every few minutes, my phone would ring and Kas would tell me, ‘You're my little mouse. I miss you already. I just want you back here with me so that I can kiss you and hug you and touch your hair.' I felt sick, and almost embarrassed for Kas. Did he really think I believed him, after everything he'd done to me? I used to tell myself he loved me, even after he'd forced me to work on the streets and it had become a ridiculous belief. I'd
wanted
to believe it, because unless I could suspend all logic and common sense and convince myself that he cared about me but had to pay off his debt before we could plan a future together, none of it made any sense at all.

Every time Kas phoned me in the car he asked, ‘Where are you now?' Each time, I'd tell him that I didn't know, and I could hear the barely suppressed irritation in his voice as he said, ‘Well, why don't you ask your mum?' I'd see Mum glance at Steve, who'd name some road or town we'd just passed through and I'd relay the information to Kas. What I didn't know until later, however, was that Kas had given Steve very precise directions for the route he should take to get home, and it was those directions that Steve was using each time he told me where we were. In reality, though, he had been suspicious of Kas's intense interest in our journey and so had taken a different route.

Neither Mum nor Steve asked me anything about what Kas had done to me, and as we drove, Mum held my hand and talked about other things. But I could tell that her
cheerfulness was forced and when she looked at me, I could see in her eyes that her heart was breaking.

We stopped that night at a hotel on the Swiss border, which turned out to be a Swiss version of Fawlty Towers. It was run by a couple Steve instantly christened Fraud and Maud, who were barely civil and who served some of the worst food we'd ever tasted. When Steve asked for salad and fries to accompany his steak, Fraud looked at him as though he'd requested caviar and Cristal champagne in a McDonald's, and we only just managed to stop ourselves laughing out loud.

Mum and I did laugh later, though, when we went to the bar and Steve – who's very particular about hygiene – nearly passed out as we watched Fraud cut a slice of lime for his drink, drop it on the floor, pick it up, swill it briefly in some water and slip it into the glass. In fact, that night we laughed until the tears were streaming down our faces and, grumpy and humourless as they were, we were grateful to Fraud and Maud for acting like a safety valve on a pressure cooker and giving us the opportunity to release some of the emotions that had been building up inside us.

As we sat in the bar, talking and laughing, I looked at Mum and then at Steve and felt my heart swell with the love I felt for them. It had been so long since I'd had anyone to talk to that I'd almost forgotten what normality was like and I'd accepted the fact that I would never have anything to laugh about again. I hadn't thought I'd ever feel safe again either, but I came very close to it that evening.

The next morning, we'd been driving for a couple of hours when Mum suddenly said, ‘Let's have a singsong!'

‘No, Mum. I can't,' I told her. But she insisted.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘It'll make us feel better. Don't you remember how we always used to sing in the car when you were little?' She turned and took hold of my hand and her voice became quiet as she added, ‘Come on, darling. It'll be okay, I promise.'

She started to sing and first Steve joined in and then I did, and she was right: it did make us feel better, and the memory of driving through the mountains between Switzerland and France, singing at the tops of our voices, is one that will always stay with me.

Later that morning, we stopped for coffee at a ski resort, where we sat outside a café in the brilliant sunshine and Mum wondered aloud if one of the people sitting at the table next to ours might be prevailed upon to take our photograph. I was instantly engulfed by panic and I felt my eyes filling with tears as I told her, ‘No, Mum. I don't want to have my photo taken. I don't want a picture of me now. Please. Look at the state of me. I look disgusting.'

But Mum just reached across the table, took hold of my hands and said, ‘We
will
take a picture, Sophie, and one day we'll look at it and remember this time and we'll be able to talk about it without crying.'

‘We won't. That time won't ever come,' I sobbed.

And Mum was crying too as she told me, ‘It will, darling. I promise you it will.'

I don't know how I'd expected to feel when I was at home again, but everything seemed to have changed. In fact, it wasn't so much that
things
were different; it was more that I'd become someone else and so I had a different perception of everything. I'd left home as one person, with particular experiences and views on life, and I'd returned as someone I didn't recognise when I looked in the mirror – someone I felt ashamed to be.

It's hard to explain, but it was as though I didn't know how to act normally anymore, and I didn't seem to fit in anywhere. Although I wanted to, I didn't know how to; I became obsessed with the idea that people might be able to read the thoughts in my head, and then they'd know I was someone who'd done things so disgusting that no
decent person would want to be associated with me. I know that if someone told me that what happened to me had happened to them, I'd feel sorry for them and wouldn't blame them for one moment. Even so, I still felt as though it was all somehow my fault.

Perhaps lots of people who've had bad experiences feel like that, and perhaps they feel, as I did, the need to ‘get over it' as quickly as possible so that they can pick up the pieces of their old lives and carry on. And perhaps they, too, find that their old lives have been shattered into so many pieces that that's impossible to do. For six months, I'd had to pretend to be Jenna, but now it felt as though I was pretending to be Sophie.

However hard I tried to be ‘normal', I remained miserable and kept thinking,
I don't want to be here, but I don't want to be anywhere else. I don't want to be anywhere. I don't fit anywhere. What the hell am I going to do?

I didn't tell anyone about what had happened in Italy. I knew Mum had decided to give me time and space before asking me about it, and although she was sometimes on the verge of saying something, she always drew back at the last moment.

Kas was still calling me regularly and eventually I told him, ‘I'm trying to get well again. I just need to be left alone for a while.' I hadn't really expected him to take any notice, so I was surprised when I didn't hear from him again for the next few days. And then I had a call from someone who said he was Kas's brother.

‘Kas has been arrested,' he told me. ‘He was picked up by the Italian police when he had a large quantity of cocaine in his car and he's in prison. I need to know if you're coming back.'

I wanted to shout at him, ‘Why are you telling me this? This isn't my problem. I don't care about what's happened to Kas. Prison is where he belongs.' But, instead, I tried to sound concerned as I said, ‘I'm sorry; I can't go back just now.'

Then I went into the kitchen, filled the kettle to make some tea and stood staring blindly out of the window as I tried to identify the emotion I was feeling. Was it elation? Relief? Disbelief? Pity? Satisfaction? Perhaps it was a mixture of all of them.

I was still standing there when Mum came in and said, ‘Are you making tea? Ooh, make one for me, love.' Then she sat down at the kitchen table and told me we needed to talk.

‘You need to tell me what happened,' she said. ‘I haven't wanted to push you, but I really have to know now.'

‘I can't tell you,' I told her. My heart was pounding and the tears that were always just behind my eyes had begun to trickle down my cheeks.

‘Yes, you can,' Mum said, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. ‘I don't care
what's
happened, Sophie. I don't care what you've done. You will always be my little girl and I will always love you. Nothing can change that, no matter how bad it seems to you. Nothing can change the fact that
you're you. But you
have
to tell me. I can't bear to see you so unhappy and not be able to help you.'

So I told her what Kas had made me do and how I'd been so afraid of him and had felt so alone that I'd had to
become
Jenna to be able to do it. I explained how Kas always stood beside me whenever I'd talked to her on the phone, and that although I'd wanted desperately to tell her I wasn't happy, as I was pretending to be, I'd been too ashamed and too brainwashed by Kas to be able to tell her the truth. And as she knelt on the floor beside my chair and held me in her arms, we both began to sob.

Afterwards, when we could talk again, she said, ‘I
knew
something was wrong. I could
feel
it. The whole time you were there, I kept telling Steve I didn't believe you'd just walk away from your family, your friends and your job like that. I'd sometimes wake up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and I'd be thinking about you, wondering where you were and if you were okay. I
knew
something bad had happened to you, but I allowed myself to believe what everyone told me – that I was just hurt because we've always had a close relationship and you didn't seem to want to talk to me about anything anymore.'

It turned out that when I phoned Mum from the hospital, she and Steve had already been planning a ‘surprise visit' to Italy. Despite the fact that I'd avoided giving her the address of where I was staying – using one excuse after another whenever she asked for it – they'd intended simply to arrive in the area and drive around, knocking on doors
if necessary, until they found me. Having lived most of her life in the small, close-knit community of a village, however, I don't think my mum had realised how easy it is for people to ‘disappear' in a city suburb, and she certainly hadn't dared to allow herself to consider the possibility that they might eventually have to leave again without me.

Even in her most haunting nightmares, the worst she'd been able to imagine was that Kas wasn't treating me well, and she was completely devastated when I told her the truth. Later, she went upstairs to tell Steve, and he came down, wrapped his arms around me, hugging me so tightly he almost squeezed all the breath out of me, and said, ‘Listen, lovey. You're safe, you're well and you're well loved. We're going to look after you and you're going to get through this.'

Mum told my sister, Emily, an abridged version of what I'd told her, and when Emily came into my room, she was sobbing. She threw her arms around me and kept repeating through her tears, ‘I'm sorry. I'm
so
sorry, Sophie. I'm
so
sorry.'

That evening, Mum, Steve, Emily and I had a family conference around the kitchen table, at which we agreed not to tell anyone else outside the family, except for Mum's best friend Louise, who knew quite a senior police officer who might know where I could get some help. And it was through Louise's contact that I was put in touch with Robin, who was head of a vice unit and who, quite literally, saved me.

A few days after I'd come home, I'd gone to the hair-dresser and had my hair dyed and cut short. I wanted not to look like Jenna and, perhaps more importantly, I didn't want to have her hair – the hair that Kas and so many other men had touched. Mum had already gone through my suitcase and thrown almost everything away, crying silently while she did it and sobbing when she found the rip in the back of my jacket and the 50-Euro note that was tucked into the lining. I think that was the moment when it all became too real for her to bear, and it hurts me more than anything else to know that, when she goes to bed every night, she has to try to block out of her mind the pictures she must see of what happened to me.

The day after I told her, Mum took me shopping for some new clothes and we were sitting in a coffee shop when I suddenly burst into tears. The look of anguish on her face made me feel even more wretched, and eventually, when I'd calmed down enough to talk, I told her, ‘I hate myself. I hate the way I look. I don't want to be in this world anymore. I don't want to have to go on living.'

‘Oh, Sophie,' she said, wiping away the tears that were streaming down her own cheeks. Then she took a slow, deep breath and, in a determinedly cheerful voice, told me, ‘You look lovely, darling. It's just the way you feel at the moment. It'll get better. I promise it will.'

‘Look at me, Mum,' I whispered. ‘I'm so skinny and ugly and my clothes are disgusting. I know you want to help me, but it doesn't matter how much money you spend on
new clothes for me: nothing will ever look nice on me again. I don't feel nice anymore – I look like a skeleton.'

I tried to pull myself together for my mother's sake and I told her I liked all the clothes she bought me, but I couldn't help thinking,
What's the point? There's no point in my even existing.

I had other worries too, the main one being that I was in debt. While I was in Italy, the money for the rent on my flat in Leeds had continued to be taken out of my bank account every month – from an overdraft once the account was empty. I hadn't told anyone, and whenever my mother asked about my financial situation, I insisted, ‘Everything's fine. Don't worry about anything.' So, of course, she assumed I'd taken care of it. The truth was, though, that being in debt made my anxiety even worse, and I knew I had to get a job as soon as possible so that I could start paying back what I owed to the bank.

Luckily, I found a really good job – on the recommendation of a friend I used to work with – just three weeks after I got home. I knew Mum would have liked me to stay so that she and the other people who loved me could protect me. And, in many respects, that was what I wanted too. But I knew that if I gave in to the temptation to hide myself away, safely cocooned from the real world, I would never be able to build a new life. What was also pushing me away from my family, though, was the fact that I felt as if I was completely different from the girl I used to be. Everything that should have been familiar and comforting
seemed strange – although I knew that the only thing that had really changed was me.

So I left my family and moved back into the flat in Leeds. But I couldn't focus. I still felt detached and disconnected, as though I was watching myself from outside my body. I kept thinking,
Pull yourself together. It's over. It's in the past. Move on.
But I couldn't, because everything had changed, and I didn't know
how
to move on. It didn't help that I'd lost most of my friends – as far as they knew, I'd gone to Italy and just stopped phoning them or answering their text messages, which they'd soon given up sending.

I made an appointment at a health clinic and had tests for everything I could think of, and I wept with relief when they told me I didn't have any infections. At least I had that to be thankful for, although it seemed I had little else.

When I had a meeting with Robin, from the vice unit, he asked me, ‘Do you understand what's happened to you – that you've been trafficked?' And, strange as it may seem, that was the first time I'd ever thought about it in those terms. Kas had done such a good job of brainwashing me that it had never actually crossed my mind that what he'd done had been entirely calculated and premeditated, and I think, even then, I still wanted to hold on to the belief that, on some level, he loved me.

Over the course of several meetings with Robin, he asked me questions and helped me to see what had happened in a more realistic light. Then, one day, he showed me a photograph and asked, ‘Is this him?' I looked
at it for a long time before answering, not because I didn't recognise Kas's face immediately, but because I could hear his voice in my head saying, ‘If I ever get into trouble because of something you've done, I'll fucking kill you, woman.' But, eventually, I whispered ‘Yes.'

‘He's wanted here for an attempted shooting,' Robin told me. ‘That's why he left the country so abruptly when you first came across him.' He confirmed that Kas was in prison in Italy on drug-related charges and he asked if I wanted him to be prosecuted for what he'd done to me. Just the thought of it made me shake uncontrollably, because I knew that the anger and rages I'd already witnessed would be nothing compared to Kas's vicious fury if he was sent to prison again on the basis of my evidence against him.

‘
No!
' I almost shouted at Robin. ‘No, I couldn't. I … He'd know it was me. He'd know I'd disobeyed him and then you can't imagine how much trouble I'd be in. He'd kill me – or he'd send someone else to do it. He wouldn't allow me to double-cross him like that. No. Absolutely not.'

‘It's all right.' Robin put his hand on my arm. ‘No one's going to try to persuade you and I do understand how you feel – it's how everyone feels when they've been through the sort of experiences you've been through. It's what makes my job so difficult, though, and it's the reason why we hardly ever get to the stage of being able to prosecute these bastards. But, believe me, Sophie, I
do
understand,
and no one is going to try to put pressure on you to change your mind.'

I was already afraid that Kas would come looking for me. In fact, I knew it would be one of the first things he'd do as soon as he got out of prison in Italy. It was wrong that he was going to get away with what he'd done to me, and I felt guilty even before someone said to me, shortly after my conversation with Robin, ‘If you don't testify, Kas will do the same thing to other people.' But although it was a thought that continued to haunt me for a very long time, I couldn't overcome my fear of him.

Robin insisted there was nothing for me to worry about. ‘He won't come back,' he said. ‘He's already wanted here, so why would he take that chance? You'll be safe. And if you
are
ever concerned about anything – however silly it might seem – you know how to contact me.' But I was constantly on super-alert, scanning the faces of the people around me, jumping at every sound and continually weighing up the risks – real and imagined – of every situation I was in.