Anna - Slave: Snatched off Britains streets. The truth from the victim who brought down her traffickers.

THEY TOOK ME BECAUSE I WOULD NOT BE MISSED.

This is the heart-breaking true story of one of the UKs most shocking modern-day slavery cases.

Anna was an innocent student living in London when she was kidnapped, beaten, and forced into the sex slave industry. Threatened and tormented by her pimps, she was made to have sex with thousands of men. But she would not allow them to break her. On learning that she would be trafficked from Ireland to Dubai, she found the courage to trick her abusers and flee. Later, she would find that same resilience to help the police in the UK bring down her abductors.

For the first time, the girl at the centre of the storm tells her story.

Jason Johnson is a journalist and writer from Northern Ireland.

Anna has worked behind the scenes with law-makers in Northern Ireland, playing an influential role in ushering in a radical new dawn of anti-sex trafficking laws. She no longer lives in the UK or Ireland.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Anna, the author. In some cases names of people/places/dates/sequences of the detail of events have been changed.

They took me because I would not be missed.

It is not a simple thing to steal someone and not put them back. Some people will miss the person; they will wonder where they went. They might call the police, go to their house, go looking through the things they left behind.

They might put up posters or go on television to say, Where has this person gone? Can someone help me find this person? This person has disappeared into thin air.

But with me, none of that happened. To know that I was alone, without people who would fight to find me, was all they needed to know. I was a young female from Romania in among people who were coming and going all the time in a big, foreign city and, as is the way of these things, I was just a face in the crowd. So they took me. It was like no crime had been committed. There was only thin air left behind and no one really noticed. And, you know, I still think sometimes, How clever of them.

From that day they called me the blind one. They would always say Where is the blind one? or How many has the blind one done? or The blind one has been making trouble again.

That was my name maybe because it was the first weakness they discovered when they took me. My glasses came off as they pulled me into the car.

The first thing I said to them was, Give me back my glasses.

And in those moments they looked at my glasses, turned them over and could see that they were strong, that these were not just for reading, that they were glasses for living, needed by someone who does not see well.

So they laughed and called me blind and then the blind one and put my glasses somewhere. I dont know where they went, but it is maybe strange to think they kept them very safe. They made sure they were not broken so that when the time was right, when I was the thing that was broken, they could give them back to me again.

And, after four months, when they said to themselves, She is ours now, she has given up, she is no danger to us now, they gave me back my glasses.

For four months I lived like someone used to live, before glasses were invented, with poor eyesight, with sore eyes and many headaches and without really being able to see anything or anyone very well. It was a new world for me, a place where I did not fit, which was often out of focus.

And then they said, Here you are, you can wear these now. Do not ever say that we dont give you anything.

It was 11 March 2011. It was Friday.

The morning was sunny and mild not warm, not cold. I remember thinking how nice it was when I closed the door at 7.30am.

The street in north London I had been living on is called Westbury Avenue. It is a long street with lots of terraced houses and some trees and, at one end, some shops, a pub, some places to eat. Its a pleasant area, people coming and going and not bothering each other and sometimes smiling as they walk past you.

The Tube stations closest to me were Wood Green and Turnpike Lane, but you should not think that I used either of them very much. Most of the time when I travelled in London I would take the bus, sitting on the top floor and listening to my music and looking out.

The Tube I think is a good place to look at people and quickly walk through tiled tunnels and stand looking at posters in stations where the only wind is from the trains, if thats what you want to do. But if you want to look at buildings or roads, if you like to look at the city itself, you will not see it down there. You dont know where you are in the Tube; you have no real understanding of where you are going. The truth is I felt better being on buses than on Tube trains, so I took the bus.

I got on board near Turnpike Lane station at 7.45am to be at my work in Finchley for 8am or a little bit after. The cosmetic surgeons who owned the house didnt mind if I was a little late or early. I had come to clean the house for two hours and I would be there for two hours, so if I arrived at 8.10am their daughter would still be nice and say Good morning and ask how I was. I would tell her I was Fine, thanks and say Hello to their dogs and we would both go about our business.

So I did some ironing and cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms and after two hours I left.

I walked for about ten minutes to the second place, where a man lived on his own. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasnt, but I had a key to his house, like I had a key to nearly all of the houses I cleaned.

I didnt know this man very well but he was getting older and I knew he really did need someone to help him keep things clean. The kitchen wasnt good and I dont think he knew how to operate his dishwasher. He would put filthy dishes in it, the food not even scraped from the plates, and close the door and forget about it.

I was there for nearly two hours, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning out and starting the dishwasher, cleaning the bathrooms and washing some clothes. The toilet in his house was well, you dont need to know.

It was nearly 1pm when I had finished the two jobs and I was taking my lunch break. I had another job starting in the afternoon in Wood Green and that would be for two hours again, because that was the amount of time many people thought was enough.

On those days, when I had one hour or more between jobs, I would go back to Westbury Avenue to eat and watch television. My breakfast on that day had been only a croissant and Coke, as it usually was, and I was hungry. Going home to relax and eat and watch television, without having to pay anything or see anyone while I was dressed in my work clothes, was a good idea.

I took the bus to Wood Green and remember thinking it might rain later in the day, that the London sky had become a little bit darker. I got off to walk along the road towards my house. If you want to picture me, you should know I had my earphones in and my glasses on and I was wearing my grey winter coat, furry at the neck.

I was wearing a dark T-shirt and some trousers and flat shoes I used for work, which were not too fashionable.

I was in a little world of my own just going along, not happy, not sad, with my head tipped down towards the pavement because I am not a girl who always has my head up.