Chapter 3: Flashback

Time stopped. Linda was back in the alley, hiding with her friends as they saw the assault. The man, who Linda recognized as a powerful politician, had dragged the girl into what he thought was a deserted alley, his hand over her mouth. Linda didn't recognize the girl, but looked on in horror as he blindfolded and gagged the frightened girl, then yanked down her panties, rolled a condom on one handed, and raped her. When he was finished, he choked her until she fell limply to the ground. He removed the blindfold and gag, stuffed the panties in a pocket like some sort of sick souvenir, and left. As soon as he was out of sight, she crept out and checked the girl. She was breathing, barely. She heard his voice again, just outside the alley. He was using his cell to report having found the body. He claimed to have seen another person run out of the alley, just as he had approached. Linda flashed her friends the code for "police on the way", and they quietly made their way out of the alley by a hidden route.

Curious, Linda went around to the front and stood there watching all the excitement. Once the police knew who he was, they fell all over each other to do what he wanted. He gave a brief description of the person he had supposedly scared off, a description so broad it would fit half the men in the area. He claimed to have checked her neck for a pulse, but failed to find one. Finally, he offered to cooperate in any reasonable way, but asked them to keep his name out of the papers. They were eager to accommodate him.

She lived through the experience, but two weeks later she had committed suicide.

Linda was shaken to her core. She had learned, in no uncertain terms, that there were people for whom morality and the law were largely irrelevant. Worse, she recognized her own parents as being among them. And she recognized that her schoolmates mostly fell into one of two groups. Either they were consciously in the same category as her parents, and acting on it, or they were largely clueless and obsessed with trivialities. And some of the teachers were worse, obsessed with what little power they had, and routinely abusing that power. That was when she largely lost her interest in school and her schoolmates.

That was when she started joining her friends in their drinking.

But she had another lesson to learn. Some of her friends had known the girl, and liked her. They started gathering information, and had her gather everything she could about him. About a month later, while he was abroad at an international conference, the police were called to investigate a break in at his house. They found his safe opened and emptied, a few areas of destruction where it looked like someone was trying to find hiding places, and one slightly open panel in his bedroom. Behind the panel, they found a collection of girls' and women's panties and bras, carefully stored in individual plastic bags. One of the younger policemen thought he recognized one of the pairs, and suggested they run tests.

The tests found his fingerprints on the bags and on some of the garments. The other garments did not hold fingerprints. But they did yield DNA samples. Some clearly belonged to him. One set belonged to the dead girl. Others to other rape victims, and one to the daughter of a leading MP. The incident never made it into the press, but the announcement that he was retiring from public life, effective immediately, did.

Surprisingly, Linda learned of it two ways. On the same day her parents dropped some hints that his days of power were over, one of her new friends passed on what his older brother had passed on to him. His older brother, the policeman.

Over that same month or so, she became more aware of some of the rumours at her school. When she heard a couple of classmates exchanging descriptions of the harrowing experiences of cousins of theirs at some mysterious school, she started paying attention. At first, it sounded like the kind of fantasy teenage girls like to horrify each other with. Descriptions of old fashioned uniforms, forced nudity and other humiliating punishments, and sadistic teachers just seemed too out of place to be believed. But the more she listened, the more consistent the stories were.

A girl of a "good family" was misbehaving. She was on the verge of becoming a major embarrassment to her family. She finally went one step too far, and was exiled to the mysterious school. She was deprived of her possessions, even her clothes, and cut off from all outside contact. She was subjected to intense and protracted humiliations.