THE tiny baby slept snugly in the crook of her grandmother’s arm, oblivious to the ghetto filth around her and to the squalid manner in which she was being offered for sale.

The old woman may have held the infant gently, but her face was hard. This, after all, was business.

“Her name is Kalinka — it means ladybird,” she said, passing the child to me in a soft pink blanket that enveloped all of her except for a pretty face of perfect serenity.

I cuddled Kalinka for a moment, feeling her warmth while the gleam of avarice in her grandmother’s eyes chilled me.

“How much money do you want for this baby?” I asked.

“That is for her mother to negotiate. Come back at 5pm and we will wait for you at that corner over there,” she said, pointing across the mud road to a building as run down as any in the slums of Bulgaria’s second city, Plovdiv.

I had come to Plovdiv, an ancient and largely dilapidated city where a hepatitis epidemic is currently raging, to investigate claims that human trafficking is on the rise in Bulgaria, which secured terms last week to join the European Union on January 1.

Foremost among the concerns of human rights activists is the suggestion that scores or perhaps hundreds of Bulgarian babies are being sold for adoption across Europe.

I posed as a childless woman looking for a fast and easy way to adopt a baby. I said my husband was a banker and we were willing to pay.

Accompanied by an interpreter, I walked into the Sheker Mahala ghetto — home to around 4,000 impoverished Roma — last Wednesday afternoon and approached a middle-aged woman, asking whether she knew of anyone who could help. A curious crowd soon surrounded us.

“If you want to adopt children you need to go to the maternity hospital. It’s the tall building over there,” said one man.

But as we turned away, the crowd parted to make way for the old woman, whose large gold earrings and imposing presence marked her out as the matriarch of the group. “There is one baby,” she said.

She introduced herself as Bogdana and, apparently trying to impress on me the robust good health and fecundity of the family line, claimed to have 17 children and 50 grandsons. Her daughter had seven children, she said, but their father was in prison so I could adopt the youngest, who was just a month old. Someone ran off to fetch her for inspection.

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