Pop Goes the Weasel | страница 67

DC Rebecca McAndrew had only been on the hunt for a few hours, but already she felt tarnished and dispirited. She and her team had hit the high-end brothels first. They were far busier than she remembered. The recession had driven more and more women into the sex industry and the sudden influx of prostitutes from Poland and Bulgaria had further flooded the market. Competition was up, which meant that prices had come down. It was an increasingly cut-throat business.

Next they’d moved on to the student campuses and the picture was depressingly similar here. Every girl they talked to knew of at least one fellow student who’d turned to prostitution to fund her studies. It was more and more a feature of everyday life as grants were cut and students struggled to pay their way through the many years of study. But the anecdotal tales of alcohol dependency and self-harming suggested this new phenomenon was not without its cost.

Now Sanderson and her team were in the Claymore drop-in centre, a free healthcare service run by a combination of NHS workers and generous-hearted volunteers. Anyone could turn up here and receive free treatment but it was in a grotty part of town, the queues were long and you always had to keep one eye on your possessions, so it generally attracted the drunk and the desperate. Many of the centre’s clients were young prostitutes – girls with infections, girls who’d been beaten up and needed stitches, girls who had young babies and simply couldn’t cope. It was hard not to be moved by the awful situations they found themselves in.

Rebecca McAndrew often cursed the long hours that came with her job – she had been single for over two years now, partly because of the night work – but she realized the sacrifices she’d made were nothing compared to those made by the women who worked at Claymore. Despite being exhausted, despite being painfully short of resources, they worked tirelessly to help keep these girls together, without ever judging them or losing their tempers. They were modern saints – not that they were ever acknowledged as such.

As the team interviewed and questioned, a paradox struck Rebecca forcefully. In a world where it seemed harder and harder to find meaningful connections with other people – love, marriage, family – it had never been easier to find paid companionship. The world was in the doldrums, the country still in the grip of recession, but one thing was clear.