For 20 years, Alice has been haunted by flashbacks of the night the Metropolitan police officer David Carrick imprisoned her in his flat and raped her at gunpoint.
She can picture his receding hairline; his hairy chest; his hands gripping her throat. She can feel the cold metal of a gun barrel at her cheek. She can hear him saying: “If you behave yourself, I’ll let you go.” She can remember going to the hospital after the nine-hour attack and a nurse telling her that she wasn’t the first woman to say she’d been raped by a police officer.
“I honestly thought he was going to kill me,” Alice recalled. “I remember thinking to myself: ‘Who is going to find me? Where am I going to be found?’ I felt lucky the next day when he let me leave. But in the weeks, months and years afterwards, I wished he had killed me because living with what he did to me pushed me to the edge. He’s taken 20 years of my life away.”
Alice, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, is the first known rape victim of Carrick, 48, one of Britain’s worst sex offenders.
The firearms officer, who served with the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, has pleaded guilty to 85 serious offences, including 48 rapes against 12 women over two decades.
Alice told the Guardian about her harrowing ordeal because she is convinced there are more victims who have not yet been identified. She also wants to maintain the spotlight on the Met’s failure to protect women. The force has admitted missing at least nine opportunities to stop Carrick.
By the time he attacked Alice in 2003, Carrick had already been reported to the police for harassing a former partner and assaulting a girlfriend, which is said to have involved biting the woman’s shoulder.
Alice, 40, has consulted lawyers and plans to sue the Met. “Police officers are not vetted enough. I’m angry that in 20 years Carrick was only vetted twice,” she said. “If they just looked at his record and vetted him properly then it could have saved me, it could have saved loads of other women. I don’t accept the Met’s apology because they still have officers in the ranks who are doing horrendous crimes. I haven’t trusted them since this incident happened and I’m disgusted by them.”
Alice said she was a 20-year-old prospective college student who was “full of hope and ambition” when Carrick lured her to his flat in Tooting, south-west London.
She told how she was at a bar when one of her friends introduced her to him, saying he was having a house party later. Alice, who was in a relationship, said Carrick was inquisitive but already knew a lot about her, including where she worked. He joked that it was because he was a police officer, before flashing his warrant card.
Later that evening, Carrick asked Alice to go to his flat to help tidy up before the party. She was hesitant but her friends assured her they would join them soon. Alice recalled: “I was a bit cautious about it but he said: ‘I’m the safest person you can be with, I’m a police officer. Nothing’s going to happen to you.’”
When they arrived at Carrick’s nearby studio flat, Alice was surprised to find it was already spotless. Carrick poured her a whisky and cola and they chatted before he tried to kiss her. She pushed him off, saying she was not interested and went to the bathroom. When she returned, she asked after their friends but Carrick said he had cancelled the party because he was tired. Alice got up to leave but the door was locked.
“That’s when the attack began,” she said. “I remember him putting his right arm around my waist, and his left hand around my mouth and dragging me back in. He hit my head in the hallway as I was struggling with him.”
Fighting back tears, she described trying to fend off Carrick before he brandished a black handgun. She said: “He pushed me on the end of the bed and as he was pinning me down, he had his knee on my thigh and his hand over my mouth and I bit him. I heard him reaching around in a box at the end of the bed and that’s when the gun appeared. He said: ‘If you behave yourself I’ll let you go. You carry on, you won’t be leaving here.’
“When I saw the gun I froze. He brushed it against my cheek and I could feel the cold metal. I thought: ‘That’s it, he’s going to rape me and then he’s going to kill me.’
“I remember as the attack was happening, I went to close my eyes and he put his hands on my throat and he said: ‘No, no, you’re going to want to be awake for this. Open your eyes.’”
Carrick repeatedly raped Alice that night. “He also pulled out clumps of my hair and held me by the throat. He was vicious, he was evil. Evil is the only way I can describe him,” she said.
At a hearing this month, Carrick admitted attacking Alice, pleading guilty to six counts of rape, false imprisonment and indecent assault. But he denied a charge of possession of an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear or violence. Alice said: “I am angry he pleaded not guilty. I know that’s a serious charge. He shouldn’t have had a gun because he wasn’t a firearms officer yet, but I’ve no doubt he had a gun.”
In the morning, Carrick told Alice: “You best be going now. I’ve got work later on.” He unlocked the door, stood outside his flat naked and waved her off. Alice walked to Tooting Broadway station and saw that the time was 7.49am; she had been held prisoner for nine hours.
She called her GP from a telephone box and said she had been raped. She was advised to go to a hospital, where she was examined by a consultant, who listed her internal injuries, bruises and bite marks on her collarbone and shoulder.
Alice said a nurse asked if she knew her attacker before discouraging her from reporting him to the police. She recalled: “I said I only met him last night, he’s a police officer. And she took me by my hands and said: ‘You’re not the first woman to come in here and say a police officer has raped them. I want you to be quite aware of the process, it can sometimes be more damaging for women to report it. They’re going to go through your history and put you through hell. They will discredit you as much as possible because they look after their own.’”
The nurse’s words convinced Alice not to report the attack, which changed the course of her life. Her injuries healed, but her mental health deteriorated. She quit her job, pulled out of her college place and barely left the house. “I just wanted to disappear,” she said. “I became a recluse. All my friends were going out, going on holiday, but I couldn’t. I changed how I looked. I didn’t like men staring at me. I didn’t like being approached by anyone.”
She was even forced to change her address after a friend told her Carrick had been asking after her at her old workplace.
Alice also distanced herself from her family, saying: “The after-effects of the attack made me very angry and changed my whole personality. I didn’t have a lot to do with my family after, because you change and they start to ask questions. So it was easier just to cut myself off from them and then I could do my own thing and not be a constant worry to them.”
She said she has been plagued by memories of the attack, remembering everything from Carrick’s burgundy shirt and black loafers to the layout of his flat. “The memories and the flashbacks that come back up, and the nightmares that you have where you feel like you’re constantly reliving the moment, you kind of think to yourself: ‘If he had killed me, then I wouldn’t have had to think about this.’”
Alice reported the attack last May after seeing media reports about Carrick’s arrest. Since then her nightmares and flashbacks have got worse. “I have nightmares every day. I wake up in the middle of the night sweating profusely because I’ve had a nightmare. The other week I went on a run and I had a panic attack because I thought I saw someone like him, even though I know he’s locked up. It brings you right back. But I know it’s a necessary evil to go through in order to finally close this.”
Alice was keen to add that the officers who brought Carrick to justice handled her case sensitively and professionally. She said she hoped other victims would contact the police. “I can understand why it’s so incredibly hard to come forward and relive the trauma, but I think it’s necessary in order to get past it and move forward,” she said. “I want the other victims to find their own voice. The Met has to be held accountable and not just say: ‘We’re sorry this happened, and he shouldn’t have been in the Met.’ We need to keep the pressure on.”
