What The Papers Say - The Word On The Street

(Abduction, kidnapping, imprisonment, psychological bondage and enforced weight gain discipline by dietary control, backed by corporal punishment)

The story had made all of the regional locals - headlining in most - and claimed many a column inch in many of the national papers; the news was sad, notable, but not earth shaking. The court’s finding was hardly unexpected under the circumstances. That a girl answering her description had been seen getting off that very train and at the station closest to that beach, being merely two stops on from her departure point, only served to add foundation to the hypothesis. Indeed, were the circumstances really so extraordinary? Where was the mystery, the intrigue, the case for inquiry? In truth there was none.

The clothes found were definitely the girl’s own. The beach was notorious, the current treacherous, unforgiving and loath to relinquish possession of those that might venture too far out. The neatly folded lonely and prophetically-final little stack she had left behind on the sand had been photographed in situ, the image viewed by the court in due course; the pile sat in isolation just above the high water line, a single handwritten sheet of A4 fluttering in the breeze and pinned upon the summit by a single apple-sized smooth grey rock.

The garments having been identified by hospital staff and the girl’s aunt, and traces of her DNA having been detected, there was little room to doubt their ownership - and further forensic evidence supported the suggested timeline.

The letter, too, rang true; there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the hand, nor, according to the graphologist, as to the writer’s distress, desperation and intention.

The doctor knew well of the court’s machinations of course; she had attended the hearing, having been called forth as an expert witness as to the girl’s likely mental state. She recalled clearly the expert testimony of the hand-writing expert, or at least his summing up of it:

‘... and in conclusion I have little doubt that the writer is a young woman in a state of considerable psychological distress and desperation and that her determination to take her own life is both clear and genuine. In my opinion, this letter before me goes beyond a cry for help; it embodies within it a tortured soul and one anticipating an imminent release.’

Of course the coroner queried the expert’s certainty as to the author’s identity but more as a matter of procedure than through any real doubt; after all, two other handwriting experts had previously concurred.

In the end he had little course other than to accept that here, laid out before him, was clear evidence of a psychologically disturbed woman’s sad demise. Here were the last pleading, tragic words of a long-suffering, tortured and twisted soul - the last thoughts of Lavinia Vitesse.

All of the psychological reports that the court received were consistent; two from psychologists working at the hospital and one from Dr Ecclestone herself in her role as the girl’s long-term therapist.

The testimonies were heard from both the girl’s stepmother and a woman with whom the girl had boarded over the last six months prior to admitting herself to the clinic. The latter, a friend of the family and possessed of no little psychiatric nursing experience herself, was particularly erudite. Both painted a clear and instantly recognisable picture of a troubled and disturbed young woman on a downward spiral of deteriorating mental health.

In the absence of any suggestion of, or motive for, foul play and taking into consideration the need for careful management of her late father’s estate - in particular the family’s rather complex business interests, that were to have come under the girls control in a matter of months - it was ordered that in the best interests of all concerned a verdict of misadventure be returned. The way had thus been left clear for the stepmother’s lawyers to lay the foundations of a claim to the estate on her behalf and - in the absence of any other blood relatives - gain full control over the family’s financial and business affairs with the minimum of complication and uncertainty. After all, many people’s jobs were at stake in a swathe of companies spread across the county if the upheaval that had afflicted the boardroom in recent times had gone on any longer. Any other verdict, any further uncertainty, and there would have been economic consequences across the county but particularly locally in this, the county town.

In almost every conceivable way this verdict had been best for everyone, any other would have been irresponsible. Whether it had been as advantageous for Lavinia Vitesse herself was unlikely, but the consequences would lie unseen by the courts now in any case. As far as the day-to-day running of the research unit was concerned, the main point was that the hospital had been exonerated of any suggestion of neglect of duty or responsibility.

Better, at least from Dr Ecclestone’s perspective, was the press’s unwitting collusion in their work; she could not have wished better armament than she had been arrayed with in those columns, headlines, photographs and editorials - all so obviously genuine. It would mean circumventing the basic restrictions of the protocol of course, to allow a girl reading matter. There were many considerations; care would have to be taken to ensure that anything likely to infer any particular date and time be edited out, but not so as to jeopardise the inherent authenticity in what was, after all, the genuine article - in both senses of the word. She would want nothing subtracted, nor be allowed to intrude, that might detract from the impact; she expected from it nothing less than a blow to the solar plexus, a winding-punch indeed, if not a knockout, a veritable coup de grace.

She glanced up at her monitor, at the group of uniformed schoolgirls at their desks, an anachronistic confection of gymslips, ribbons and pigtails. One girl in particular caught her eye.

It took an expert eye indeed to still perceive identity amidst such a perfection of uniformity, but those huge deep-violet eyes would always single that girl out for extra attention; they fairly begged one to administer the strap or the cane. The face was more rounded now of course, there were just the beginnings of a double chin to show for the dietician’s efforts, but it still seemed to cry out for a spanking - perhaps even more so, now that she had put on a little weight. That trim, tight little dancer’s bottom of hers would be more rounded now, more elastic, more resilient, all the more pleasurable to mark with few swift cuts of a nice thin whippy cane.

For a moment she considered then, decision made, Anne Ecclestone began gathering up the newspaper pages she had chosen from within the little categorised heaps laid out across her desktop; the secretary could collate them later. She made a note that where possible they be left in context on the page they had come from; they would be all the more genuine, all the more convincing for it. She glanced back up at the flickering computer screen, wondering what hope or expectation that girl, or any of those girls, might still harbour; she was the psychologist, she knew what she was doing, but there her empathy failed her. She could never know how it felt, but would she want to? Would anybody want to? And yet it excited her to imagine what her charges were going through. In time these newspapers, these cuttings, would fade but how much sooner her patient’s hope now?

Lavinia Vitesse was gone now; her life was not unlike those cuttings, ephemeral, fading from the public’s memory just as those photographs would fade in the sunlight. That name would fade in time on the public’s lips and eventually, given the proper tutelage, even in the mind of her patient; she would see to it that it would.

Yet again the doctor let her eyes rove across the array of pasty-faced teenagers filling the screen; such a shame, such a pretty girl. She deserves to be so much more than just another mental patient, but, long term, what other prognosis can there be,?. What that girl really, truly, needs, the poor little thing, is access to much more by way of mental stimulation. She needs real learning not the unending hours of tedious rote-learnt nonsense she is presently submerged in; it was stifling her personality, suffocating her creative potential. A young woman of her age needs to exercise that brain of hers to a far, far greater extent. As with muscle tissue so it is with the brain; deprived of usage there is the tendency to atrophy, to become flaccid, lazy and - over time - reduced in function.

She was toying with her thoughts now, playing a private little game of ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’, indulging herself in a twisted make-believe pretence: That poor girl, if only there was the funding available, then perhaps, psychologically speaking, she wouldn’t be deteriorating so rapidly. Perhaps then her brain wouldn’t be turning to mush.

As if in ironic self-mockery, her full ruby-glossed lips had taken on a rueful pout; her true emotion lay locked away, expressed only in the heavily-rapid hammering of her heart. In truth her work was generously funded indeed but there were stipulations applied in certain, special, cases; stipulations seemingly designed to ensure the very outcome she was presently predicting for that one particular girl up there on the screen.

Such thought processes as these, although seemingly contradictory, to the doctor represented a valuable form of self-therapy; after all, she had as many spectres peering over her shoulder as anyone else, more than most if truth be known. She played these mental games on a regular basis, whenever she felt the need to re-examine her motivations, whenever her personal gratification became sullied with the twinges of guilt; in this manner she had constructed, within her own mind, the most sacrosanct and private of confessionals wherein to discuss her sins.

The truth was that she had that girl’s path mapped out from day one. She had put together a program, breathtaking in its elegance, to deal with her. It was to be a subtly choreographed curtailment of the girl’s freedom; she was to be taken through a series of finely-graduated steps, each more oppressive than the last, each imposition that little bit more constraining, that little bit more tiresome.

It was a path she had delighted in guiding the girl down. All the while testing her, observing her, finding pleasure in the girl’s progression, taking satisfaction, on occasion physically, in curbing that young woman’s independent spirit - the more so when so subtly achieved as to have virtually entirely evaded her subject’s perception at the time.

There could be no denying it; each freedom denied the girl, each constraint placed upon her behaviour, built upon that level of satisfaction, brought with it thrill upon thrill upon thrill, each electric in its intensity. This was pleasure beyond the appreciation of most, albeit most would condemn such as twisted at best, if not downright perverted. To the doctor, though, the acknowledgement of what she had done to that girl, what she was presently doing to her, brought only peace and comfort - in her own mind at least she could invoke all sorts of justifications to support her actions, no matter how unethical, how distasteful they might appear to the outside observer.

Of course, she didn’t have to worry about any overseeing committee or outside interference - whatever went on here went on behind impenetrable, high walls and was safeguarded by the strictest security. Whether the power that freedom had brought had twisted her ideals or merely awakened some diabolical genie long slumbering in a remote, dark barren recess of her soul is conjecture - perhaps the corruption of her judgement had been inevitable, even deliberately engineered. Whatever the truth of the matter, she had convinced herself that somehow she represented the lesser of two evils, that she had the best interests of the girl at heart. After all, there were others out there whose sole interest in the girl’s future lay only in that they should not be encumbered by her, that she should be out of their way - and they didn’t care what it entailed to be free of her and the potential of her interfering in their schemes. What harm might they visit upon her to achieve their aims?

She had met the woman who was the girl’s stepmother and legal guardian and knew many of the others involved in the girl’s background - she well recognized that these were ruthless people, people who would have few qualms in acting, if need be, to ensure the continuation of their comfortable lifestyle. She knew, also, that the stepmother, in particular, had had doubts when she had first put forth her peculiarly-unique alternative solution - the woman would have far preferred more certain... shall we say...more permanent measures, despite the obvious risks and potential repercussions.

That woman had taken a hell of a lot of convincing; she had no knowledge of the power of suggestion and little confidence in ‘all that waffle about psychological methods’. And she had made it quite clear at the time that she had no interest in what she termed ‘psychobabble’. Her interest lay only in the outcome, only in the good doctor’s assurances that her own life would be swept clear of any unwanted ‘complications’. It had taken a detailed tour of the clinic’s security arrangements to finally sway her.

It was in order to satisfy, reassure and placate that woman that such stringent methods were being bought to bear on this particular girl now; methods that were strictly speaking outside the scope of any of the experimental protocols presently in operation. She was more than happy to provide a disciplined, structured and secure environment for the girl, to provide feedback, written reports and videos if necessary - but even with her predilections, it was proving difficult to keep up with the girl’s stepmother’s demands. In order to placate the woman she found herself seemingly constantly reassessing the situation. She was forever tweaking the girl’s regime, constantly obliged to make ever more stringent her charge’s discipline and to devise ever tighter security and ever closer supervision arrangements for her - and still that woman wasn’t satisfied.

Not that any of this lay outside the doctor’s own interest in the girl of course; it was not so much that there had been any major deviation from her planned course of action, so much as from time to time certain way-points had been reached somewhat ahead of schedule. She was of the opinion that a less hurried approach would have allowed the girl to have reached a greater level of acceptance of her circumstances and limitations at each point before progressing further. With an eye to the future she had planed for the girl and what she wanted to achieve with her, she favoured a more gradual approach, progressively bringing the young woman more and more under her control and that of the clinic, letting her dependency grow naturally and her aspirations to wither in their own time. The final destination would be the same but the effect on the girl would be more thorough, more complete - her eventual docility would be assured.

The doctor had not been entirely the sole instigator behind it all, nor would she be the sole arbiter of the girl’s fate, but nevertheless the girl’s future did now effectively lie in her hands - at least for the foreseeable future. She would see to it that this particular young lady’s future would be devoid of influence or substance much beyond the confines of a suitably secure hospital ward or psychiatric institution, much as she was already quite thoroughly incarcerated in. It was a future towards which it was up to her to guide the girl, gently, ever so gently, so as, when the time came, her charge’s acceptance would be total and complete. She should be spared the anguish, pain and frustration of denial, of the belief that the curtailment of her freedom was somehow unjustifiable, unnecessary and avoidable. Instead the girl should be encouraged to see the locked-ward as home and hanker after little else - she should come to savour that sense of security, that sense of dependency and belonging. And she would, the good doctor would see to it - it was all in the girl’s best interests, after all.

The cursor hovered over the logging off icon, for a moment she paused as if about to change her mind then stabbed decisively down on the mouse button with a finality that summed up the guilty post-pleasure emptiness she felt inside.

She was still breathless, she was hot, sticky, her usually immaculate leather skirt lay now dishevelled, ruched still in brown folds across her upper thighs. Her left hand, stray silvery glutinous strings still dangling on and between her fingers, grasped and tugged at the twisted tangle of fabric hanging between her legs. Expensive ivory satin knickers incongruously hung there in sodden shame, ungainly twisted around fine-denier dark-tan pantyhose, the slickly saturated crotch of each seemingly reluctant to release the other from its sticky embrace as if parting lovers.

Standing, kicking off her shoes and pulling off her under-things, stuffing the latter unceremoniously in her handbag, having giving up the struggle and having in any case snagged a fingernail in the leg of the pantyhose, she smoothed down her skirt, doing her best to iron out the horizontal rows of wrinkles and creases from the otherwise smooth leather. Her hair was plastered across her forehead and down the left side of her face, her cheeks still rosy with heat, her perspiration still trickling, viscous and sticky with salt. She was a mess and she knew it; she would have to take a shower and quickly. She glanced down at her watch, at the little diamond studs that indicated the hour positions; half past one, she was due to give a lecture at three, she would have to get moving.

Slipping her now naked feet back into her brown high-heeled court shoes she made towards the door, conscious of her now bare legs and hair that, having resisted her most dexterous brush wielding, hung on still to its dishevelled freedom with grim determination. Half in, half out and momentarily half-turning, glancing back at her desk, a smile slowly spread across her face; she had been granted absolution, at that moment of release she had been granted absolution. How else could it have been so intense? A little pout came and went, she wanted more, to do it again, but knew that there wasn’t time. Her secretary would be back later, she could put her to work; she loved nothing better then looking down on that girl’s head bobbing about under the desk...except, perhaps, watching those girls in the schoolroom - and that one girl in particular, the girl with the deep-violet eyes. Reluctantly turning away, closing her office door behind her, Dr Ecclestone stepped out into corridor.

Allegation, Abduction - and the Search for Mushroom

How often one’s expectations have a habit of tripping over the unforeseen - even, at times, to stumble over the seemingly unrelated: Elsewhere, at that exact self-same moment a mind had been made up, a decision made, a dust-dry conscience had been reinvigorated - a conscience that once pricked would drive its owner on with the tenacity of a bulldog.

He was a notorious and self-confessed lady-killer, even if not quite in the murderous sense. Yet here he was digging in very unfamiliar ground indeed, probing territory very much not to his liking. Guilt ridden, lonely, or just plain lovelorn and desperate - what difference did it make? Whatever the reason, he had searched for weeks, fruitlessly and without rest - always in his mind, the same question: “where is she? Where is my little mushroom?”

He had thrown her out and for the most superficial of reasons - good ol’ green-skinned jealousy, as simple as that. She had been seen, trudging around looking for a room...then she had just disappeared - it was as if the world had stopped and she had just stepped off into space.

He had thought she would have headed home, back to the fields and villages of her childhood. But what did he know of the trials and tribulations waiting for her there? No, he was to blame, he would have to make amends and he would have to find her - the police had shown little interest in what was to them yet another missing person among the countless dozens on their books.

There was one small clue, however, albeit from some drug-addict lowlife of a drifter - a small mobile nondenominational aid group. What had he called them? God’s something or other, Jesus’ something? He claimed to have seen a girl answering to her description accepting a ‘handout’ from them. Presumably the guy had meant money; if there was one thing his quest had taught him it was that information costs, and hard currency was the only lever that would work on these streets - offers of food fell on ungrateful ears. Later that same evening the guy had apparently seen the same girl, or at least one bearing an extraordinary resemblance to her, walking with a female member of the group - a woman far more mature by comparison - and then nothing more had been seen of her, by him or by anyone else he knew.

Others he had spoken to knew of the group; clearly some church-linked ‘outreach’ organisation targeting aid to the downtrodden city underbelly. Over and over the same jumble of nomenclature and slang came to him through drug and drink hazed minds and slurring lips: Some called them ‘God’s Salvation’, others the ‘Salvation Squad’ still others the ‘Jesus Squad’. Gradually a consensus had built up - ‘The Salvation of Jesus’.

Finding the group had been simplicity in itself; they were listed in the Yellow Pages - getting a straight answer out of them had been another question entirely. It was not that they appeared deliberately evasive or to be hiding anything in particular, just that they tended to be somehow... diplomatic, obtuse.

There always seemed to be one stipulation or another they could invoke to fend off his inquiries. Then finally came the admission, that the girl was indeed known to one of their members but that she had been seen going off with a woman having a description remarkably similar to that he had been given by his ‘down-and-out’ informant. Yet he was assured that this woman was no member of their group; rather the impression had apparently been received that the woman was in actuality some sort of relative - an aunt, it was thought - and that the two of them had seemed quite close.

He had certainly never heard of any ‘aunt’, in fact he had no knowledge of anyone as close to her as was being described to him - certainly not in London anyway. And yet most he had spoken to in the group were adamant that this mystery woman was indeed her aunt - although one or two had said they thought she might have been some kind of social worker.

Ironically, had it not been for that insistence he might well have written off the sighting has a red herring, a case of mistaken identity - as it was, he found himself picking up the phone.

“Hello, which service do you require?”

“Police, please...”

His little mushroom? If only she could have heard him at that minute - would she have laughed, burst in to tears or perhaps something in-between?

If only he could have seen her at that moment, stood in the corner of the doctor’s room with arms stiffly at her sides and her legs framed uselessly in callipers. Would he have run to her with concern and compassion burning in his heart, taken her in his arms meaning to whisk her away to safety? Or would the mere sight of the angrily-swollen, criss-cross basket-weave of red imprinted on her helplessly-bared and oh so vulnerable buttocks have been enough to inflame a very different passion?

And if not, what of the more recent, horizontally overlaid, gridiron-branding of pinky-width flaming scarlet; would the sight of that have been enough to twist his best intentions? Expertly crafted from the very uppermost curving slopes of that tight, almost heart-shaped milky-skinned little bottom and extending to near-on halfway down the backs of those milk-cream thighs, where finally curtailed by the intervention of the girl’s leg-brace straps; right at this very moment in time these were so fresh as to be actually visibly throbbing. What with those still-developing wheals and the local involuntarily twitching of muscle fibres sending little patches of soft girl-flesh, alternatively tautening and relaxing, dancing bewitchingly across the surface of that peachy behind of hers - what with all of that in the background - if he had been asked at that moment whether he might perhaps prefer her kept there after all...what would have been his answer?

What of the girl herself? What of young Meredith Hewson? A young woman so well shielded from reality, his reality, any reality, as to inhabit, for the most part, a shadowy self-built world of uncertainly-flitting phantasms and constructed of self-doubt and inconsistency - what care could she have that someone, somewhere, searched; even if that searcher was her ex-lover? As crushed as she felt at that instant, she would only have viewed it as false hope - for surely her situation was beyond hope.

After all was said and done, she had thought herself safe, here in hospital. But they had let her down; he had still got to her, the old man, that old church-man from her nightmares, the priest or whatever he was. But they were not nightmares, were they? They never had been; they were memories pure and simple - as unlikely as that might seem - she was certain of it. Just as she was certain that he had come to her - just when she was at her most powerless to resist, strapped down, bent over from the waist waiting for her examination and X-ray and left so open and vulnerable with her legs spread wide and immobilised in those awful leg callipers they kept her in.

Of course she hadn’t actually seen him, how could she have, strapped face down like that? But surely they could have seen the physical evidence in front of their own eyes. Not satisfied with anally raping her he had viciously taken a cane to her defenceless bottom prior to the act - just as he had always taken that heavy leather strap of his to her behind when she had been in the parsonage, to “beat the devil” from her before he would take her from behind. Besides, they had cameras just about everywhere; someone somewhere must have seen it all.

Yet they denied that anything had been seen, denied the existence of the frenzied web of burning cane-lines she could feel blazing agonizingly across her backside, even denied that she had been left alone for much longer than a minute or so - a period ridiculously too brief for the events, of which she had complained, to have occurred in.

It had all been in her head, just as all of that other stuff she seemed to remember had apparently been fabricated in her head - and surely the very existence of those security cameras only went to underline the truth of that statement. She had just been in a car crash, an accident, that was all - they said so, constantly. All of those other things had just been delusions and dreams, wicked dreams...dreams that she had no right to have had, that had to be eradicated, that she had to have therapy for...that she had to be punished for. It was all for her own good - they said so.

Here was a personality folding in on itself - day by day, week by week and month by month. Psychologically, she was nowhere now that he would recognise - not that her physical surroundings would match more closely his common experience in any case. The ‘squeaky bouncy little thing’ of old was stood here now, a quiet, hunched and mouse-like little thing - quenched indeed.

But was that really so surprising? After all, she had just been caned by her therapist, by a woman doctor, in front of two waiting nurses as witnesses - and simply for having just previously been caned by someone else; or so it seemed to her. She had just been caned for having been caned, just for daring to complain about having been caned, not to mention anally abused - or rather for sticking to her conviction, for refusing to admit that she was deluded, that she was, in fact, mentally ill.

That boiling, frothing exuberance of old, of the old ‘mushroom’ lay still now, weighed-down beneath a thickly-carpeted oil of introspection and introversion. Yet still they would seek to keep her, still they would work on her. They had carte blanche over her. It was a dream come true for any possessed of her carer’s predilections - besides, her presence attracted substantial funding...and from an impeccable, if unexpected source.

Tapping his foot impatiently, his shoulder beginning to ache from the effort of keeping the ‘phone pressed to his ear for what seems like an age, having been put on hold, he is momentarily and quite visibly startled at the strident voice at the other end - a woman’s voice, clipped, and professional...

“Police, how can I help you?

“Hello? I wish to report a possible abduction...”