Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade

by Sophie Hayes

  Although everyone kept telling my mother, ‘Sophie’s fine. You should just relax and be pleased she’s enjoying herself,’ she couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong. She told herself it was just because she was missing me and because it had been so out of character for me to decide not to come home in the way I’d done. But she wasn’t convinced and she felt worried.

  Before I’d gone to Italy, my mum had told me that if ever anything went wrong and I needed her help but couldn’t speak openly on the phone for any reason, I should ask her, ‘How’s Auntie Linda?’ One day, when I’d been in Italy for a few weeks and was talking to her on the phone, telling her for the umpteenth time that everything was fine – and then biting my lip to stop myself bursting into tears – she interrupted me and said, ‘Did you want to ask about Auntie Linda?’

  I knew what she meant and I wanted more than anything in the world to scream ‘Yes!’ down the phone at her, but Kas was standing right beside me and although he couldn’t hear what she was saying, I was terrified of making him suspicious or angry. I think, too, that I was so ashamed of what I was doing I didn’t see how I would ever be able to tell my mother the truth. So I said, ‘I’m okay. Stop worrying about me. Everything’s fine.’ I reassured her again that I was having a great time in Italy and then I said ‘Goodbye’, as cheerfully as I could, and handed the phone to Kas.

  ‘What was your mother saying to you?’ he asked, still holding it in his outstretched hand and watching me with his eyes narrowed. ‘Why did you have to tell her not to worry?’

  My heart began to thud. Perhaps he had heard what she’d said after all and if I didn’t tell him the truth, he’d fly into a rage. But if I did tell him, I’d have to think of some plausible explanation of what she meant, and my mind was already shutting down because of the fear.

  Somehow, though, I managed to keep my voice level as I said, ‘Oh, it was nothing. She thought I sounded as though I had a cold and she was just asking if I was all right.’ Then I shrugged and added, ‘You know what mothers are like – they always worry about things like that.’

  Kas continued to look at me steadily for a moment and then he said, ‘Okay. But make sure you tell her you’re eating properly and that everything’s fine.’

  In fact, I did have a cold that day. I was barely eating, standing night after night in the freezing cold and sometimes in torrential rain, and so run down that there was rarely a day when I wasn’t ill in some way. But it didn’t matter how ill I was, I still had to go out to work. There was just one night when Kas let me stay at home. I was exhausted and I’d had a horrible feeling all day that something really bad was going to happen if I went out. So I told him I had terrible stomach pains, and although he shouted at me, eventually he said, ‘Right, stay in the bedroom and sleep. I don’t want to see you looking at the television. If I see you even move, you can’t imagine how much trouble you’ll be in. You’ve cost me money, woman, and tomorrow you’re going back to work, however ill you feel.’ But he didn’t need to warn and threaten me because I slept for almost 24 hours, and I would have stayed asleep every day and every night for a week if I’d had the chance.

  Sometimes, Kas would wake me up during the day and tell me to get dressed because we were going out – usually to buy me new ‘working clothes’. He always told me what to wear, and in the daytime it was tracksuit bottoms, trainers, a jacket and a cap, with my hair tied back and very little make-up, because keeping a low profile was very important to him, and his main aim was for no one to notice us. So one day, when we were driving somewhere and I looked up just as a police car drove slowly past us, he waited until it was out of sight and then smashed my head sideways against the window.

  ‘Why? Why would you look at the police?’ he shouted at me. ‘Are you trying to draw attention to us? Are you trying to get me into trouble? I’ve got fucking cocaine in this car and if I get caught, it will be your fault, and then what are you going to do? You’re going to be stuck here all on your own with no one to look after you. Is that what you want?’ And I felt really angry with myself for having looked at the police car without thinking about the consequences.

  There were so many times when I was frightened of Kas, so many times when a knot formed in my stomach and my heart pounded in my chest as I waited for his reaction to something. One of the worst times of all was the night he decided I was cheating on him.

  It was almost half past 5 on a Sunday morning, I’d been out since 8 o’clock on the Saturday night, and I was just about to start the long walk back to the flat when a car pulled up beside me. Although numb with exhaustion, I decided to go with just this one last client, but as soon as I got into his car, I realised he’d been drinking. My heart sank: drunk guys always took forever and I knew Kas would be expecting me back. And then my phone rang.

  Of all the things I was frightened of – and by this time there were almost too many to count – not answering the phone when Kas rang was perhaps the most frightening of all. From the very first day, he had instilled in me the need to answer his calls immediately, and even when I did, he would threaten me and swear at me in Albanian for being so slow to respond. So it didn’t matter who I was with or what I was doing, I would scrabble to reach my phone with my heart racing.

  ‘Where are you?’ Kas shouted. ‘You get your arse back here – now!’

  ‘I’ve just got into a car,’ I whispered. ‘It’s the last one.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes and then I’ll come looking for you.’

  Fifteen minutes later, the man still hadn’t finished and my phone rang again.

  ‘Where the fuck are you? I’m worried sick, going out of my mind thinking something’s happened to you. You could be fucking dead for all I know,’ although he sounded angry rather than concerned for my safety.

  ‘I’m coming. I’m coming,’ I told him. ‘It’s just … I won’t be long.’

  Five minutes later, while the man was still grunting and fumbling and trying to focus through his drunken haze, my phone rang again.

  ‘Woman, are you fucking with me?’ Kas’s voice roared in my ear. ‘You see what I’m going to do to you now! I’m on my way and I’m going to fucking kill him and then I’m going to kill you. You are fucking dead, woman.’

  I started trying to push the guy off me, telling him, ‘You’ve got to go. Go! Now!’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ His speech was slurred but he must have recognised the urgency in my voice because he moved back quickly into his seat and sped off almost before I’d had time to clamber out of his car.

  As I stood shivering at the side of the road, I could hear the intermittent screech of tyres as Kas’s car sped down the winding hill from his flat, and when he pulled up beside me, he reached behind and flung open the back door. I bent down to get in, and he grabbed me by my hair, dragging me to the middle of the seat. Then he banged the door closed, swept the car in an arc across the road and drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the fingers of the other entwined again in my hair.

  ‘Where is he?’ Kas screamed. ‘Where is the motherfucker? I’m going to fucking kill him.’

  I’d lost count of all the times I’d seen him in a rage, but never before had he been as furious as he was then.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I whimpered, clutching my head with my hands to try to stop the hairs tugging painfully at my scalp.

  ‘I know you’re fucking cheating on me!’ he bellowed. ‘How dare you disrespect me in this way?’

  ‘I’m not. I didn’t do anything,’ I sobbed. ‘Please, I promise.’

  ‘You’re risking everything.’ He banged my head again and again on the back of the seat until it felt as though my brain was crashing against the inside of my skull and I thought I was going to pass out. ‘I could get caught by the police coming out here to look for you. I’ll find him and I’ll kill him. What sort of car is he driving?’

  But he didn’t wait for me
to answer. Lifting me up by my hair, he dragged me along the seat until I was half-sitting, with my body twisted away from him, and then he started punching me, turning away occasionally to glance at the road.

  By the time we arrived at the flat there was an intense, hot pain in my back and shoulders and it felt as though every muscle had been ripped apart. Kas told me to sit on the sofa and when he stood in front of me, I shut my eyes and waited for the moment when his fist would crash into my face. But, instead of hitting me, he leaned down towards me, smoothed and straightened my hair and said, in a quiet, almost normal, voice, ‘Show me how much money you’ve got.’

  I handed him the wad of notes and he sat down on the chair beside the sofa to count them. Kas always counted the money himself, sorting the notes one by one and placing them in neat, orderly piles of hundreds, fifties, twenties and tens on the table in front of him, all in the same orientation and with their corners smoothed. He’d be angry if I’d been given any five-Euro notes – ‘The money used by peasants’ he called it, spitting out the words with disgust – and one night he went crazy, shouting at me and hitting me for handing him some coins. ‘What sort of person pays for sex with coins?’ he shrieked at me. ‘And what sort of person accepts them?’ So I always dreaded this moment.

  On this particular night, however, although I held my breath as I always did, I’d been working for at least nine hours, so I knew there was enough money to satisfy even Kas. But suddenly he was on his feet again, screaming at me, ‘You cheating bitch! How many times have I told you: do not cheat on me; do not steal from me. Do you think …’

  It was like being trapped in a horrible, illogical, never-ending dream, where nothing made sense and everything that happened was unexpected and inexplicable.

  ‘I didn’t cheat on you,’ I cried. ‘I didn’t steal any of the money. It’s all there. Everything I’ve earned tonight is there.’

  ‘Don’t you dare to interrupt me.’ Kas spoke slowly in a voice that was cold and full of threat.

  Again, I shut my eyes and held my breath, waiting for him to hit me. But this time he left the room and came back a few seconds later holding a knife in one hand and a broom in the other. I watched as he dropped the knife on to a chair and unscrewed the brush head from the broom. Then he picked up the knife again and stood, towering above me as I cowered on the sofa. In a dangerously pleasant voice he said, ‘So. I’m going to let you choose. Which one do you want? The knife or the stick?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ I whispered. ‘Please, Kas, I …’

  ‘The knife or the stick?’ he repeated more loudly, bending down and pushing them both into my face.

  ‘The stick,’ I snivelled, and as he threw the knife on the chair and raised the stick above his head, I dropped on to the floor, locking my arms around his leg and pleading with him, ‘Please, please don’t do this. I promise I didn’t do anything. Please …’

  The handle of the broom crashed down just once on the back of my skull and then came flying past my head as Kas threw it on the floor and shouted at me, ‘Look what you’ve made me do now – and all because you wanted to screw someone else.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t do anything wrong,’ I sobbed. But my voice was barely audible. Reaching out my hand to feel for the edge of the sofa, I managed to drag myself to my feet and stagger into the bathroom just in time before I was violently sick.

  When I came out of the bathroom, my head was still spinning. I felt dizzy, almost as though my mind had become detached from my body and I was watching myself from the outside. And Kas was still in a fury. Grabbing me by the hair with the fingers of one hand, he yanked me towards him, and as he did so he used his other hand to punch me with such violent force that he sent my body smashing against the wall.

  I was more scared of him than I’d ever been before, not least because I knew how easy it would be for him to kill me – either deliberately or inadvertently – even though I hadn‘t done anything wrong. And although I didn’t realise what had happened until much later, that was the night he cracked my shoulder blade.

  My body was already covered in bruises from all the other times he’d punched me and bashed my head repeatedly against the wall. But the pain in my neck, across my shoulders and down my arms was the worst I’d ever experienced. When he eventually waved his hand at me in disgust and told me to go to bed, I had to sleep in my clothes because I couldn’t raise my arms high enough to take them off.

  I was never allowed to count the money, but I did keep a rough tally in my head, so that I knew how many more customers I needed before I’d earned at least the minimum that he expected me to make every night. I’d stopped keeping the money in my boots after the first week because I was afraid of being kidnapped or of someone trying to steal it from me – and would push 50 Euros through a little hole I’d made in the lining at the back of my jacket and put the rest in a plastic bag, which I’d bury in a hole in the rough ground behind the petrol station.

  One Saturday night, I worked constantly until six in the morning – at one point there were three cars lined up, all regular customers waiting for me – and I knew I must have earned a small fortune. Kas had a couple of friends staying with him, and when I got back, they were all asleep and the flat was in darkness. I hated the men being there, particularly because I knew they had no reason to care about me and that anything could happen. So I crept into the bathroom, opened the plastic bag of money, counted it and then pulled off my coat, pushing my hand through the slit in the lining and pulling frantically at the material as I searched for the notes I must have put in there and then forgotten about. And then the voice in my head shouted No!

  I knew I must have earned at least 1,000 Euros, but however carefully I searched and however many times I counted, there was still just 600. I couldn’t understand it; it simply didn’t make any sense. Think, I told myself. Just try to calm down and think. Where might you have hidden it? It must be there. There’s nowhere else it can be.

  I had to have made a mistake in the counting. The only other alternative was that someone had stolen from me, and that seemed impossible. One thing was certain though – Kas was going to kill me.

  I was shaking and my stomach was cramping and churning when I woke him up, whispering to him, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’ve only made this tonight,’ as I held out the wad of notes to show him. He got out of bed immediately and, without a word, grabbed me by the arm and pushed me ahead of him into the bathroom, locking the door behind us.

  When he smiled at me, it felt as though icy-cold liquid was flooding into my heart. He sighed as he said, ‘Ah! Rrishit tim pak. [My little grape.]’ But then he snatched the notes from my hand and counted them and his voice was hard and pitiless as he hissed at me, ‘Do you think you can come home at 6 o’clock in the morning with just this? Just wait until my friends leave. We will deal with this later. And while you wait, you’d better think, woman. Think where my money has gone. I know you’ve cheated on me and stolen from me, and I want to know what you’ve done with my money.’

  ‘I haven’t. I promise I haven’t,’ I stammered. ‘The only thing that could have happened is that someone’s taken some of the money I buried. I …’

  ‘Why?’ he snapped, twisting my arm until I thought it would break. ‘Why would someone take some of the money? Are you stupid? Do you think everyone else is as stupid as you are? If someone was going to rob you, they’d take it all. Do you think they thought they’d stumbled on a bank, so they decided to take some now and come back for the rest when they needed it? Is that what you think? Don’t you dare lie to me, woman. Just see what I will do to you when you steal from me.’

  I didn’t sleep at all that night. Instead, I lay awake, crying silently into my pillow, dreading what I knew was coming and wondering what my mother was doing and what she’d think if she knew the kind of life I was really leading.

  The next day, as soon as his friends had gone, Kas slapped me across the face, shrugged his sh
oulders and said, ‘What you lost, you can make up today.’ Then he switched on the television, lit a cigarette and turned his back on me.

  His unpredictability was as unnerving as his temper because it meant that I never knew what he was going to do – and I sometimes wondered whether he did either.

  For seven nights every week it often felt as though I was going round and round in a revolving door. I’d stand at the side of the road, a car would pull up, the man would ask how much, I’d get in the car and we’d drive to the track beside the petrol station, then afterwards he’d drop me off, another car would pull up …

  The nights had been cold right from the start, but the temperature dropped steadily as the weeks went by, until even if it was warm and sunny during the day, it was so cold once the sun went down that however many layers of jumpers and jackets I wore, I was always freezing. It didn’t help that my weight had dropped to about 6½ stone and I was smoking up to 20 cigarettes a night, although I’d rarely have a chance to smoke one before the next car pulled up beside me. In England, I’d hardly ever smoked, and the fact that I did so now seemed to be just another indication that Sophie was disappearing. Perhaps because of my lack of appetite, loss of weight and a persistent cough – which the cigarettes and standing in the cold did nothing to improve – I seemed to be getting significantly weaker almost by the day. So sometimes it was a relief to be in a warm car for 15 minutes, particularly when I was with one of the men who were nice to me. One night, when it was so cold it felt as though ice crystals were forming in my bones, my teeth were chattering so violently that when a car pulled up beside me and the man asked ‘How much?’, he could hardly understand what I was saying when I told him the price. I was so grateful to get into the warmth for a few minutes that I didn’t look at him properly until I was sitting beside him in the car, and just as I realised that he was as high as a kite on drugs, drunk or completely crazy – or all three – he locked the doors.

  ‘Let me out of the car,’ I told him, struggling to keep my voice level so that he wouldn’t know how panic-stricken I really was. ‘Open the door. I want to go.’