The Abduction of Monica 3: The Prisoners
by Richard Alexander (Gromets Plaza)
(story continues from The Abduction of Monica 2: Taken! - Mary's Story)
It was late Tuesday afternoon when Paul Bowden arrived at Bilboes. Paul was Monica’s uncle by marriage, now widowed and – according to Monica – he had known her since she was very young, when he had married her aunt. He was a big, balding man in his late fifties, with a deceptively easy-going manner. I had met him a couple of times before, in a previous incidence of Monica going missing. Most significantly, Paul was a Detective Inspector with CID.
He listened intently as I explained the disappearance of Monica and Mary, almost 24 hours previously, now. We were sitting in Monica’s study, accompanied by Trish and Jillian. Somehow I seemed to have become de facto Second in Command of Bilboes all of a sudden, as I found myself explaining the circumstances leading up to the disappearance.
There was no God-given Divine Right Succession Plan within Bilboes. Jillian helped Monica with the accounts and book keeping, whereas Monica relied on Trish, Mary and myself when she wanted to discuss important issues or matters that affected the team or the business as an entity. At the risk of sounding conceited, I think Monica confided in me most of all, though at times I privately wondered what use my thoughts and observations really were. Maybe it was the Mars – Venus thing. Perhaps it was also a point of difference in an otherwise all-female household.
Not for the first time I now found myself picking up the reins abruptly dropped by Monica.
Jillian - blonde, tall and athletic – sat on the leather sofa with her legs curled up beneath her, a pensive look on her pretty face. She was possibly the smartest and most sensible of the girls, but also unassuming and without pretensions.
Trish was likewise blessed with common sense, as well as the ability to use tools like a guy, and together we had spent many happy hours experimenting in my tool shed. With a shock of auburn hair and a husky laugh, her British Columbia upbringing had stood her in good stead through times of adversity. It was now that I needed the presence of both of these girls in a situation that left me with a cold, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was as though I was standing at the top of a cliff, shuffling closer to the edge, afraid of what I might find if I looked over the precipice.
Paul Bowden nodded as we explained the recent presence of the Russians. He was familiar with the workings and activities of Bilboes, but the mention of the Russians seemed to quicken his interest. He quizzed us extensively, and we retrieved the various sections of CCTV footage that were in the system showing the arrival, departure - and some of the activities - of Dimitri and Ivana in the playrooms.
“We’ve had our eye on these two for some time,” Paul explained after we had looked at the footage. “They’re both known to us – part of the new Russian mafia that’s mainly been operating out of Sydney and Melbourne. These two had dropped out of sight for a while, though, I believe. I’m not that close to it but I have some contacts.”
“So what do we do now?” Jillian asked.
“We’re making the assumption that Monica and Mary’s disappearance is linked to these Russians – though that’s probably a reasonable supposition at this stage. That gives us the vehicle licence and description from your CCTV and whatever else we can dig up from the Grand Heritage Hotel. There’s also an obvious question but I have to ask it: Has there been any contact from anybody that might indicate some sort of a ransom demand?”
“Ransom? Do you think that’s what this might be?” Trish asked.
Paul scratched his head. “Frankly, Trish, I have no idea. I have the impression that Monica has been mixed up in stuff she shouldn’t be involved with. Perhaps it’s no fault of hers. It seems to me that sometimes her past creeps up on her and surprises all of us. Would I be right?”
Trish murmured agreement.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I thought, for - with the exception of the debacle on Shark Island (See Monica’s Justice) - Paul had not been part of some of our more outrageous or hare-brained adventures, most of which had taken place outside Australia.
“We have specialists on these matters – I’ll talk to my colleagues in Sydney and let you know any developments in finding Monica’s car or the other BMW. Rest assured we will have all our resources on the job.”
* * *
I suppose we couldn’t have asked for much more than that. Jill made a bit of a fuss about what else might be done, but in reality, an All Points Bulletin was the best we could hope for. The fact that this had happened to Monica before was in some odd way reassuring, while at the same time very disturbing. We had emerged from the Shark Island affair by the skin of our teeth. I did not know if we could be as lucky a second time around.
* * *
I was awoken the next morning by Jill banging on my door before the sun had even risen. All of those on the Bilboes staff sleep in a very comfortable detached bedroom annex at the rear of the place. It’s kind of like a little motel, with six large bedrooms with ensuites in a row with a balcony along the front, barely 20 paces across the lawn from the back verandah of Bilboes. Only Monica lived in the main house, upstairs in a separate bedroom above her study.
Jill didn’t wait for me to answer. She was in my room as I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. We didn’t exactly bother locking the doors, here.
“Steven, come and look at the email! It’s about Monica!” Jill wore a pale peach-coloured strappy dress that might have graced a tennis court, for it revealed all her tanned legs and arms. Her voice was taut with anxiety and she looked on the verge of tears. I didn’t bother quizzing her, but threw on a Japanese robe to cover my nakedness and followed her outside. While we respected each other’s privacy, it had to be said that there was little, if anything, that we hadn’t seen of each others’ bodies in the course of our time together at Bilboes. Modesty was not really a big thing for us.
I followed Jill across the grass and up the half dozen steps at the back, then through the kitchen, down the hall and into Monica’s study. Jill regularly dealt with the electronic correspondence to Bilboes, and it was hardly surprising that she had been up before dawn. I had taken forever to get to sleep as I tried to rid myself of the thought of Monica and Mary being abducted – or worse. All manner of scenarios had played through my head – the possible reasons and people that might be behind their disappearance.
Monica and I went back a long way – not just to high school. Since my time at Bilboes our relationship had become... well, considerably more than boss and employee. Sure, we’d been intimate not infrequently in the course of our work and during a few adventures that had taken place. Monica and I were nothing if not competitive, and every now and again it seemed that we just couldn’t help ourselves in trying to put one over the other. I had lost count of how many times I had taken advantage of a bound and helpless Monica, just as I must confess to succumbing to her own wiles on a number of occasions.
But it went deeper than that. We had stood on the deck of a boat approaching Macau as we sought to rescue the others, as we had similarly held hands in the dusk before the Taj Mahal contemplating an equally unlikely quest. If I sat back and analysed things, I could probably identify half a dozen instances where we had saved each other from potential disaster. I had asked myself not a few times if Monica and I were destined for something special, and if fate had brought us together for a greater reason than had already come to pass. Yet always I kept falling short. Monica had been part of my life for too long, as had all the girls in Bilboes. Somewhere the position of being friends had blurred into a sort of incestuous family, with the ‘love’ word lurking in the background.
I had slept with all the girls, I have to say. I loved them all but Monica had always been special for me, as for the others. Monica had a charisma and charm that bred a fierce loyalty regardless of the odd misjudgement. We would follow her to the ends of the earth, and indeed, had come close to doing that on several occasions - ‘ends’ being somewhat determined by where you started from, naturally. The fear we now felt for her, and of course for Mary, was manifest in the jumpiness of Jill and myself as we now stared at this email message and the attachment that accompanied it.
The message was brief, from a hotmail address.
“Monica Armstrong has met her Nemesis;
Mary Ramirez will bear witness to the just punishment that will be inflicted.
The punishment will last a hundred days and nights.
Monica and Mary will not.”
It was signed:
“Nemesis: The Goddess of Retribution and Vengeance”.
The attachment was a RealVideo file ominously labelled “Day 1”.
“Have you looked at it?” I asked Jill quietly.
“No... I was scared to, by myself. Even now I don’t want to. Who is doing this?” she murmured in the silence of the study.
“We have to see what this is about,” I said gently, placing my hand over hers resting on the mouse, and clicking on the attachment.
“Oh dear God,” whispered Jill as the scene became visible.
It was a close-up of Monica, filmed from in front of her face. The most noticeable things were the iron ring gag locked in her mouth, forcing it open, and the dark smudges where her mascara had run. She was looking directly at us – so close it seemed we could almost touch her, that she would have been able to hear us if we’d spoken. Her raven hair was matted as though she had been sweating but someone had smoothed it into place for the camera. It hung limply under the iron bars running from the O-ring around each side of her head to where the two arms passed through the holes in a further piece stretching across the back of Monica’s neck. Allen screws secured the arms to the neck piece such that even with her hands free – and at this stage I didn’t doubt that they were secured - Monica would not have been able to detach the iron contraption from her head or remove the O-shaped piece from behind her teeth. A line of drool slid down from her lower lip and was followed down by the camera.
The next thing we saw was the collar, and if I hadn’t subconsciously already reached the conclusion, I knew at that moment that we were dealing with a bondage aficionado. This was the Martin E-collar – a massively heavy aluminium collar that incorporated shock devices, in much the same way as a canine training collar. It was almost 6 centimetres high and nearly 3 centimetres thick, made up of seven layers of 8mm aluminium riveted together. It was very expensive, and anybody who knew about this stuff – much less owned one – was into restraint in a major way. We were dealing with a very experienced professional here. While this perhaps did not surprise me, I knew that it was at least a clue as to who might have kidnapped Monica, for it now appeared that kidnapping was what this was all about.
My stomach turned cold at the sight of Monica staring into the camera. Her blue eyes were watery and looked on the verge of tears. I had no idea where she was or what she had gone through to get there, but I could surmise that it had been frightening and at very least, unpleasant. I felt my chest tightening as Jill stifled a sob beside me.
The camera moved back and we could see the rest of Monica’s predicament. She was naked, kneeling on a small steel table, perhaps half a metre square. We could not help but notice that her position was the classic submissive position, sitting back on her haunches, knees apart, her hands spread palm up on each thigh. I came to the next stage of my understanding at that moment, when I realised that whoever had created this little scenario had done it very carefully. There were messages here that we were meant to pick up. They knew it would be going to the police, and they were confident enough in their hideaway that they could tease and taunt us with any number of clues that they knew we would fuss over but ultimately find useless.
Monica’s submissive kneeling position was not simply a demonstration of the obvious fact that Monica was their prisoner. It was a demeaning, humiliating position for a Domme, particularly one of Monica’s confidence and stature. If they intended to torment her for a hundred days – God forbid! – it did not take much to guess that this might be the beginning of a long and painful degradation that would focus as much on Monica’s psyche and will as on her body.
It was obvious that Monica’s submissive kneeling position was not one of choice. Her hands were held apart and palm-up by a set of small bilboes, the iron bar about half a metre long passing through iron straps that secured Monica’s wrists to it and prevented her twisting them around. She was unable to raise her wrists or rise from the table because of a short chain securing the centre of the bilboes bar to the table between her knees.
The camera moved around for a side view, showing the erect stance Monica was forced into. While a slave would normally be obliged to keep her head bowed, in this case the weight and bulk of the collar gave Monica no choice but to try to keep her head erect. I had read about the Martin collars, and knew that this particular one weighed about two kilos, and did not look very comfortable. No doubt her captor had directed her to stare straight ahead, for she remained motionless, even as the camera revealed more of the ordeal she was suffering.
The camera took in the swelling profile of her breasts, with erect nipples and the small specially made stainless steel padlocks through the piercing. Monica’s breasts were one of her best assets, being firm and uplifted exactly as nature had intended with no artificial help. The adornment of her dark nipples with the padlocks was something I adored, and she wore them occasionally just to please me, I knew. The fact that they remained untouched at this stage gave me a horrid certainty that her torture was only just beginning, and that those lovely breasts would soon become part of whatever sick plan her captor had in mind. What we were seeing was just the beginning.
A bead of sweat rolled down the side of her left breast, was picked up by the camera and followed down across her ribs, slowly curving inward to a black iron belt locked tightly around her waist and extending in a wide triangle down between her legs. I recognised a chastity belt when I saw it, and knew that such a belt could be a barrier to inserting objects in a woman’s orifices, or in this scenario it could just as easily be an obstacle to the removal of mechanical devices. Instinct told me that Monica was fully plugged with two such devices.
The inspection continued – a vicarious and horribly protracted viewing that made me tense and unconsciously grip Jill’s hand tighter.
The camera showed that Monica’s feet overhung the rear of the table. Here her ankles were joined by another pair of bilboes, with a short bar this time, locking them close together. I was sure the symbolism of two pairs of bilboes was anything but coincidental, given the name Monica had chosen for this house. It was another way for the abductor to show his dominance over Monica – and us.
The most painful thing of all was revealed a moment later when we saw that Monica was not in fact kneeling directly on the surface of the table, but rather on three wooden dowels, about the thickness of a tennis racquet handle. One ran under her knees, another across her shins, and the third just below her ankles. With her entire weight supported on these six points, the pain must have been extreme after only a very short time. I wondered how long she had been there. Was it just for the benefit of the video, or had she been forced to endure this punishment for hours?
Then I saw that there were in fact two further dowels placed at right angles under the three. While this did not directly impose further pain, it imposed a further difficulty. It was like balancing on two rollers in that any sudden movement might send her slipping off the side of the table. It explained why she remained absolutely motionless, and why I could see the first uncontrollable muscle tremors in her thighs and calves.
The camera moved slowly around behind Monica, and we could see the red weals on the soles of her feet and across her buttocks. I had the awful thought that soon all her beautiful flesh could be criss-crossed with the marks of whip and cane, and that her captor was pacing her punishment to ensure it was as protracted and extensive as possible.
I had become so focussed on Monica’s fate that I had forgotten about Mary. Whoever was doing the filming was about to rectify that omission, as the camera slowly panned through a hundred and eighty degrees. I had the chance at the same time to take more notice of the rough hewn wooden floor and the industrial barefaced brick construction of the walls. It looked like an old factory of some sort, or a deserted warehouse. The room was perhaps ten metres square, with a rusty steel door in one wall and a series of high windows along another, some with broken glass panes, others just grimy with age. The place was well lit, probably for the benefit of the camera, and I could not tell where the light was coming from.
My observations were forgotten at the sight of Mary.
She was secured to a square steel post, the bottom of which was attached to a rectangular steel plate bolted to the floor, and the top of which seemed to rise to a ceiling hidden from sight. It had been drilled through with holes the diameter of a finger, over its length, such that bolts or shackles could be readily anchored at any position.
Like Monica, Mary was naked, and was standing on her tiptoes as the camera centred on her. She was gagged in a similar fashion to Monica, except that rather than an O-ring gag, hers was in the form of an iron rod that bent inside her mouth in the form of a ‘U’ – sufficient to keep the tongue depressed, and to mangle any attempt at speaking rather than stifle all sound.
Also, like Monica, Mary wore a Martin E-collar, connected by a chain at the back to a bolt passing through the steel post. Her hands had been cuffed with rigid steel cuffs behind the post, then pushed upwards and outwards by a steel bar about half a metre long connected to the cuffs and then bolted to the post. The collar attachment at her neck meant that Mary could not bend over as was normally the case with this form of strappado, nor could she twist her arms because of the rigidity of the cuffs. It was a most stringent and unrelenting position imposed by the steel restraints, but became worse as we followed the camera down her lean body.
Steel cuffs were locked on to her ankles and connected by a short hobble, but I could see these were simply there to make a point, or maybe for control after the filming was complete. Perhaps the most onerous aspect of Mary’s confinement was the U-shaped steel saddle that was positioned between her legs. It was only 5 centimetres wide, supported by a couple of steel struts from where it was bolted to the post, but it was evident that there were two large plugs fastened to it, which Mary could accommodate front and back only with difficulty. She could ease the penetration by standing on her tiptoes, but that placed extra strain on her neck and arms...
The camera zoomed in on her face, at the half-closed hazel eyes, the black hair plastered down on her forehead, and the ribbon of saliva that hung down to her breasts. Perspiration stood out on her brow and she was breathing heavily. The camera then moved away to a small table between the two prisoners. On top of it was a piece of paper with a print out that said “DAY ONE” in large letters. Below it was a small digital clock with the time at 9.18. I did not know if this was the actual time that the filming had been done, or the duration that poor Monica and Mary had been in the restraints.
Then the screen went blank.
* * *
14.05.09
story continues in The Abduction of Monica 4: The Psychic Detective
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