Array Girl A: Girl A: My Story

‘Fucking shut up,’ the man I’d once thought of as a jolly Father Christmas lookalike yelled at the taxi driver, ‘or I’ll sort you out later.’ Then straight away he had punched him full in the face.

Cassie’s barrister, Zarif Khan, was the one to make a statement when the court reconvened, telling the judge, ‘My client was extremely shocked. He feels intimidated and threatened, and the interpreters are also worried because he made a comment to them about talking too loudly.’

Liz gave me chapter and verse that evening. Judge Clifton had glared at Daddy, she said, and warned him that if he did anything like it again, he’d spend the rest of the trial down in the cells.

‘Daddy raised his hand to speak,’ Liz chuckled, but the judge had stopped him and said, ‘No, none of that. And don’t say you haven’t been warned.’

The police in court reckoned that for all his patience Mr Nichol must sometimes have wondered why he’d agreed to represent Daddy. Most defendants take the easy route of doing everything their legal team tell them, but not Daddy.

He started off OK by pleading not guilty when the court clerk put all the charges to him but, after that, he did everything to ruin any slight chance he might have had of getting away with it all. To use one of the phrases he’d once thrown at me, he was like ‘a bone in a kebab’: he’d snarl at the detectives in court, claiming they’d framed him because of his colour, and accused the judge of being ‘more of a prosecutor than a judge’.

He was the first of the gang to give evidence, and it was apparently like watching stand-up – except that the ‘comedian’ in the box was actually a paedophile rapist. There was a bit of a delay though, before he started his testimony, and Liz told me about it later.

Mr Nichol said Daddy couldn’t take an oath on the Koran as he hadn’t bathed. A washbasin wouldn’t be enough; he’d need either a bath or a shower – neither of which was available at the court. So in the end he had to affirm or promise to tell the truth rather than take an oath on a religious book. The judge was apologetic, telling him: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve done my best, but short of bringing in a bath myself I can’t see that there’s anything else I can do.’

Daddy, who said he’d settled in Oldham after coming to Britain as a boy in 1967, denied everything, of course. Nor did it take long for people to realise that he hated Rachel Smith. Maybe it was because she was a woman, I don’t know, but from what I’ve heard, he just kept trying to embarrass her with the things he’d say about sex – and even about her barrister’s wig. ‘If you didn’t have that sheep on your head, you might be my equal,’ he said once. She wasn’t having any of it, though, and would usually wait till he’d run out of steam and then just say wearily, ‘Just answer the question, please.’

Daddy’s contempt for women wasn’t confined to the prosecuting barrister. Vicky Crook, a CPS case worker, came to court one day wearing a trouser suit and a low-cut – but still perfectly respectable – white blouse.

He probably meant it as a distraction, but he suddenly burst out: ‘This woman is sitting half-naked in front of me. How am I supposed to look at Miss Smith with her bloody tits coming into my eyeline?’

He made out the case against him was all white lies, of course, made up by me and the other girls he’d raped and trafficked. ‘They were intelligent, they were clever, they knew what they were doing,’ he told Miss Smith. ‘If they’d gone on Lord Sugar’s Apprentice programme, they would have won.’

It was the white community who’d ‘trained’ girls like me in sex and drinking, he said. ‘When they come to us they’re fully trained and they start their own business. They start their own business and then the police very conveniently in 2008 pick me up.’

In all my time as his victim, I’d never known Daddy to have sex with Emma, but in court that’s what he claimed. It was the only way he could even try to explain his DNA being in my knickers – that it was actually Emma he’d slept with, and that I’d then come along and switched her knickers with mine.

To go with the alibi, he’d made up a story of how he and Emma would meet up in secret so people wouldn’t think he’d ‘infested’ his own community by sleeping with a white girl. ‘You see, we are racist too,’ he beamed.

He said he’d always told Emma to wash before they had sex, and afterwards he would go home, shower, say two units of prayer, and ask Allah to forgive him for doing wrong.

He’d never raped me, and nor had he told me he’d get someone to kill me the night he’d got me into his car at Morrison’s.

We were all prostitutes working for Emma, he said, and her ‘business empire’ stretched as far as Leeds, Nelson and Bradford. ‘The police know,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened, it happened with the blessing of the police.’

His problem, though, was that the final forensic test proved beyond doubt that Emma hadn’t been near the knickers I’d been wearing when he’d raped me.

And under cross-examination by Miss Smith, he started contradicting himself.

‘Nobody did anything to anybody,’ he said now. ‘You should look in the mirror at your own community. Where’s school? Where’s Social Services? Where’s everybody else?’

Things got really interesting when he was told about me describing his body as really hairy. Was that accurate?

He must have guessed the question was going to come up, because suddenly he started pulling his T-shirt over his head.

‘She would have seen this,’ he said, triumphantly, displaying his incredibly hairy torso. Then, to the court usher, sitting horrified a few feet in front of him: ‘Don’t be nervous. I lose hairs.’ And to prove it, he tugged at the hair on his chest and threw a clump of it into the well of the court.

It landed on the carpet just in front of the witness box, where it remained for the rest of the session and presumably until the cleaners arrived to vacuum it up.

The public gallery got a matinee performance at court that day, as the two female interpreters also got told off for giggling at another part of Daddy’s evidence. They were hauled up by the judge and told to behave. One of them apologised, but as soon as she’d turned away from the judge her face broke into a smile. Those who saw it cringed.

It wasn’t just his hair that Daddy was having trouble with. He told another of the defence barristers, Ahmed Nadim: ‘Sex didn’t take place every day because of my age, you know.’

But that only confirmed the way he’d been with me sometimes; sometimes he couldn’t physically do what he wanted to do.

As he left the witness box for the last time, Daddy flashed one more of his greasy smiles to a female juror and walked slowly, swaggeringly, back towards the dock.

By then, every scrap of detail about his attacks on me, and the way he’d trafficked me for sex, had been aired before the jury. But it wasn’t everything, not by a long way. I had no idea at the time, but months later I learned something that underlined just how violent and disgusting he could be.

It turns out that shortly after Daddy’s arrest, back in March 2011, another of his victims had come forward: a girl who had been abused two decades before he attacked me.

As a different jury, in a different city, would discover, she had been raped from the age of three.

This little girl, Lanika, was Pakistani and because Daddy was well known to her family, he would often come and stay.

The first time he raped her, she was so young and so small that afterwards she had had to push a chair towards the bathroom sink before climbing up and washing the blood from her knickers. She was only able to turn off the bathroom light because it had a cord that hung down.