That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was the men that sometimes came to the flat. It was mostly just this one man – Colin, his name was – and sometimes he brought another guy with him, I was never sure of his name. And – I can’t really describe it – I’d look at them, or they’d catch my eye and I would just – break. I would go to pieces inside. I can’t really describe it... it’s as if the second I saw them, a gigantic rush of – of horror would swamp me. They never said much to me but occasionally, they’d laugh together. At me, I think it was. I can’t describe how that made me feel. Just – it was so black, this wave, it was like drowning. I used to get really out of it, you know, with booze, if I knew they were coming round and I couldn’t leave the house. God, it was –

“I just sort of carried on. I mean, I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt so bad, so I kind of buried it and just went on, day to day. There were little, odd things though, that cropped up. I remember asking Tracey if I could have my birth certificate so I could get a passport – I think I had some sort of idea about going abroad – I wanted to escape for a bit, to run away – and she said she didn’t have it. She said she’d lost it.

“Anyway, the day I turned sixteen – or the day Tracey told me I turned sixteen – she threw me out. She said it was time for me to take care of myself now, that she’d kept her end of the bargain and kept me until now but enough was enough and it was time for me to make my own way in the world. You can just see it, can’t you? A sixteen year old kid with memory loss, out on the streets of London. Yeah, we were in London, some god-awful bit of South London, by the way. The really shitty part, with the pound shops and the bookies and the off-licence with the sign saying ‘we can’t sell alcohol before eight o’clock’ – that’s eight o’clock in the morning – and the crappy, crappy boutiques with their synthetic, awful, fake-jewelled-studded clothes in the smudgy window, and the obese, sweating black girls with their fifty screaming, corn-rowed kids in tow, and the scrawny, skaggy white girls with their horrible greasy hair and their toddlers sucking on a can of Red Bull, and the alcoholics trying to buy Special Brew at nine o’clock in the morning, and the mad people, who’d been thrown out of any kind of care home due to being complete arseholes and a complete lack of anyone, anyone, who had any kind of class, or dignity, or worth...

“For the first couple of years, I thought I was going to be okay. I had a little bit of money that Tracey had given me and she’d told me to go to this café up in the East End, where someone would give me a job. So I went there, and they did give me a job, and I was a waitress there for a year or so. I lived in this tiny, shitty little bedsit in Walthamstow, and went to work, and came back and slept and did my usual bury-my-head-in-the-sand type thing, so I wouldn’t be able to think about anything. I kept getting the black waves, every so often, mostly after men talked to me in the café. I got through it by drinking a lot and smoking and not thinking about what it might mean.

“After a while, I started going out with this bloke, Michael. He used to come into the café – he was the foreman of a building site nearby – and after a while I moved in with him. It was about the same time I got sacked for being drunk at work. Michael said it didn’t matter, he’d look after me, and for a while it was fine, I just sort of stayed at his place and we went out and had fun. He was really into his coke and, after a while, I got into it too; it made me feel even better than the booze. After a while, I wasn’t getting the black waves anymore, not as long as I could do the white lines. Then Michael started getting a bit arsey with me, having a go at me for taking all his charlie and never paying my way. I said I didn’t know what I could do and he said he could think of one thing I was good at...

“The only surprise was how long it took me to become a hooker. I didn’t even mind it so much after a while – I liked the attention. I liked the fact that I was getting paid for doing what other girls were stupid enough to do for free. I couldn’t understand why anyone – anyone – would want to fuck for fun. But that’s what men wanted and so that’s what they got – at the right price, anyway.

“After a while, I left Michael and set up on my own, in Soho. I shared with this other girl, Susie. She was okay. We used to work, and then we’d go out clubbing and pretend we were normal girls on a night out.

“Ironically enough, it was one of my regulars who saved me. He was an older guy, he must have been in his mid-fifties, and he saw that I was getting more and more strung out. He came round to see me but he didn’t want sex with me, not that time. Instead, he just made me sit on the bed and tell him what was wrong. And I just broke down; I was such a snivelling, sobbing mess – you should have seen my face, snot pouring from my nose, no wonder he didn’t want to fuck me – and he told me I needed to get off the drugs, that I needed to talk to a therapist and that he would make me an appointment with a drugs counsellor. And he did, and I went along and after that, it was okay. Not good, you understand, but better. And it got better, slowly, day by day. Susie came along with me for a while and things were going really well. But then she had a major relapse. I had to get away from her and so I moved down to Brighton. And I kind of pulled myself together, slowly. That’s when things really started coming together.

“My therapist in London had recommended another therapist in Brighton. He specialised in repressed memories, recovering them, that sort of thing. That wasn’t why I went to him, though – it was more that I needed a therapist and this was the only one I knew of that was any good. So we start the treatment and he does the repressed memory thing on me.

“All my memories were still there, from my childhood. Right up until the age of ten. Not wholly, not completely, but enough. You were there, although I couldn’t remember your name. My parents. Our house in Hellesford. Myself as a young girl, an innocent young girl, before all these terrible things had happened to me.

“I remembered what happened that night. The night, the night we were going to go to the stones. I remembered walking up the road by the farm, how big the countryside was all about me. It was so cold... I didn’t go to the stones, I don’t know why. I think I walked to Penzance. There was still a lot missing - I remember vaguely, very vaguely, waking up in an alleyway somewhere, hidden behind cardboard boxes. I went into a cafe somewhere – I remember the steamed up windows and they had plastic ketchup bottles on the tables that were shaped like tomatoes. A man sat opposite me and started talking to me – or did I go there with him? Then there’s nothing, a complete blank, for the next few years.

“Well, you can imagine. It was like an earthquake in the middle of my life. But in spite of it, I was glad. Because I’d always known that there was something more to my story than the bits that I could remember. It was like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place.

“A journalist in one of the national papers did an article on all the famous kid disappearances. I think Ben Needham’s name was mentioned, and a few others, and just a little tiny paragraph at the end mentioned me. Jessica McGaskill. I was reading it in a coffee shop, and when I got to that bit I – I fainted. Fell right to the floor, got cappuccino everywhere.

“And after that, I knew. I knew who I was, or who I had been. I did my own research and I compared more memories, and I was certain. I was scanning the papers every day, to see if I could find anything else – I almost wrote to the journalist who had written the first piece but I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea...  Anyway, one morning, there was something in the paper about Angus and the school thing that he owns – sorry, owned – a college, right? And as soon as I read that, I remembered your name. And I knew I had to find you.”