The Nigerian girls made a heart-wrenching sight. They were huddled in one corner of the room that had been allocated to them at a north London women’s refuge, like a flock of bedraggled birds. Flightless birds. They stayed closed to the wall, as though still chained.

After checking on them, Rachel went to speak to the refuge manager. It had been agreed that they would be interviewed there, rather than being taken to a police station, which could traumatise and frighten them.

‘How are they doing?’ Rachel asked the manager, a kindly but rather brisk woman in her fifties.

‘Well,’ she shrugged slightly. ‘Obviously you’ve just seen for yourself: they’re not great. But they have eaten and drunk a little.’

‘Okay, that’s something.’

‘There is a problem though,’ the manager went on. ‘The interpreter that was sent speaks Hausa. That’s the most prevalent Nigerian language apparently. But he said that these girls are Igbo speakers.’

Rachel sighed. ‘I’ll have to make some phone calls – I expect I can find an Igbo interpreter; the question is how long that’s going to take. We need to start the interviews as soon as possible.’

‘The Hausa interpreter knew some basic Igbo; enough to get their names and ages. Although you’ll have to get Social Services to do a Merton age assessment to check they’re telling the truth.’ She handed Rachel a piece of paper. One thirteen year old, two fourteen year olds, a sixteen year old and an eighteen year old. Thirteen. Christ.

Brickall was already on his way to the refuge, but Rachel phoned the Crime Support Unit and after a game of telephonic pass-the-parcel, spoke to someone who had two Igbo interpreters on their books. Both interpreters would be with them in around an hour.

Brickall arrived, accompanied by a video operator. He was in a bad mood, which usually indicated a hangover. When Rachel told him they were waiting for the correct language speaker, he swore colourfully.

‘We can get the interview room set up in the meantime,’ Rachel told him.

‘But this is going to take forever as it is; we don’t need delays on top. Not with the bloody headache I’ve got.’

Rachel reached into her bag and handed him paracetamol tablets. ‘Tell you what; we’ve got two interpreters, why don’t we request a second video operator and then we can do two sets of interviews simultaneously.’

‘Fine,’ said Brickall gruffly. ‘You phone them while I’m finding a coffee.’

---

The interviews were laborious. Rachel started with the youngest girl, Ifeoma, who was so pathologically fearful that she would not even raise her head at first, let alone speak. It did not help matters that the interpreter was male, but Rachel thought it was more important for Brickall to use the female interpreter to temper his very masculine aura. Piece by halting piece, she and the interpreter coaxed her story out of her.

Someone had come to Ifeoma’s village, spoken to her father, promising that she could go to London and study English, then get a well-paid job. She was not asked if she wanted to go. Did she want to, Rachel asked via the interpreter? No, she did not. She wanted to stay at home with her parents and her brothers and her grandmother. She had cried when they told her about it.

Then one night she was woken and put in the back of a large van. It drove through the darkness for many hours. A lady was with her who said she was called Auntie Florence, but she was not a real aunt. They went to a huge building with many aeroplanes and she was taken onto the plane with Auntie Florence and another girl called Essie. When the plane reached England they were not taken to a school or college, they were taken to a house. She kept asking why they were there, until Auntie Florence beat her. So then she shut up. She and the four others were kept chained to the wall most of the time, but sometimes they would be freed long enough to clean themselves up and be taken to another house, where strange men would do terrible things to her.

It took some time and a lot of very careful prompting to get Ifeoma to expand on this. Eventually it was established that they inserted their male organs into her, in more than one orifice. It made her bleed. Sometimes they were rough and bit and slapped her. Auntie Florence regularly beat her. Once when one of the other girls tried to run out of the house, Florence told the two men who worked with her to beat her too. These two men regularly raped the girls, whenever they felt like it.

After she had finished with Ifeoma, Rachel phoned the police surgeon who had examined them in hospital the night before, and checked that he had given a formal statement of his findings and that photos had been taken of any injuries. Then she interviewed fifteen-year-old Essie. Essie was a little bolder and more confident and seemed to welcome the chance to talk about what had happened to her. Her story was very similar to the younger girl’s, save that in her case she had positively yearned to go to England and study. The subsequent shock and disillusionment had made her angry. She was the girl who had tried to run away.

Rachel checked the video recording, then went in search of coffee. She did not expect to bump into Brickall in the hallway, looking pleased with himself.

‘Job done, thank Christ.’ He waved a sheaf of paper in her direction. It looked suspiciously like a hand-written witness statement.

‘Hold on, what’s that?’

‘The statement made by the eighteen-year-old. The video guy had to leave, but she’s too old to require Special Measures so I did a routine pre-statement notice.’

Rachel stared at him. ‘Routine as in you wrote down what the interpreter said and got them to read it back to her in her own language?’

‘Yep.’

‘And the witness signed it?’

‘Of course. Don’t worry, I took an accompanying statement from the interpreter too; it’s all covered.’

Rachel was shaking her head.

‘How do you know she understood it? These girls have had no education.’

‘Because I told the interpreter to ask if the kid was able to read and she said yes.’ Brickall scoffed.

‘Back up the truck, Einstein…’ Rachel was already checking her watch and taking out her mobile. ‘These girls have been beaten and abused into compliance; they’re going to say whatever they think we want to hear. We can’t be sure she really does know how to read; not at any level of complexity.’

Brickall looked exasperated. ‘I did the standard procedure we do with any non-native English speaker. She knows what’s in her fucking statement: it was read to her in her own language!’

Rachel was shaking her head slowly. ‘But there’s something else you’ve overlooked. Something even more important.’

He looked blank.

‘She says she’s eighteen, but there’s no documentation to back that up: she doesn’t have a birth certificate or any genuine ID. She might be younger. Considerably younger. And if she is, she needs Special Measures.’

‘Shit.’

‘You know how this works: if the fact we’ve just assumed she’s of age comes out in court, the defence will try and use it to throw out her case. Belt and braces, Detective Sergeant.’

‘Fuck, we’re going to have to video her, aren’t we?’ Brickall covered his face with his fingers.

‘Don’t panic, I think my video operator’s still packing up, and I can phone the office and tell them to send one of the interpreters back here. They can’t have gone too far. They’ll have to claim an additional fee, but I’ll sort that with Upstairs.’

After a couple of phone calls, the female interpreter returned, cheerfully confessing that she had been having ‘a cuppa and a cig’ at a nearby coffee shop. An hour and a half later, and the video interview of the allegedly eighteen-year-old Augustina had been completed and Rachel and Brickall were in her car on their way back to the NCA offices.

‘What a fucking carry on,’ Brickall said. ‘This is why I bloody hate trafficking cases.’

‘Stop stressing: we got it done.’

‘Thanks to you spotting the glaring error.’ Rachel knew Brickall well enough to know that it pained him to acknowledge this. ‘There would have been a right old shit storm if I’d submitted that written statement to the CPS. You can bet it would’ve got back to Patten.’

‘No problem, fuckwit.’

They both let it go unmentioned that, after his recent six-month suspension for professional misconduct, Brickall could not afford to be caught making any more mistakes.

‘Seriously, I owe you one.’

‘Good, because I was going to ask you a favour.’ They were at a set of traffic lights, so she could turn her head to the left and look at him. ‘Quite a big favour.’

Brickall groaned. ‘Suppose I can’t really say no now, can I? Go on, what is it? You want me to set you up with that new guy in Child Protection, the one who’s replaced You Know Who.’

He never mentioned Giles Denton by name, as though he was Lord Voldemort. There had been little love lost between him and Denton when they worked on cases together, but after the Irishman abruptly left his job at the NCA, simultaneously abandoning his romance with Rachel, Brickall was even more full of bile.

‘I want you to come on a road trip with me.’

‘Road trip? What the fuck, Prince?’

They were now turning into the basement parking area of the NCA. ‘Come over to mine for a drink this evening and I’ll tell you all about it.’