T he three women refer to each other as “the girls”, even though they are in their 40s and 50s, long past girlhood. They have a WhatsApp group called Sister Solidarity, even though they are biologically unrelated. The unshakeable bond between Laura Hughes and Lauren Preston, both 45, and Mary Sharp, 58, came about for the saddest reason – all three were raped and abused by Martin Butler, a manipulative drug dealer on their estate in London who groomed and coerced them decades ago. Butler is now serving a lengthy sentence for the rape and buggery of Sharp in 1988. At his trial, Preston and Hughes provided bad character evidence as part of the prosecution case against him, about the grooming, rape and abuse they suffered from him in the mid-90s. He was subsequently convicted of the historic rape of an unidentified teenage victim, after a separate trial last year. Butler was in his mid-30s, 20 years older than Hughes and Preston, when he started to groom them on their estate in Ruislip.…