Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

When she had come back to her bedroom, she recalled him watching her in the darkness as she stuffed her knickers into a drawer.

She couldn’t actually swear that the time with the chair was the first time, but it felt like it. Maybe it was earlier. Daddy raped her so many times that the memories of each attack just merged with the rest. And it was actually only when she opened a copy of Roald Dahl’s The BFG that all those hideous memories came rushing back.

She was about seven at the time, still at primary school, and The BFG was that week’s reading book. In the first few pages, she read about how the little girl in the story had tried to scream as a giant figure loomed over her bed, but no sound had come out.

It jogged the worst of memories.

The girl, now a woman, would scream again as she gave evidence against him – scream at him via a video-link, just as I would like to have done. And this time the sound did come out.

‘He ruined my life,’ she yelled at the camera above her, ‘and I will never forgive him. Not ever. Nothing will ever make up for what he’s done to me.’

She told the jury, the jury in her court case, how he liked to make her kneel on the floor in a pose called the murgha , ‘chicken’, with her arms threaded through her legs and touching her ears. He’d then beat her with a cricket bat.

Once, when older, she’d whispered, ‘Sex maniac,’ under her breath, and he’d giggled, saying: ‘Yes, that’s what I am!’

Like me, the girl had been too frightened to tell anyone. She got as far as telling a policewoman in 2005, but then had backtracked, refusing to give a full statement for fear that it would bring dishonour to her community.

But the officer’s notes had stayed on police files, and they were still there three years later when I made my own complaint about Daddy.

The detectives involved in my case, or at least someone in Greater Manchester Police, should have known about those notes, or been able to access them. Maybe it was as simple as someone typing two words – his real name – into a police computer. But for whatever reason, it wasn’t done, and so no one made the link between what he’d done over all those years before, and what he’d done to me in 2008.

If they had, they would surely have realised the first time around that I was telling the truth – or that it was highly likely that I was. Whatever they’d thought at first, the police could have gone back to the girl in Oldham who had told them he’d been abusing her but had then got scared; scared because of the pressures of her own community, the pressure not to tell.

She would have been interviewed – properly, I hope, and they might have thought, This all fits together. He started off by attacking a girl in the Pakistani community, and then later turned to the only other kids he felt were available to him: white kids . A kid like me.

Actually, I reckon the fact that I was white was pretty irrelevant, really. It was just that I was available. And once you’re a rapist you’re always a rapist, whatever the colour of your skin.

One Operation Span detective would sum up this part of the case against Daddy perfectly, in four words: ‘A total cock-up.’

The girl Daddy had attacked wasn’t lacking in courage, no way, and eventually she did something about it again. She came forward in 2011, after Daddy had been questioned and then released over his attacks on me.

When Lanika’s case came to court, she said she couldn’t ever imagine having a normal relationship, because every time a man came near her she thought of Daddy. But I think there is hope for her. Once she’d given evidence, she told the detective who’d guided her through it that maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to find a way to a happiness she deserved.

I hope so – if she can, then so can I.

It was around the time of Daddy’s cross-examination, as the trial stretched on into March and April, that the police rang to say they’d identified three more suspects and wanted me to do another VIPER parade.

There were three of them this time, though I could only identify one guy. Operation Span officers carried out a dawn raid on his last known address a few days later, but he’d already fled to Pakistan.

But I was oblivious to it all this time, because I finally had some brilliant news: Chloe was coming home!

Rochdale Social Services still had a care order in place, but from the day in late April that she came back to me, I was given joint responsibility for her.

The appointment with the social workers was set for dinner time and I got everything ready. I’d bought all sorts of new things for my little girl – clothes, toys, everything. And I was cooking corned beef hash for her tea because she loved it.

I was still living with the foster couple, and I was waiting in their living room, dead nervous, heart beating like a drum, when I heard the doorbell go.

It was the social workers who came in first, two of them, carrying the papers that I had to sign; then, two minutes later, there was another ring at the door and this time it was Chloe, standing there, holding the hand of her foster carer, but beaming up at me then flinging herself headlong into my arms.

‘Mummy, Mummy,’ she cried. I just dissolved. Finally, finally, she was back with me.

She sat on my knee, munching a chocolate biscuit and stroking my face, while I filled in all the forms, telling the social workers I’d make sure that this time she was home for good.

Chloe’s foster carer was about fifty, and looked nice. Once she’d brought in the last of Chloe’s things we went through the routine she’d got her into. It sounded so weird hearing about my own daughter’s routines from a stranger, but I knew I had to listen and take it all in.

When it was time for her to go, I gave her a box of Thorntons chocolates I’d bought her. Well, it wasn’t her fault, was it? She gave Chloe a kiss and a hug, then turned to me. I thanked her for everything she’d done, saying I felt like I was going to cry.

‘Don’t,’ she said, her face beginning to crumple. ‘You’ll set me off.’ And, of course, we both started crying.

Once they’d gone, I sat playing with Chloe for ages, overwhelmed, but happier than I’d ever been in my life, thinking to myself, Everything is finally over. I’ve got her back!

Just as the trial was nearing its end, and the day before Chloe was returned to me, Greater Manchester Police held a preverdict briefing at their new headquarters. People from the CPS were there, too, and from Rochdale Social Services. I heard about it later from journalists who were there.

The briefing began, they said, with an apology from Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood. ‘We do understand that we could have dealt with the issues better than we did,’ he told the thirty or so reporters who’d turned up.

‘We apologise to any victims who have suffered because of any failings on our part, but at the time we did what we thought was best. We have learned a lot of lessons.’

The issue was genuinely about vulnerability, he insisted, and it ‘just happened’ that the men involved in the trial were all Asian.

‘We did not sweep it under the carpet,’ he continued. ‘We didn’t understand the problem. We do understand it a little bit more now and we have it at the top of our priority list. We are open to ideas about how we can do it.

‘Hindsight being a wonderful tool, we will probably look back and say we could have done things better.

‘This is cutting edge stuff and we are dealing with it legally, investigatively and technically. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it is that we are in a better place and in a wider partnership to deal with these issues.’