Array Girl A: Girl A: My Story

They’d only been doing their jobs, just like all the other barristers, some Asian, some white, but they were both terrified that images of them would start appearing on the usual racist websites.

Those same websites had already been telling their followers that the trial was coming up, and newspapers and TV had carried reports of the arrests and charges. The difference between the two is that, at least on a good day, people in the media know about the law, and that everyone deserves a good trial; whereas the racists hiding behind their websites either have no idea, because they’re stupid, or else don’t care because all they’re looking for is hatred and blood.

Mr Justice Gerald Clifton – the judge for the case, who’d be retiring as soon as the trial was over – was furious, not least with Merseyside Police who’d put extra officers in the square outside Liverpool Crown Court, but hadn’t reacted quickly enough before the barrister got thumped. A high-ranking officer was called in to get what I heard was a real telling-off. From that point on, the square looked like a chessboard of coppers in yellow fluorescent jackets while, inside, security was even stricter than normal.

The thugs from the British National Party and English Defence League thought they’d struck a blow for justice, but I can’t work that one out. You don’t get justice by waving placards comparing white girls to halal meat, as they were doing outside the court. You get it by letting us get into court so we can give our evidence.

Anyway, the original jury was discharged and it took two weeks to get new barristers.

Once they’d been found, the judge sorted out a seating plan in the dock: he wanted the defendants to be directly in line with each of their legal teams, but every time a plan was supposedly finalised it had to be changed for one reason or another. By the time Rachel Smith, QC, finally rose to give her opening address, the eleven defendants had played a series of games of Musical Chairs, but the judge and all the lawyers had print-offs of the final seating plan – necessary, in a trial with so many defendants.

Susan went to the court with quite a few of the other detectives involved in Operation Span, but because she, too, was giving evidence, she had to stay away from the actual courtroom. For the same reason the two of us weren’t allowed to even meet up, so instead she introduced me to some of her other colleagues.

The detectives in court would vary, because if any of them were giving evidence they weren’t allowed to sit in until they’d gone into the witness box. Whichever one of them was free would sit in the public gallery, taking it all in. The policewoman in Court 3:1 on Day One was there to see the defendants, over to her left, the eleven of them sitting in the glass-panelled dock with two interpreters and an assortment of security guards.

Apparently, Daddy had been seated in the front row as the jurors filed in. His arms were folded and he had had a smirk on his face.

When I heard about that first day the bit that amazed me the most was that one of the jurors was young, a girl, and apparently Daddy had focused in on her and given her a huge smile as she sat down. She was so flustered she went red, but then looked away and concentrated on looking at Judge Clifton.

Miss Smith’s laptop was open on the desk in front of her, its screensaver the image of a snow leopard. On the press benches reporters fidgeted, skimming the copies of the opening address they’d been given, pens poised over pads or fingers resting over their iPhones, ready to tweet the best early lines.

Miss Smith – who at first meeting had seemed almost as scary as the snow leopard on her screen – started by telling them how me and the other four girls all knew Emma. I was the eldest, while Roxanne, thirteen when she was attacked, was the youngest. All of us, she had said, were the sort of kids who were easy to identify, easy to target, and easy to exploit. And we’d all been procured for the gang by Emma.

She gave each of the jurors a piece of paper that gave the defendants’ names, nicknames and addresses. It would help them get to know them as the case unfolded, she explained.

Daddy was the first to be mentioned, then Immy, Tariq, Cassie, Saj, Billy, Tiger, Car Zero, The Ugly One, Shah and Hammy.

Aarif wasn’t there, of course, because he’d run off to Pakistan, but he still got a mention. In fact, I only found out on that first day of the trial why I’d first been taken to Aarif’s flat in the first place: it was because he and Saj were bored with Emma and wanted a new girl.

Chef wasn’t there either, but not because he’d done a runner. It turns out he was less than five miles away, at HM Prison Liverpool, serving fifteen years for rape and indecent assault. His real name was Anya Miah, and at the time he’d been molesting me he was on the run.

He should have gone on trial in 1998 but failed to turn up at court. The police finally caught up with him in 2011. He was fifty-two years old when the jury at Liverpool Crown Court put him away on 3 February. At the time I knew nothing of this.

Only a few days later, in the same court complex, Miss Smith was moving on to talk about the two conspiracies – the one that Daddy was involved in, and the later one with Tariq. The case involved chains of men, she said, and they all wanted one thing: under-age girls for sex.

‘Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing,’ she went on. A female juror on the back row had looked nervy, like she wished the case could have been about a robbery or something. ‘The events and circumstances described by the girls are at least saddening and at worst shocking. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were.’

She started with my story. At first, Miss Smith said, I’d liked the idea of living at Harry’s house. I’d had no money but was given food by Harry and allowed to stay there.

But then I’d been exploited and raped – first by Daddy, then by the others he took me to. One thing she couldn’t say was that eventually I’d been abused by Harry himself. She couldn’t say it because the things he’d forced me to do to him would be the subject of a separate trial much later in the year. For now he could only sweat it out at home.

Miss Smith then got to the part where I’d kicked off in the Balti House. She knew how much I’d told the police at the time, and the detectives across the aisle from her – the ones from Operation Span – knew, too. But all she said about the failure to get the first Girl A case to court was this: ‘Regrettably, the police officers who looked into the matter didn’t take the investigation further at that stage.’ She could have gone on to make the point that it took nearly a year for the file to reach the CPS, but of course she didn’t: she knew the jury would have enough to think about. Not least that Roxanne, having been handed to the gang by Emma, became so brainwashed that she had actually fallen in love with Billy. And how I had been so brainwashed that I’d felt flattered at first; that I thought they saw me as pretty. But then how I got trapped and so scared that they were all able to rape me.

They hadn’t always hit me, she said, and I hadn’t always cried or protested. But they still forced me. Daddy had raped me when I was dead drunk, telling me he just wanted to talk. ‘“It’s part of the deal,”’ said the barrister, echoing Daddy’s words. ‘“I bought you vodka, you have to give me something.”’

At one point Miss Smith paused, then said, ‘Hannah estimated that she was having sex with several men in a day, several times a week. There are many men she describes who have not yet been positively identified and who are not therefore on the indictment.’