Girl for Sale Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: No escape

  Chapter one: A family snapshot

  Chapter two: Brief sanctuary

  Chapter three: Moving on

  Chapter four: Forever families

  Chapter five: Alone

  Chapter six: The kid who waited

  Chapter seven: Mum

  Chapter eight: School’s out

  Chapter nine: Out of control

  Chapter ten: Egyptian Mo

  Chapter eleven: Payback

  Chapter twelve: Lost girl

  Chapter thirteen: Skin trade

  Chapter fourteen: Sam the Rapist

  Chapter fifteen: Lara vs Lauren

  Chapter sixteen: Human traffic

  Chapter seventeen: A hope

  Chapter eighteen: Noah

  Chapter nineteen: Choose life

  Chapter twenty: Operation Bullfinch

  Chapter twenty-one: The trial

  Epilogue: Blameless

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  At the vulnerable age of 12, Lara McDonnell was picked out by a gang of men who befriended her, showered her with attention and gained her trust. Manipulated and groomed, her life quickly spiralled out of control as the men trafficked her around the country, deliberately keeping her compliant with drink and drugs. Deeply disturbed and frightened of what the gang would do to her if she tried to escape their evil clutches, it would take over five years for Lara to find the strength to fight back.

  This is her heartbreaking story.

  About the Author

  Following Lara’s horrifying ordeal, she found the strength to become a key witness in the trial of Britain’s most evil sex ring and has since rebuilt her life with her son and adoptive mother.

  To my son. I hope you understand how special you are.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The names of people, places, dates, sequences or the details of events may have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

  Prologue

  NO ESCAPE

  The shrill ringtone made me jump, even though I was expecting the text. I didn’t have to read it; I knew the gist of what it said and who had sent it. As soon as I heard the noise and saw the screen of my phone light up my heart began to beat faster. Tension, anxiety and fear threatened to overwhelm me and I started to breathe faster as I reached for the handset.

  ‘B here in 10. Friends here.’

  Six short words. My instructions. I didn’t need any more detail than what was written on the screen. The person who sent it was careful enough to be vague – he didn’t want to leave any evidence. I knew exactly what was required of me and I knew I couldn’t refuse. I shivered and tried to calm myself; my head swam as I attempted to come to terms with what I was about to do.

  I sat down on the pretty floral duvet cover on my bed and tried to pull myself together.

  ‘You’ve done it before – it’ll be over in a few hours. The drugs will help,’ I told myself.

  I hugged my knees and rocked back and forth. My bedroom was warm and cosy. It should have been my sanctuary but there was nowhere I felt safe.

  My bed was clean and comfortable. The bookshelf was full of my favourite stories and a sketch pad lay open on my desk. Bradley from the pop band S Club 7 gazed down at me from a poster on the wall. It was a typical young girl’s room but I was not a typical young girl.

  The place I was being summoned to could not have been more different from the room I was leaving. The squalid flat was just a short walk away from the three-storey Victorian house I lived in but it might as well have been on another planet. It was a crack den. The drug fumes always stung my nostrils when I walked in. They smelled like burning plastic and they sparked a craving in me. The drugs numbed me. I knew that, as soon as those fumes filled my lungs, what followed – the men and the abuse – would be more bearable.

  Downstairs my mum was cooking dinner. The smell of homemade casserole filled the house. But I had no appetite – I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. I started to work out how I was going to leave the house. I had no keys. Mum wouldn’t allow me a set – it was her way of trying to keep tabs on me. She was frantic with worry. I disappeared on an almost-daily basis and always after a text message. She didn’t know the half of what was going on; she didn’t know about the drugs and the men and I wasn’t about to tell her.

  I was ashamed and I was also scared. How had I let myself get into the position I was in? My life was a complete mess. I didn’t know who I could trust or who my friends were; all I knew was that, as soon as the texts came through, I needed to get out.

  The man who sent them called it work. It was my job. I belonged to him and I did what he told me to do. He gave me alcohol and a constant supply of drugs; in return I did as I was told. I was there to service his customers.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Once, I believed I could trust him. I believed he was my friend but, increasingly, he terrified me. I knew that if I refused what he asked then he would hunt me down and he would hurt me. It made no difference to him whether the police or social workers knew. As far as he was concerned, they couldn’t do anything.

  I reached under my bed and felt around for the screwdriver I used for breaking the lock on the window. My hands were shaking as I wedged it between the window and the frame and popped open the catch that held it shut. Slowly I pushed the window open. Mum was still cooking downstairs. The sound of the crockery and the fan on the oven masked the sound of the window sliding open. I had broken out many times before and nimbly climbed through the open space, onto the security light outside and jumped down into the garden.

  As I did so the light came on. I saw Mum look up and stare out of the kitchen window.

  ‘Lara!’ she cried. ‘Where are you going?’

  But I was gone. There was no way she was going to stop me. It was dark and the cold night air hit me as I ran off. I was wearing only a hoodie and a pair of jeans. Other clothes would be provided for me where I was going. I would be made to wear the tarty underwear the men insisted on. The thought of it made my skin crawl but I didn’t have a choice.

  My phone trilled again. I glanced at the screen as I ran over the bridge. The spires of Oxford University shone in the distance.

  ‘Where r u?’

  ‘On the way,’ I texted back hurriedly.

  I rounded the corner of the estate and a gang of menacing-looking teenagers loitering there eyed me suspiciously. As I hurried past they said nothing.

  The door was open when I arrived and I walked into the dirty main room. A stained sofa was placed in the middle of the room in front of a widescreen TV. The air was thick with crack fumes. Mohammed was waiting.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he hissed, his eyes dark and bloodshot.

  ‘I… I… I had to get out of the house,’ I stuttered.

  He nodded towards the small, cluttered bedroom.

  ‘Get in there and get that lot on,’ he ordered. Through the door I could see underwear laid out on the bed. It was cheap and tacky adult lingerie.

  Two men were sitting on the sofa behind Mohammed. Their eyes followed me as I walked into the room.

  As I closed the door behind me I tried to understand how my life had become the misery it was. I was a slave, I was sold – I was just 13.

  Chapter one

  A FAMILY SNAPSHOT

  My birth mother stares out of the photograph with empty eyes. The picture has been taped together with Sellotape. I ripped it in half several years ago in a fit of anger.


  In the shot, she is holding me. It was taken when I was just a few months old. I’m dressed in a grubby babygro that had faded long before the photo was taken. A sun hat is plonked on my head. I am sitting on her knee. Her hands are holding me, but not supporting me; my head lolls uncomfortably to one side. She stares vacantly at the camera, disinterested.

  She is Theresa Jenkins – Terri. Born in the Northwest of England, she was adopted as soon as she was born. From what I know, her parents were very young when they had her and both were alcohol dependent. When Terri was born the kind of child protection procedures that we have in place today did not exist, so I can only imagine her parents must have been in no fit state to raise a child for her to be taken away from them.

  But I don’t call Terri ‘Mum’. I used to when I was little but, as I got older, I started to realise that Mum is a title you earn, it doesn’t get handed to you automatically.

  Terri was 42 when she died. She had seven children. Two were not with my birth father, Shane Long. The eldest in my family is a girl, and her name is Isobel. I have never met her – she was adopted before I was born. Until I was eight, I knew nothing of her existence. In all, including half brothers and sisters, I have 11 siblings because Shane had children from a previous marriage. I have never met them either and I don’t remember Shane ever visiting them. Our family was broken long before I came along and my birth parents’ attitude to parental responsibility was non-existent.

  The photograph tells me everything I need to know about my links with Terri. She is expressionless and detached from me, the baby on her lap, and from whatever else is going on around her. It looks as if I have been placed there against her will. Her body language is screaming, ‘Take this thing away from me.’ Any normal mother in a similar situation would be swollen with pride, eager to show off her little bundle of joy. They would be looking at the child in front of them and cooing or nuzzling up to her rosy cheeks. But Terri looks awkward; she is squirming away from me. It’s the same in every photo I have of us together; she always looks detached and empty. She is devoid of love, affection and motherly pride. Her gaze is always somewhere else. In all the pictures I have seen of her with her children, the pose is the same: we are just plonked on her knee, like a succession of dolls. There is no intimacy; she does not cuddle up.

  No one really remembers their early years entirely. We patch together a story of how we grew up through photos, snatches of memory and things we are told by our families. Some of my memories are vivid, others enhanced by reports on me that I have read over the years in a thick file passed between different agencies.

  What happens in those early years of any child’s life is vital. From birth to toddler and pre-school, those events form the way we see the world and inform our ideas about attachment and about relationships. All I remember is fear, violence and pain. Terri was a drunk and a junkie, Shane was a violent monster – the few memories I do have of them revolve around beatings and bloodshed.

  Terri had long dark hair and a crooked nose. She wasn’t an attractive lady by any means. She didn’t look after herself; she never wore nice clothes, did her hair or wore make-up. She looked like an abused woman, which is what she was. She looked haunted; she had a hard life that shaped her features. Even when attempting a smile (which wasn’t very often), she looked pained. In the few years I lived with Terri, her physical condition deteriorated sharply. I know now it was the crack cocaine and the heroin she was hooked on. As well as the photo of her holding me as a baby, I also have one of her with me, aged four. In those short years she has aged a decade: her eyes are puffy, her nose and cheeks purple with cracked blood vessels. Her complexion is sallow and pale. In the older photo she is 31 but she looks like a woman in her fifties. She had very bad teeth; I assume that was the drinking and the smoking (she was a very heavy smoker and always had a cough). She was overweight and had given up caring about herself long before she had kids, which she had in quick succession.

  Shane looked like a criminal. The only photo I have of him is from a story on a news website reporting that he had been jailed for beating women. It didn’t surprise me that he’d attacked women, or that the report went on to state that he had been aggressive to a child and one of the victims needed hospital treatment. What did surprise me was that he was described as a father. Like Terri, that was a title he never earned from me.

  In the accompanying picture he looked evil. He had been married before he met Terri but they themselves never tied the knot. Unlike Terri, Shane made an effort with his appearance: he showered and attempted to slick back his black hair. As a child, I remember him as a giant, a tall aggressive ogre. His voice was very deep, with a Northern accent.

  I was born in 1992 in North Staffs Hospital. My birth name was Lauren Long. I have since discovered that I weighed just 5lb when I was born and that Terri never had a scan or a check-up during her pregnancy. I was a very poorly newborn, but I guess I was lucky as some of my siblings were born with meningitis. I’m not sure why they were born with it, but I’m sure the poor conditions we lived in did not help. All I had to deal with was a dangerously low birth weight and foetal alcohol syndrome, which I developed because Terri drank throughout her pregnancy. My social services records show that she never had any antenatal care. My parents were both smokers. I have no reason to believe they gave up or reduced their intake during pregnancy, and from birth I had problems breathing, later diagnosed as asthma; also eczema and heart murmurs.

  We lived in a rundown town in Staffordshire. Nondescript, it was full of council houses that all looked the same. Unemployment was high, aspirations low. I lived there with Terri, Shane, my older brother Jayden, older sister Kirsten and younger brothers, Harry and Jamie. I don’t remember Terri working but then again I don’t remember any of the neighbours working either.

  Shane went out each day in his yellow van – I think he was involved in some sort of building work. Terri stayed at home with us children and drank herself into a stupor until he returned and beat her; usually because she was drunk. She became quite good at pretending to be sober but Shane always knew. She attempted to hide her empties round the house, behind bits of card, in cupboards and drawers, and became increasingly frantic as the day wore on, worrying about the next beating. It was a very abusive relationship, and Shane did nothing to hide the brutality and cruelty from us children.

  We lived in squalor. The council house we called home was disgusting – dirty, damp, smelly and dark. From the outside, it was a featureless brick block with a scrubby front garden and a yard at the back. There was an old disused toilet outside. Everything about it was grey, grubby and depressing. It was the worst-kept property on a rough street in a rundown estate. Terri took no pride in it and Shane only appeared to flit in and out long enough to beat the mother of his kids.

  Inside, the kitchen cupboards that were once white had long since turned brown, stained with grease and nicotine. There was rarely food in them. The oven was filthy and hardly ever used. In the lounge, there was a threadbare, grey carpet and a dull-coloured sofa. The curtains were dirty bits of material hung against windows that were smeared with dirt.

  Upstairs there was a bathroom and one bedroom with a double bed in it. We all shared the same room and the same bed – I don’t remember Shane ever sleeping there with us; I assume he was often out or asleep on the sofa. The bedroom floor was covered in the same grey carpet as the lounge and was strewn with dirty clothes. There were no comforts; nothing about the place that was welcoming: it was a house but it certainly wasn’t a family home. I remember thinking it looked like a horror house, something you would see in a scary movie.

  My memories of that place are thankfully limited because I don’t have happy memories of early childhood at all. I remember in bursts: I remember drinking water out of shoes when there were no cups or glasses, the taste of leather in my mouth. I don’t remember family meals together, but Terri must have cooked occasionally because I recall Shane once throwing a fork a
t her in the kitchen because he didn’t like what he had been served up (it missed and hit my younger brother, Jamie, instead). I don’t remember going out as a family, ever. There was no TV. I don’t remember any toys. Most of the time we weren’t dressed; we ran around in nappies that were usually heavy with excrement and urine and hung around our knees. What clothes we did have we shared; we grabbed what was lying around. Sometimes the boys would wear the girls’ clothes and vice versa. In another photo I have, Harry is a toddler and dressed in grubby girls’ clothes. I remember Shane once tried to drown me in the bath. He was very drunk and was holding me under the water. Jayden came and hit him with a dustpan; that’s when the police came. I can’t remember who called them, it was usually Jayden or a neighbour. They wrapped me in a towel and took me out to their car. I remember feeling cold all the time. Winters were cruel and we would huddle together in the bed, trying to keep out the damp and the cold.

  Then there were the mice. The place was infested with them – they were drawn to the filth. I saw them at night when the lights of a passing car lit up the bedroom. They would be caught, momentarily, in silhouette at the end of the bed, their oily bodies scurrying for cover. I tried to pretend they weren’t there and hid under the dirty bed sheets or closed my eyes and pressed my face into one of my siblings’ backs. In the silence, I could hear them run across the floor. To me it seemed like there were hundreds of them.

  Christmases were not full of laughter and warmth. We didn’t have a tree, although one year Shane hung a tree-shaped car air freshener up in the lounge as a sick joke. Presents were rare. On one occasion, when I was about three years old, I was given a pretty pink Barbie watch for Christmas. I loved it, it was the first possession I remember and I would wear it everywhere, even to bed. Then, one night, I made the mistake of taking it off and placing it on the floor before I went to sleep. In the morning the straps and the cheap plastic surround had been chewed by the rodents we shared our house with. Heartbroken, I received no sympathy.