Monica's Justice

by Richard Alexander (Gromets Plaza)

(story continues from Monica's Justice - Captives of Shark Island)

Chapter Eighteen - Death in the Jungle

All manner of uncomprehending thoughts raced through my head as I looked down on the mess that had once been a multi-million dollar house. Most clearly visible was the shattered swimming pool that had made up the top level, and the realisation dawned of the huge weight that the pool comprised, and that if the main structural supports had failed, this weight would have crushed anything beneath it.

My brain was reeling with the likelihood of Leila, Mary and Helen having been either in the house or in the cages beneath it. God, this couldn’t be happening! Nobody could survive a collapse of that magnitude, with such a weight of debris concertinaing down to the ground. If they had survived, then the high seas would surely have drowned them as they lay trapped.

I clung to the handrail of the stairs as I peered down the face of the cliff at the ruins of the house, trying to deal with the horrendous import of the situation. I had to get down there to check, but I could only do so by circling inland to come out on the beach.

In shock, and barely thinking clearly, I bashed my way through undergrowth in a wide circle back to the beach. My mind was numb, unable to accept the enormity of what I had seen. When I blundered out of the vegetation on to the beach the waves were nearly reaching the top of the sand where the greenery started. The wind was driving rain and spray in my face and I barely heard the cries for help above the roar of the surf.

I raised my head and at first saw nothing, before I focussed on the tops of the five posts that at low tide stood embedded in the sand, and now showed only half a metre above the roiling waves. Only when I looked closely could I see the heads bobbing just on the landward side of three of the posts.

My heart leapt at the sight, for as quickly as these girls had been taken away from me, so too had they been restored - they were alive!

I plunged into the surf. The water seemed to warm me, for it had none of the chill of the rain. The first post was only twenty metres away and I reached it to find Leila struggling to float on her back with her wrists handcuffed above her head around the post. She must have been placed there like that, then, as the tide had come in, she had lost her footing and been forced to float up with the tide.

The water was probably two metres deep here, but the waves were so rough that she was getting bounced about and was taking in water. I grabbed hold of the pole with one hand put the other around her body under her breasts, pulling her back so that her head was above the waves and against the pole. By holding her in this fashion I was able to lift her high enough out of the water to let her lift her manacled hands over the top of the post.

The poor girl was exhausted, coughing and spluttering. I dragged her back towards the beach to the point where she could stand on her own before setting out towards the next post.

Mary was in the same situation, again half choking and trying to stay afloat by clasping her wrists against the pole. It took me a further ten minutes to get her and Helen ashore and the four of us crouched naked behind a fallen palm before I told them of the shelter we had found.

As a group, leaning on each other for support, we made our way back through the rain and the raging wind that slapped branches against bodies, to finally reach the safety of the generator house. There was a welter of exclamations and a babble of explanations as the girls hugged one another and we huddled together for warmth as best we could.

The storm continued for another twenty-four hours. I made some brief forays to return with coconuts, of which there was no shortage, for they were all over the ground. We awoke on the second day after the storm to a warm sunny day, and only at this stage did we venture forth like New Age humans after the Armageddon, looking out over the death and destruction that had been wrought while we had cowered in our shelter.

There were more than a few biblical parallels in our plight, not least being our nakedness like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Except in this case there were four Eves and the Garden of Eden had been shredded. That aside, if you were going to wander naked anywhere, this was the place to be – until we were obliged to forage in the wreckage of the house that is.

We made our way back to the beach where we had discovered our stream amongst the rocks, and here bathed ourselves. It was a kind of ritual cleansing that we perhaps unconsciously felt we had to undertake, to remove any traces of our mistreatment and the ordeal of the storm. The cool water could not remove the physical bruises and welts, but it made us feel better. Nobody was talkative, which – for these women – was something unusual. We were all thinking our own thoughts and wondering what was ahead of us now, as we headed back along the sand and over the rocks to what we now thought of as Five Post Beach , with its pile of wreckage at the far end.

Today the water was millpond still, lapping at the sand as though it had been like this forever. The five of us sat down for a short while, just taking it in as the sun slowly cleared the eastern horizon and the promise of a hot and humid day made itself felt. Monica sat next to me and rested her hand on my shoulder. We gazed along the beach strewn with flotsam and debris, some from the forest and a lot from the house. In the shallows were bits of wood and an assortment of the more buoyant refuse from the house. Cushions, broken timbers, clothes… As the tide retreated it left the stuff stranded on the sand like a dog returning a stick to its master.

Eventually we stood up and walked slowly towards the house. Amidst the debris along the beach were all manner of bondage devices – a leather helmet, some ropes, a couple of ball gags lying like bizarre driftwood on the shore. I reckoned they must have come from the top level, where there had been a big trunk of the stuff beside the pool, which must have broken open in the collapse.

The main wreckage of the house was our first stop, reluctantly looking for bodies and for food and anything else we could salvage. The likelihood of us having to become latter day Robinson Crusoes had become very real. Monica and I were the only ones to climb through the wreckage, for the others remained handcuffed and we had no key to unlock the manacles. I tried smashing them with rocks, but the chains were made of toughened steel and the rocks disintegrated long before they made any impression on the metal.

The wreckage of the house was a massive tangle of girders and timber. Much of it had been submerged during the storm, but we found that in the collapse it had fallen away from the cliffs, leaving a small access under the shattered pool to what must have been the kitchen. Burrowing through the debris I found a bunch of tins and a broken deep freeze, though there was little in this that could be utilised. No doubt we would be the only castaways ever to live on caviar, however brief a time that might be.

Along the beach on either side of the house all manner of stuff had washed ashore after being sucked out of the house. While Monica and I began what might be a long task of excavating the wreckage, Helen and Mary went southwards along the beach while Leila went on the north side to beachcomb for anything that could be of use. We needed food, clothing and something with which to make fire. Ideally we also needed a satellite phone, but somehow I thought that was pushing our luck.

Monica and I found no bodies, though given the amount of wreckage, this wasn’t surprising. Bradley had chained the three girls to posts as the tide had started to come in, and an hour later they had seen the house collapse at the height of the storm but had seen no survivors.

I could feel some sadness over the deaths of Jade and Portia, but in regard to Bradley, I felt nothing but relief. He was a dangerous killer, and it had likely been only through the intervention of nature that we had been spared his ultimate revenge.

After a couple of hours it was starting to become too hot and we elected to withdraw south to the beach we had discovered on our first day, where the small stream was located. Monica and I were carrying as much as we could of our booty, leaving other stuff stacked in piles. There was timber for a fire, timber for building a shelter, articles of clothing, tinned food, cans of drink, ropes that could be used in a shelter and a bunch of various materials from linen to curtains that might provide us with shade.

We took what we could carry and headed back down the beach where Mary and Helen had been likewise gathering cast up things from the shoreline and putting it into piles. We had managed to salvage an assortment of clothes, but with their wrists still manacled, Mary and Helen could not readily put on any of the tops we had found. They now both wore short skirts topped with blouses worn like capes, done up around their necks. I didn’t mind, for I had no objection to breasts on display at any time. Monica wore a white shift dress that had a tear up one side but otherwise looked a passable fit. I had found a pair of baggy beach shorts that were a couple of sizes too big, but the drawstring made up for that, and with a baggy shirt on top of that I was starting to feel quite human again.

As we reached the rocks at the end of the beach, Monica said:

“Leila should have been back by now. I’ll take some clothes to her before she gets herself sunburnt. Maybe you can see about a permanent campsite, Steven.”

This was more like the Monica I knew, starting to take command, and venturing, little by little, into territory which we knew existed but were afraid to go ourselves. We did not know how long we might be here, nor how long our food and shelter would have to last. Monica was laying the groundwork by subtly referring to the potential permanence of our requirements.

As she walked back along the beach, I looked at Helen and Mary. Their clothing covered much of the results of their ill treatment at the hands of Portia and Bradley, but I could still see the flesh of their legs and breasts was bruised and marked with red weals. Other than that, in their otherwise washed and scrubbed state they could have been models for a glossy – if slightly risqué – magazine advertising a getaway holiday on an island paradise.

“What are you grinning at?” Mary asked, not unkindly.

“You two are the original Girl Fridays,” I told her. “I feel like a cross between Robinson Crusoe and Adam.”

“Don’t go getting too many ideas about repopulating the earth,” Helen warned with a smile. “Come on, let’s get this stuff back to camp.”

I took a couple of curtains and formed them into rudimentary sacks that the girls could carry over their shoulders, and loaded them up with as much useful stuff as they could handle, following along myself with some of the more awkward objects.

We set out an area beside the stream that was relatively flat and free from stones, and settled down to demolish some cans of drink, a number of which were now cooling in the water. That was when I started to feel the first stirrings of unease.

“Monica should have been back by now,” I said, half to myself. I looked at Mary, and a faint furrow of concern on her brow echoed my own thoughts. Maybe Leila had hurt herself – or Monica, for that matter. We were on an island without medical aid or contact with civilisation, and we could not afford to have a serious accident. As one we stood up and set out to retrace our steps.

We did not talk much on the way. Beyond the rocks, Five Post Beach was deserted. We skirted the base of the cliff between the collapsed house and the rock, emerging on to the north beach to find a similar scene of deserted sand. With the ebbing of the tide exposing the beach we could follow two sets of footprints, clearly seeing Leila’s as she wandered about picking up flotsam and relocating it to neat piles above the high tide line, moving methodically along the beach. Monica’s trail was more direct, cutting across Leila’s wanderings as she headed along the sand towards the low rocky promontory a hundred metres distant.

Again the beach was strewn with debris, which Leila had done a good job of sorting. I could not help but notice another rubber ball on a strap bobbing at the edge of the water, and a leather posture collar cast up on the sand still with a length of rope attached to the ring at the throat. Anybody arriving at this beach in a boat would be just a tad puzzled by the collection that the sea had returned.

At the end of the beach we halted abruptly, staring at a confused disturbance in the sand where it appeared that some sort of struggle had taken place. Monica’s footprints went over the top of whatever had happened, and I felt a cold sensation in the pit of my stomach. The girls knew it too.

“Somebody’s alive,” Mary whispered. “Ohhh shit…”

“And they’ve got Leila…” Helen added.

We stared at each other as the implication sank in. Someone – or maybe more than one – had survived the collapse of the house, and was now on the loose, hunting us. Leila, with her wrists already handcuffed, would have stood no chance at trying to fight them off. Monica appeared to have gone after them without calling us for backup.

“Whatever happens, we stay together from here on,” I said sternly. “If you get isolated, you’ll get picked off – that’s what they’ll try to do, whoever it is.” There was no argument from the manacled Mary and Helen, only concerned nods of agreement. They both knew the seriousness of the situation. Just when we thought we were at least free from the tortures we had undergone, suddenly the possibility was back again. My real fear was that it was Bradley who was loose. If, as had been mooted, he was ex-SAS, or at very least security in the oil industry, coming up against him now would be a very different proposition from in a fancy beach house. Even on his own, he would have survival and hunting skills here in what passed for jungle, and we would be the ones being hunted. If his background was as we thought, I had no illusions about being able to reverse his advantage.

With a new, grim determination we followed Monica’s footprints up the beach and into the undergrowth. It was evident that Leila had been somehow overpowered, for a further set of footprints were now clear, and they could only be Bradley’s. They dug in deep in the sand, which could well have been the result of carrying something heavy, like a helpless girl.

Much of the foliage near the beach had been stripped by the ferocity of the storm, and the floor of the forest was strewn with leaf litter and broken branches. I picked up a heavy piece of driftwood for a club. It was not difficult to spot the path through this that Bradley and Monica had taken, however, and we went forward very cautiously.

The trail took us inland, then gradually swung back towards the cliff-top behind the house, the ground rising slowly as we stealthily made our way through the undergrowth. The vegetation parted slightly such that there was an almost recognisable pathway through the bush which opened abruptly into a clearing. I stopped so suddenly that Mary bumped into me. I was aghast at the sight that lay before us.

In the middle of the clearing hung Jade Wong, her bound wrists held above her by a rope over the bough of a big banyan tree, her ankles stretched apart by ropes tied to saplings nearby on each side. Jade was naked, and, I suspected, dead. The most sinister thing about the whole scene was the cross of rope that ran up from between her legs to loop around her neck, while another series of turns constricted her torso above and below her breasts.

Her head hung down, her face hidden by a curtain of black hair partly held in place by the strap of a gag while one end of a heavy stick was jammed between the ropes in her crotch, the other pushed into the ground.

My heart was pounding as I looked around the clearing. There was no sign of Bradley, Leila or Monica. I motioned to Mary and Helen to stay where they were as I approached the semi-suspended figure. I had come across dead bodies before, not least in the course of our adventure in India, and I did not like them. As I got close to Jade I saw flies buzzing at her nose and knew I was looking at another body. Jade’s eyes were open, her lips stretched around a red rubber ball jammed between her teeth. The ropes were tight about her neck and as I circled the body I saw how a stout branch had been thrust into the knot at the back to tighten everything at once – neck ropes, crotch ropes, chest ropes.

All this had happened after Jade had suffered, however. One forearm was swollen and looked as though it was broken – perhaps a result of the collapse of the house. The rest of her body had also endured an ugly beating, before death had probably come mercifully. It was hard to know how much of the bruises, welts and scratches occurred in the house, but a large percentage had to have been from the hands of Bradley.

Bradley had clearly decided the disintegration of the house constituted a major shift in relationships, particularly after the five of us had escaped and he had nobody to play with. There was no sign of Portia. If she had perished in the collapse, then Bradley must see himself alone except for Jade and five prisoners on the loose. If she was injured, maybe he saw her as a liability, to be disposed of with a little ‘fun’ on the way. That would leave him a free agent to stalk and pick us off one by one.

I reckoned that there was more to it than this. Bradley had always been a loose cannon, a rogue trader waiting to run amok as soon as the mores imposed by the presence of Jade and Portia were no longer applicable. That was when Bradley could resume whatever perverted sexual crusade he was following – whatever plan the voices inside his head told him to pursue. Significantly, he could pursue each of us to the end, unworried by having to keep us alive once captured. His ultimate desire would surely be our individual and protracted deaths, based on whatever perverse logic drove him down this road.

There was nothing we could do for Jade. I didn’t want to be distracted from our pursuit of Monica and Leila, for the hunt had suddenly taken on a macabre and horrific turn. I hurried the two girls past the body and we resumed our tracking. We had only gone another fifty metres before there came the sound of voices – or at least of a voice. Bradley.

We emerged unexpectedly into another clearing, perhaps twenty metres across, dominated again by a banyan tree with its long vertical roots dropping from the canopy above.

“Ah, there you are,” Bradley said conversationally. He was sitting on the trunk of a fallen palm tree and looked up as we appeared. My stomach turned when I caught sight of Monica and Leila.

Leila was prone on the ground, possibly unconscious, with a rope knotted around the links of her handcuffs and then tied to her ankles so that she was bent over. She made no movement that I could see.

Monica, her white dress torn from her, was tied in a similar fashion to Jade, tight ropes binding her torso and running vertically from neck to crotch, her wrists tied together to an overhead branch. Like Jade, her head hung forward and she appeared motionless. For a sickening moment I thought that she, too, was dead, but I saw her head move slightly and thought that she may have been rendered unconscious.

Bradley had been blessed with all manner of bondage stuff washed up on the beach, and had probably done his own collection of it, along with other aids to survival, on the high tide ahead of us. He wore a pair of board shorts and looked at ease and confident in the situation, which was the complete opposite to the way I felt.

I started to make a move towards him, then stopped as he stood up and I saw he had a machete in his hand.

“Let her go!” I said, as confidently as I could.

Bradley just laughed.

“Why the hell should I? You’re all going to die anyway. It’s just a question of when and how painfully.”

There was no answer to a statement made as matter-of-factly as that. This was no Mexican stand-off, with two people each pointing a gun at each other. A Mexican stand-off implied each party had some sort of negotiating chip, but right then Bradley seemed to be keeper of the chips.

I took another step towards him.

“Uh-uh,” he cautioned, waggling the machete in my direction. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve done Monica’s ropes slightly differently from the others. Her noose is separate and – as you can see – goes over that branch above her and down to the palm tree here. It in turn has been bent over and tied to the root of the banyan. If I cut this rope tied to the banyan, the palm will spring back – quite violently, I assure you – taking Monica’s noose with it. I don’t know if it would break her neck or simply strangle her – it’s been a while since I’ve practised this sort of thing.

“Let me explain a little further. There’s just the six of us on the island. Portia’s under a pile of rubble; Jade was never going to make it anyway. In case you’re wondering about our survival we both got blown off the balcony as the house collapsed – thanks for asking. Jade landed partly on rocks, I hit the sand. Portia didn’t even get that far.

“So - that leaves five against one. No – I’m sorry, two of those are already captured here. It must be only three against one… Wait, two of those are girls with their hands cuffed together. Hmmm. What odds do we give now?” He was grinning with all the self-assurance of a man in charge who knows exactly what he wants and how he’s going to get it.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mary asked. I noticed she was moving very slowly off to my right. “What did the psychiatrist tell you when they did the compulsory evaluation, just before you skipped bail?”

“What?” Bradley seemed momentarily caught off guard. “What are you talking about?”

I looked at Mary, but she wasn’t looking at Bradley. Instead she was staring at her feet, moving still, ever so slowly, in wider arc, distracting Bradley from where Helen and I stood.

“You remember, Bradley. Dark Castle… when was it? Eighty-six? Eighty-seven? You nearly killed a girl with your over zealous little strangulation act. Was that where you first got a taste for it? They had you up on a charge of attempted murder, but subject to a psychiatric examination first. That’s when you slipped through their fingers, wasn’t it…”

Bradley wasn’t the only one dumb-struck by Mary’s words. Evidently something had come back to her in the time that she had suffered on the island.

Bradley turned towards her.

“Where did you here this?” he demanded.

“Does it matter?” Mary appeared icy calm. “Let’s just say I was there. I saw what happened to the girl and how she’ll be a vegetable for the rest of her life. You did well to leave the country at that point Bradley – though I suppose that’s not your real name, of course.” Mary was now ten metres equidistant from Bradley and myself, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Helen start to edge away from me to the left, probably trying to outflank Bradley on the other side.

As I saw it we had nothing to lose. Any promises we could extract for Monica and Leila’s well-being would be worth nothing. He was just as likely to kill them and come after us. Worst case, we all died. Best case, perhaps only Monica, unless we could come up with some last minute plan. Right then, as Mary sat down on a large rock, looking at least as composed as Bradley, I suspected she might just be getting under his skin.

“Was that when you went off to South America, Bradley? Guarding your oil executives and doing a bit of drug smuggling on the side? Life would be pretty cheap over there, I imagine. Why’d you come back here, huh? Get into a bit of trouble there as well? Decide you could afford to retire here in Oz? Enough in your account from your little deals on the side?” Mary was working herself up, on a roll, leaping from inspired guess to inspired guess and seeing them hit home in a way that Monica would have been proud of.

I was watching Mary but a movement next to Bradley caught my eye. Monica was stirring, and let out a low groan, slowly raising her head as she came to. Bradley seemed not to notice but continued to focus on Mary.

“That’s where the Burandanga came in, wasn’t it,” Mary shot at him. “Something new on the Australian scene, something better than a date rape drug, for the victim remained conscious. Robbery without violence, rape without memory – the perfect criminal drug.”

That shook Bradley, I could tell. It was something we should not have known about, and would not have known about had it not been for Monica’s uncle in the police force. Suddenly Bradley’s world had become just a little more complex than simply controlling the lives and deaths of five people on this remote island. Bradley looked hard at Mary, but said nothing. However, I noticed his brow furrowed, and his knuckles seemed to grip the machete more tightly.

“You must have satisfied your kinky little urges in Venezuela, or wherever you were. But of course things are always that much better at home, aren’t they, Bradley.” Mary was taunting him now. “You had to continue with your deadly little perversions, getting yourself off as your victims gasped their last, struggling to breathe while they climaxed again and again and you decided enough was enough. And dommes were so much more fun, weren’t they Bradley. Bringing them to a climax, forcing them to behave like pathetic little subbies as they pleaded for their lives under the whip. Once you had a taste for that you couldn’t stop. First there was Tara, then Catherine.”

“How did you know that?” Bradley growled, now clearly rattled.

Monica now raised her head fully and shook it slowly, as if to clear her vision. She said nothing, slowly becoming aware of what was going on around her, and I prayed she would not attract attention to herself.

“We know a lot about you, Bradley,” I joined in. “Why do you think we’re here? Do you think nobody knows where we are?”

“Bullshit!” he declared. “You don’t even know where you are yourselves!”

“Ever heard of tracking devices?”

“You’re bluffing. We went right through your luggage – no such thing. It was all dumped at sea in any case.”

“Ever heard of micro-implants?” I continued, trying not to stare at Monica who was looking around at her predicament and had realised her vulnerability to the noose. I saw her shift her weight slightly, straightening up so that her bound hands above her head managed to grip the noose rope.

“You’re bluffing,” Bradley sneered. “When you’re all buried here or fed to the sharks, nobody will be any the wiser. Oh, they’ll find poor Portia under the wreckage, and Jade will have been lost in the storm, but hey, that’s the way things go.”

“And you will have got your kicks by then, right?” This was from Helen. “You’ll have got yourself off with five more murders.” She paused and stared hard at him. “Have you ever considered that your brain is defective, that you are a damaged human being who should be locked away from other human beings?”

Bradley only laughed.

“What are you, a shrink?”

“No, I’m a lawyer, and I’ve seen enough scumbags to recognise another when it comes crawling out from under a stone,” she said acidly.

I saw Monica’s hands move and grip the noose rope, her eyes meeting mine in one of those moments of understanding that we frequently have. She nodded imperceptibly and while Bradley was momentarily preoccupied with Helen, I shuffled a few inches forward, trying to disguise the movement.

“So what was with the church, Brad?” Helen pursued. “Wasn’t taking a life sufficient, such that it had to be done in a church?”

Bradley seemed to have overcome his initial surprise and gave a supercilious laugh.

“You people seem to know an awful lot – not that it will help you unless you can send a message back from beyond! I bet that caused the cops some head scratching. They think they’re so smart sometimes. They get their fancy psychologists in, create a criminal profile… I bet they had be all sussed out as some Satanist or else some liberal god-farer who hated the B and D set and who was out on a crusade to cleanse society of such low life. I love fucking with their minds!”

That was when I decided to make a move.

Bradley was about ten paces from me, and I knew there were two things Bradley might do. He would either go for the rope holding the palm tree and Monica’s noose, which would give me a second’s distraction, or he would defend himself against me. If he was indeed SAS, either one might not be a particularly favourable option for me.

At that moment I thought of Tara and Catherine, and the heartache their deaths had caused. Perhaps I should have thought of Jade as well, not to mention the torture he had imposed on all of us. Tara and Catherine was quite enough for me, and with a yell that surprised me, I launched myself at Bradley.

Bradley must have seen the options as well, like a chess player who looks several moves ahead, and he knew that his best chance against three people was divide and conquer, and to do that he needed a diversion. He had not seen Monica grip the noose rope, but knew that the distraction that would come with Monica’s likely demise was there for the taking. As I charged he swung the machete against the rope and sheared it with one blow.

The palm sprang back, hauling on the rope looped snugly around Monica’s neck. I didn’t know whether Mary and Helen had seen Monica’s surreptitious preparation but I suspected she would be their first priority whatever the outcome. Monica gasped and gripped the rope as it tightened and pulled her arms even tauter. She took the brunt of the force with her arms, but the rope was pulled tight around her throat.

I was already on my way to clash with Bradley at that moment, concentrating to the point of not seeing any further than my target. I had to trust in the girls to see themselves to safety. My only focus was on Bradley as he recovered from the machete swing to face me.

My momentum was such that there was no squaring off. I was going to smash into him with everything I had, and in this case I had made the unforgivable cricket decision of deciding which shot I was going to play before the ball was bowled.

I still had my solid driftwood branch, and knew my only hope was to disable or incapacitate Bradley in the first rush. If he got in a hand-to-hand with me I knew I would be done for, if the stories of his SAS training were true.

That was why I let fly at his knee cap at the moment before we clashed. I swung the piece of timber like a softball bat and felt a sharp cracking sound a split second before we collided. As we did so he was swinging the machete and I caught a glimpse of it descending while I tried not to loose focus of the targeted knee.

As his knee cap shattered Bradley let out a piercing scream and dropped the machete which crashed into my forearm as I tried to protect myself. I felt a searing pain as the blade sliced into my flesh, but the mental picture of Tara and Catherine were still motivation for me and I was caught up in a bloody rage the like of which I had never felt before. The girls had vanished from my perception in the red haze of madness that had dropped over my eyes and all I could think about was beating this bastard to a state where he could never cause harm to anyone ever again.

After he had collapsed to the ground I must have hit him three or four further times. I was incensed with his arrogance, his contempt for human life, particularly the women I had known and whom he had taken away. In my blind fury I was hitting and hitting the senseless form until manacled arms dragged me away and I realised I was crying.

“Bastard…bastard…” I was whispering as Mary took me aside and held me as best she could. This meant putting her manacled arms around me and holding me to her in a most un-Mary-like gesture, but one that I knew came from the heart, whatever she might suggest later.

I felt all the anger sudden drain out of me and could do nothing but hug her, feeling the soft warmth of her bare breasts against my chest. I was unaware of Helen untying Monica and Leila, who had now also come around.

We sat huddled together under the banyan tree for a long time, Monica and I with our arms around the others in a display of solidarity, relief and gratitude that we found difficult to put into words. Monica and Leila were nursing large bumps on their heads, but that at least was better than Bradley. His neck was broken, and the reality was slowly dawning on me that I had killed a man, taken another human life whatever little worth it might have been considered to have.

We carried the bodies of Jade and Bradley back to the cliff top overlooking the remains of the house, and buried them as best we could using sheets we had found and bits of wood to dig the grave. It was a slow and tedious process, but the best we could manage. For the purposes of our collective story – if the need for such ever arose – we had found Jade and Bradley in the wreckage and had done the only decent thing. Whether we encountered Portia’s body in the near future was an unknown, and I for one was not looking forward to too close an exploration of the debris.

The sun was setting when we returned to our little camp beside the stream and dined on cold tinned food that we extracted with a knife I had found in our early explorations. We had also found several bottles of wine which had survived the collapse by being in a wooden case, and we felt they were appropriate to the occasion.

That said, none of us were in a celebratory mood. We had seen the deaths of two people and while we had escaped our immediate confinement, three of our number remained in handcuffs and more importantly we had no real idea where we were or how to get off the island.

Once again we were castaways facing an uncertain future.

* * *

19.03.06

story continues in Monica's Justice 19 - Captives of Shark Island

o0o