Chapter 40: Market Research

Harry had a good laugh about my encounter with Kelly. I'd been a bit suspicious that it was a put up job but he assured me it wasn't. She was just one of the possibles that they'd had on a target list a while back. When they decided she didn't fit the customer profile they left her office on the list for possible training exercises. He seemed convincing enough about it. I didn't mind either way, it had been fun.

I bumped into Freddie outside of his office. "Well," he said, "at least the numbers seem to be picking up."

I had to agree with him. "Yes," I said, "the Search and Snatch service has been getting a lot of response and some of that is already feeding through into billings, the on-line auctions have been good for moving some of the stock too."

"You're right," said Freddie, "I can't remember when we've had so little prepped stock sitting around. That's helped keep the costs down in stock holding too. Mind you some of the staff up there are getting a bit restless; not enough girls for them to play with."

"We need to find a way to fix that," I said, "the last thing we want to do is to hack the guards off, they do a great job."

"Well give it some thought, can you. They've got a bit of diversion with Brian's family but they'll be sold soon enough and I don't want to stack up any problems for the future." He stopped and thought for a moment. "Oh, and another thing ... how do you think our market share is now?"

I stopped dead in my tracks. With all the other activities, I'd forgotten one of the basics. I hadn't really thought about what share of the market we were getting and how we were shaping up against the competition. With Freddie, though, I knew there wasn't any value in trying to bluff my way out of things. "Freddie, I haven't the faintest idea. I'd not really thought much about it with all the other stuff we've been doing on analysing the client needs and setting up the new products and the account management. You're absolutely right though. We might be growing but if competitors are growing faster we could be going backwards."

Freddie grinned. "Don't worry," he said, "I thought that might be the case. You've been focussing on urgent stuff plus the whole Brian thing was a bit of a distraction. I even have friends that are saying if you carry on like you are the UK will run out of women." I laughed. Freddie went on. "We need to try to get some sort of a picture though, don't you agree?"

I nodded.

"I don't think you'll find it easy. It's not like anyone publishes the auction prices and volumes! Anyway see what you can do. I was just going down to see how Rick is getting on with Brian's family. Do you want a look?"

The real answer was "no, not really," but I thought that probably wasn't wise. Freddie still harboured a grudge over the whole Brian business and he'd been getting Rick to make things pretty tough on the women. Plus, of course, he'd been making sure that Brian got to know what was happening to them on his account. Freddie strode off towards the preparation and orientation areas. I tagged along behind him. Rick was there to greet Freddie when he got to the cells.

"You're looking to see how Alice and her family are getting on?" Rick said.

"Mmm," said Freddie. "I'd just like to satisfy myself that the regime we are holding them under is sufficiently, let's say, rigorous."

"Rigorous," said Rick, "is the watch word. Come and see." He opened the door to one of the cells. I followed Rick and Freddie inside.

The four women barely reacted to our arrival in the cell. Clegg had insisted that they should be all kept together so that they should each witness the humiliation and subjugation of the others. That included Brian who was standing chained to the far wall, naked, with his wrists shackled over his head. He was looking in a pretty sorry state. Rick explained that some of the girls had volunteered to, as they said, soften him up. Tricia had quite a few friends in Prep and they had all welcomed the opportunity to take their revenge on her kidnapper. There was a shelf on the wall beside Brian, Ranged along it was an impressive array of butt plugs, nipple clamps, gags, paddles, whips and other items of dubious but almost certainly unpleasant purpose. From the blood that encrusted the wheals on his legs, it looked like quite a lot of the shelf's devices had already been employed on him. He tried to turn his head towards Clegg. I could see that he'd been fitted with a dental gag. He managed a sound from his throat at once angry and despairing. It wasn't helped by the collar he'd been fitted with. The stores had only had them in women's sizes; the biggest they could find still looked like it was choking him. Clegg ignored him and turned his attention to the women.

"I see they've been shaved," said Clegg, looking down at the four bald and women. "That's good. Keep them like this, don't let the stubble grow back," he said bending down beside Beth and running his hand across her shaved pubis. "This one's smooth enough, good." He put his hand beneath her chin to lift her head so he could look at her face. Her eyes were red with tears. "Oh, yes. Take their eyebrows off as well and their eyelashes. I want all their hair off and kept off." He turned his attentions towards Ella, pushing her down so she was laying face down on the floor of the cell. He kicked her legs apart and then crouched peering closely at her backside. The bruising around her arse showed she was being used from behind as much as in front. "How often is the 18 year old one being fucked?"

Rick picked up the clipboard used to record punishments and rapes of the cell's occupants from the hook beside the door. "This one?" he said, pointing at Beth. "Three times so far today, seven yesterday. The 19 year old was eight times yesterday, twice so far today. The girls are more popular than their mother or their aunt. They were done three times each yesterday."

"Hmm," said Clegg. He got up and gripped Alice by the throat, pulling her to her feet and thrusting her back against the wall. She was choking from the pressure of his hand on her windpipe. "Can't have you feeling left out, can we? I know you just love watching your daughters being raped but we'll have to see you get your fair share. Rick, make sure she and her sister are getting fucked just as frequently as the girls. It's not like your lot to need encouragement. Get the guards to roll dice for which one they get to do if they can't be relied on to share it out evenly. Otherwise pretty good, pretty good. Keep them going on this regime until they're ready for training." He turned to me. "Have we had any offers or interest yet?"

"Well, Challis might be interested in him," I nodded towards Brian. "She's asked for some photos and an estimate on initial training costs. It looks like we've got some Kushtian interest in the two girls but nothing on the mother or her sister yet. I think the sales team are a bit disoriented by all this. They thought a lot of Brian. I'm not sure they are putting all their efforts in."

"Well, see what you can do," said Clegg. "And tell the sales lot, they've got a new incentive plan. If they can't find customers for these they'll be joining them on the web site." He stalked out.

I went back to my office to work on the market research challenge. I tried to map out a strategy for the problem. I reckoned there were two main things we needed to know. How and what our competitors were doing and what the total volume of sales, in the UK and globally, were. I had a word with Seb, he reckoned he could give me a fix on the volumes and values going through the internet auction sites with just a bit of hacking. I said fine, as long as he didn't leave our sticky paw prints over anyone else's web site.

Freddie asked Ellie to give me a contact that might be able to let me have a picture of the total number of abductions in the UK. I was puzzled as to how we might get that until she gave me the phone number to call. Chief Superintendent Phyllis Jacobs of the National Crime Squad sounded like she ought to be an authority and so she was. She pointed out that much of what I needed to know was publicly available. The moves in Government to have police forces publish their performance statistics meant that lists were available of the number of missing person complaints and the clear up rates. She pointed out that if I were to ask for a break down of numbers by sex and age, she would be obliged to provide them under Freedom of Information legislation and I might well get a good fix on what I needed. She was right; it was quite interesting to see what a disproportionate number of women between the ages of 18 and 35 had gone missing over the previous year, and how low the clear-up rate for these disappearances was in comparison with that for other groups.

I didn't ask Freddie why she was so willing to help.

I cut the police numbers down by a figure that looked like the disappearance rate for other groups, that took care of the "genuine" missing persons, I thought, and left the probable number of slave abductions. Of course I still didn't know how many of those on the police list were as a result of operations like ours, some of them had to be amateur collectors, picking up by individuals for their own use. They weren't really competitors individually but, of course, if they were snatching their own they weren't buying from us. It occurred to me that it might be useful for our overall market share if the police were being more successful against the amateurs, I'd have to think about that.

Seb came up with some useful data. He'd come up with three web sites run by UK organisations.

That linked up with Freddie's assessment that there were five main competitors to us, Seb reckoned that there were two others under development but not yet operational. We had a look around. One surprise was to see two faces that I recognised. Staring out at me from the screen were Rebecca, my some-time girlfriend whose kidnapping had started my involvement with Clegg's business, and Amanda, her flatmate. Just out of curiosity I clicked on the "more details" button under Rebecca's photograph. "Offered for sale by private treaty," it said. "Following the decision of her owners to replace many of their current slave stock, this well trained piece is available for immediate shipment to a delivery point of your choosing. An experienced flight attendant, she has been serving until recently on her current owner's aircraft and would be an ideal purchase for any owner seeking to improve service on board their own flights or with minimal cross training on board an owner's yacht."

I wondered for a while where she would end up.

Seb interrupted my thoughts, "Do you want to look at the numbers?" he said.

He'd got figures for each of them. Together they made up about 20% of the total number of girls lifted by my reckoning. Given that there wasn't much different about any of their web sites I guessed that the share of overall sales would be pretty much the same as their share of web based sales. It wasn't accurate but at least it gave us a working hypothesis.

As well as the numbers I felt I needed the background data. At least I had Rachel's report following her interviews with Sukie. I pulled the wad of pages from the file. It looked like she had done a thorough enough job. Producing that had stopped anyone asking about what else she had planned, I guessed. She'd organised it much as I had expected with separate pages on each of the "keepers" that Sukie had been loaned out to, 15 keepers detailed on one or two pages each and an overall summary page. I started to read wondering if it was actually going to help. It was interesting but anecdotal. I wasn't sure how I was going to draw any conclusions from it.

There were some possibilities, though. The interesting thing was the way in which so many ideas recurred. The sex of course and the violence and the beatings and the institutionalised humiliation; as if it wasn't sufficient for the slave to be restrained at the bid of her keeper. It was almost as though the keepers defined themselves in terms of their domain over the slaves that they kept. The slaves weren't simply utilitarian items, they brought status to their owners in the same way that an expensive car or yacht might. Thinking about it, it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise.

What was puzzling was that none of the descriptions that Rachel had provided seemed to reflect the woman that I had encountered on the island; her warmth, intelligence and instinct for companionship. Whether that was a result of her perspective, or Rachel's interpretation or the influence of Sukie's owner, I couldn't say but I did end up feeling that there I wasn't getting the whole picture

Tricia was out of town on a job and I was at a loose end anyway, so I thought I'd spend an evening with Sukie.

I found her in a cell in the Prep Centre. It didn't look like anyone had taken much care of her. She was naked and wearing some heavy shackles around her ankles. Her black, straight, hair was hanging lankly, she didn't look is if she had washed for days, she smelled that way too. A steel yoke kept her wrists at shoulder level and the steel band around her throat was closed with a padlock that also fastened her to a chain to the cell wall. She was gagged as well. She turned towards me without any show of resentment and knelt up presenting herself to me. "Hello, Sukie," I said.

She nodded in response. I unfastened her gag, prising the ball from her mouth. "Thank you," she said.

"Why are you being kept like this?" I asked. The yoke and shackles seemed much more severe than was usual and girls were rarely kept gagged after they arrived unless there was some disciplinary reason.

"The guards tell me it's because I have not been "prepared"; not been "orientated". Because you wanted my stories they have just kept me secure, not done anything more. They worry that I will try to escape, I suppose."