Nick Davies

She was a middle-class white woman with an elegant style and piles of blonde hair. Her husband was an insurance broker with a taste for the good things in life. They had two daughters, aged 14 and 9, and they lived together on the edge of a provincial city in a £250,000 house with two tall poplar trees and a brand new BMW parked in the drive. Often, in the evening, they would go off together to a restaurant or a club, picking up a fine time on his American Express Gold Card.

West Yorkshire. September 1992. Police report that a quarter of the prostitutes who are arrested in their vice areas are aged 16 or under. They say the figures have soared in the previous 12 months. During 1991, less than four per cent of prostitutes they dealt with were under age.

For most of her life, Natalie Pearman was a walking portrait of an ordinary girl. She lived with her four brothers and sisters and her cat called Lucy in a neat little council house on the edge of a peaceful village in Norfolk. She liked ballet and horses and watching Neighbours after tea, she was good at drawing and painting and she had the idea that when she grew up, she would like to go into the air force so that she could be independent and travel around the world.

Scenes from a city. England, the autumn of 1993.
In a McDonalds hamburger bar, two boys sit at a table. Jamie is eleven; he is small and slim with blond hair, pale blue eyes and a face with the kind of impish innocence that makes old ladies want to pat him on the head. Luke is 13, chubby with pink puppy-fat cheeks and a chunky little body whose roundness is exaggerated by the padded red anorak which he insists on wearing indoors and out, regardless of the weather.

There is a woman in Nottingham, a half caste, who worked on the streets of the red-light area for years before finally she stopped and settled down with her man. She had a baby. And as soon as that happened, she found she was short of money. She couldn’t afford to buy clothes for the child and so, one night this summer, she went back out on to the streets. The man found out.