Free Slave Girl by Sarah Forsyth Page B

trying to open it. I pressed up against the keyhole and called out, hoping against hope that someone would hear me, would come to rescue me. Nothing.
    I tried to open the window but it, too, was shut tight. By the look of it someone had painted over the whole frame a long time ago; it didn’t look to have been disturbed for years. Forced to accept that I was trapped, I sat on the bed and cried for what seemed like hours. Eventually I lay down on the dirty sheets and fell into the blank, dreamless sleep that comes with absolute exhaustion.
    Sally shook me awake the next morning.
    ‘Get dressed. It’s time. He’ll be here any minute.’
    I stared at her, searching her face for a sign of what I thought I’d seen the night before but there was nothing. Her face was blank – an expressionless mask with no hint of sympathy or kindness.
    ‘Just get up, get dressed and get ready. And do it quickly.’
    An hour later I was getting back into Reece’s car to be taken – along with Sally and two of the girls from the airport – to a flat in the Hague’s Red Light District. As we all squashed into the car I could see the heavy black gun lying on the passenger seat next to Reece. He seemed totally unconcerned about driving around with a gun on open show.
    For a fleeting second I thought about making a grab for it. If I had the gun maybe I’d be able to turn the tables and make Reece take me back to the airport? Then reality kicked in: his hand was no more than six inches from the handle, whereas I would have to reach through between the front seats to get it. Even if I did get my hands on it first – and even if Reece, Sally or one of the other girls didn’t try to wrestle it from me – what on earth was I going to do with it? I’d never even seen a real gun before, much less pointed one at somebody else. Didn’t they all have some kind of safety catch? Where would that be? And anyway, I knew that I’d never be able to pull the trigger: shooting someone – even someone like Reece – would be completely beyond me.
    The flat had two rooms – a bedroom and a sitting room – and a bathroom, all leading off a little corridor. It stank of dirt and cigarettes and stale sweat. The two girls headed for the bedroom, where they changed into skimpy underwear and settled down on the sofa ready for their first customers of the day. I sat on the floor in the lounge, my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped tightly around them. Sally perched on the edge of the sofa. She was clearly my minder, and wasn’t going to let me out of her sight.
    We sat there all through the day and the evening. Several times I heard a phone ring and voices from the bedroom; half an hour later there would be a knock at the front door and the sound of a pair of stiletto heels making their way to answer it. After that, a few minutes – no more than a quarter of an hour – of grunts and groans and the sound of a bedhead banging against the wall, then the heels in the corridor and the door opening and closing once again.
    As each hour passed I became increasingly scared of the phone ringing. I became convinced that the next call would be someone demanding a new girl – and that I would be summoned into the bedroom. It was like waiting for a terrible accident to happen, one I knew was certain and unavoidable. And as I sat there I slipped back into the awful memories of what Dad or the men at the care home did to me. This was just the same: waiting for the inevitable pain and misery to find their way back to me.
    From time to time Sally tried to talk to me. She told me about Reece – how he had been a petty criminal back home in England since he was a teenager; how he had a long criminal record and how he was well-known to police in his hometown of Leicester, as well as further south in the Home Counties. The car he had been driving when he met us at the airport had been stolen in England. He was going to sell it to one of his contacts over here.
    Despite the