Array Girl A: Girl A: My Story

Not even this letter told the whole story. An official document Sara had received earlier the same day – something they call an ‘outline of concern’ – talked about Shannon having sex with specifically ‘Asian men’.

It said the abdominal pain had been so bad she’d had to go to the local accident and emergency department. But she was never given any treatment.

‘She was escorted away by three Asian men before she was seen,’ said the report. ‘She is now missing.’ Police had been informed and were ‘concerned’.

The document moved on to an incident two days earlier, 14 February. Valentine’s Day, of all days. Again it said she’d been wearing a sari, but this time referred specifically to her being ‘carried across the road by three Asian men’.

She was ‘obviously under the influence of some substance’ and ‘had no memory of what had happened at the hotel’.

It turned out that Shannon’s mum had asked Social Services to put her under a child protection order because she couldn’t cope. It didn’t happen. Eventually, Shannon became pregnant by one of her abusers. She lost the baby. Given what she’d been through, I’m guessing that was a good thing.

If Social Services had been on a ‘journey’, it wasn’t the same one I’d been on. Nor Leah, Roxanne, Alicia, Paige, Courtney, Nadine, and all the others they’re still either investigating or who never came forward.

What we went through was real. Not packaged, not dressed up, not made to fit someone’s politics or agenda. We didn’t care about things like that. We just wanted to be rescued.

It’s only very recently, while I’ve been at home with Chloe, that I’ve learned just how badly I was let down by the police. Maybe I mean betrayed.

Because it turns out they actually knew about one of my attackers in the very early days of my abuse.

They knew because three weeks before I was bundled into a police van and questioned about smashing the Balti House counter, this particular round, thickset man had been seen in a takeaway in Rusholme, home to Manchester’s so-called Curry Mile.

He wasn’t alone. He was with two girls aged twelve and thirteen. One was actually a friend of Paige, called Kirsten, two years below me at school. The other was Grace – another victim, I guess, but a girl I’d never heard of.

You know how the police always ask people to keep an eye out for anything suspicious, and to report it? Not to be stupid; just to use their common sense?

Well, that night there was a 23-year-old student from Manchester Met waiting in the queue for some chips, and she noticed this odd grouping ahead of her. An Asian guy, pretty old-looking, with two very young girls. And the guy, she said, had the sort of look on his face that reminded her of a kid at a sweet counter.

‘Have anything you want,’ she heard him telling them. ‘Anything.’ He was all smiles and happy. Behind him in the queue, the student looked uncomfortable. Like, she knew instinctively something was wrong.

The takeaway had a couple of booths for people to use if they were eating in, and the guy collected the food and led the girls to one of them: him facing away from the counter, the older girl at his side, the younger one opposite him.

To the student it all looked weird. Too weird. She made eye contact with Kirsten a couple of times and felt a connection; sensed an unspoken desperation. She just knew she had to intervene.

By this time she’d been handed her chips, but instead of heading for the door she leaned over towards the girls and said: ‘Hey you two, who’s the guy you’re with?’

She glanced at the man. His eyes darted away. Grace did likewise, momentarily, but she recovered enough to say: ‘Our uncle.’

‘Your uncle ?’ said the student. Given the man’s colour, it still felt wrong. Grace realised too. ‘He’s my dad’s friend,’ she explained.

The student, out with her boyfriend, wasn’t giving up. She asked the girl for her dad’s number. Then, as she began to dial, she noticed the man reaching for his phone under the table. She had a sixth sense he was turning it off so it wouldn’t ring. Her call went straight to voicemail. She knew, she just knew.

And then she looked at Kirsten, knowing, instinctively, that this man was looking at her too, and asked: ‘So what’s this guy’s name?’

Kirsten wouldn’t answer at first, but then she said: ‘He tells me to call him Daddy.’

The student’s boyfriend had had enough. ‘He tells you to call him Daddy ?’ he asked, a menace in his voice.

By now a real scene was developing, and others were starting to get involved, crowding in on the melamine table with a middle-aged guy and two kids sat at it. The student tried to calm her boyfriend, but by now he was a liability. She decided it would be best to take him outside.

A few moments later, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Shabir Ahmed and the girls – their food abandoned – scurrying away from the takeaway and on towards a pharmacy a little further down on Wilmslow Road.

My rapist was in a silver Honda that night, but just before he headed away the student scribbled the registration number onto a piece of paper and immediately rang the police.

The last image she remembers was of Kirsten looking back at her, seemingly bewildered, from the back of the car.

It turned out that both Kirsten and Grace had been reported missing that night and to their credit the police took the student’s call seriously.

Detectives were knocking on her door just after midnight, and a little while later Ahmed was being arrested at his home in Oldham. He claimed everything had been completely innocent; that the girls had asked for a lift and he’d just been happy to help out.

Kirsten and Grace were spoken to, as well, and neither would make any disclosures. Maybe they, too, had been told he owned them; that they were his bitches. Or maybe they managed to break free before he’d fully groomed them.

The end result was that Ahmed was set free, without charge and without so much as the abduction warning that police might have thrown at him.

The big thing, though, was that his involvement with two young girls at a time he was already raping me had triggered what police call a Force Wide Incident Number. It’s an automatic procedure. An officer logs a FWIN on a computer and there it is, a permanent record. For ever.

So the night I was driven into Rochdale police station for questioning about a smashed counter – the same night I told them Ahmed had raped me – the FWIN from three weeks earlier should have rung massive alarm bells.

It was there for the whole of Greater Manchester Police to see.

And, it gets worse.

The night before I threw that jar of mayonnaise at Chef, Paige had plucked up the courage to come forward and tell police how a guy called Taz had forced her to give him oral sex. And where had this taken place? The Balti House.

So, within twenty-four hours, two of us had told police about separate attacks at a single takeaway in Heywood. And yet it had taken three-and-a-half years to get some kind of justice.

In Paige’s case, the man was charged, it seems, but the investigation fell by the wayside and it never came to trial.

I know now that there had been other mistakes, other oversights, in the days before Operation Span.

The jury never got to hear, for example, about some extra DNA evidence against Kabeer Hassan because the police hadn’t sent my jeans away to be tested.

This, despite me having talked about them being pulled down just before he raped me. By the time the forensic results came back, years later, the trial was about to start and they were ruled inadmissible. The people in Operation Span were gutted, but there was nothing they could do.