Chapter 2: What has Beth got into?

Matt's work went to pieces, and the business was carried by Janet his secretary. It was obvious to her that something was wrong, but she would not inquire. If Matt wanted her to know, he would tell her. It was after he had made a bad mistake on the roster for staff at one of their contracts that Matt had to try and explain what was going on. He found it difficult as he wasn't too sure himself. So much of what he suspected were ideas in his head, generated by feelings, and small clues. Janet listened carefully, not saying anything until he had finished. Even then she didn't comment for a minute, then shook her head.

"No! You are wrong. Elizabeth will not have left you. You are too important to her for that."

"How do you come to that conclusion, Janet?"

"Elizabeth came here to see me one day when you were away."

"Beth came here?" Beth had never shown any interest in his business. Janet had one of those womanly smiles on her face.

"Yes. I believe she came to check me out, make sure I wasn't a threat to you and her." Matt was totally surprised.

"I'm astonished. That doesn't sound like Beth in any way." Janet shook her head.

"How little you know about women, Mr. Bennett. Including your wife it would seem. Yes, Elizabeth did come to see me, and in the course of our chat said something to the effect that you were so important to her, that without you there would be no point in living." She paused. "Mr. Bennett, she loves you totally and unreservedly. She will not have left you." Matt took some comfort from this, but it still didn't explain Beth's behaviour. Janet seemed to have picked up on his worries. "Mr. Bennett. I feel that Elizabeth has some personal crisis she is trying to resolve, and this is why she has gone off. She will be back when it is sorted."

"I don't understand. Beth knows she could come to me and discuss anything. If that is the case we could resolve it together." Janet disagreed with him.

"No. You told me once about her demeanour at her brother's funeral. I think at the time you described her as unemotional. You saw a person who doesn't reveal their feelings. That is not the person who would come to you to discuss anything that was that personal. For her, it would be necessary to work it out on her own." Matt had to agree with this theory. That was Beth. Very self-contained, never revealing the depth of her feelings. Yes, she would do everything to overcome problems herself before admitting them to anyone else.

Matt felt better now, his mind illogically concentrating on the best interpretation that Janet had offered, and ignoring the other facts. His equanimity was to be seriously disturbed though, two days later by a call from Gary.

"Matt, I think you had better get over to see me as soon as possible."

"What's happened?"

"You won't understand it by my telling you, you need to see."

"O.K. Gary, I can get to you about nine tomorrow morning, will that suit you?"

"Yes mate. I'll be here."

It was a worried Matt who arrived at Gary's office in Neasden the next morning. Gary did nothing to relieve his worries as they sat down in front of the impressive array of computing equipment. They both had mugs of steaming tea.

"Right, Matt. I have isolated the file that was deleted, and I have to say that whoever put the site together was fucking brilliant. I'll explain why as we go through it." He loaded the file on to one of his screens and it opened. Matt's heart sank, the screen showed numerous pictures of women being tied up and slapped, spanked with paddles, or even one where the woman was whipped. The faces could not be seen, and the man administering the punishment would never be recognised either. He certainly wouldn't be wearing the black leather garments out in the street. They emphasised his muscular development in the shoulders and chest, and also his penis which sprang nakedly from the front of his split trousers. Gary interrupted Matt's thoughts. "Now most of these sites are pay per view. This one is free, and I'll show you why." He clicked on the 'Enter here' button. The screen dissolved and re-opened with a similar background, except the half dozen stills became two video clips. These featured two of the women previously seen, but now in larger format, the viewer could see the cheeks of their bottoms rebounding, one from the harsh slaps with a paddle, the other from the cuts of a cane. The blush of bruising skin was already noticeable on the first, and the red stripes where the cane had been laid on the other. Then the scene changed to the two faces of the women, and both exhibited total pleasure from the punishment they were receiving. Gary stopped the action.

"I've stopped this because I want to show you something. Did you notice when those action scenes were playing, a flicker across the scene?" Matt shook his head.

"I can't say I did." Gary nodded.

"O.K. I'll let it run again." He did so and suddenly Matt saw the very fleeting flicker.

"Yes!" he almost shouted.

"This is bloody good," Gary commented. "You don't see it at first, and it isn't obvious at any time, but if you watch that for long ... well, I'll show you what it is." He closed the screen down and then turned on another. "I downloaded it onto this bit of kit, because I can slow the speed right down on this one. It's slowed down by a factor of eighty percent. Now watch!" The screen came alive with the scene they had watched before, but the action was so slow it was more like a collection of stills showing one after the other. Matt commented about that and Gary simply said, well that's all it is really.

Now when the flicker came up, Matt could see it was words overlaid on the screen. 'PAIN IS PLEASURE', then the next flicker said, 'PLEASURE FROM CONTROL' then another, 'CONTROL LEADS TO ECSTASY' and another, 'ECSTASY FOLLOWS SUBMISSION' the last one said 'SUBMISSION TO PAIN' The motto's then reverted to the first. They still went through very quickly and It was only because he concentrated that Matt could read them. He looked at Gary.

"What the fuck is this all about?" Gary didn't answer. Instead he turned on the first screen again.

"What else do you notice?" Matt looked carefully, trying to ignore the sight of the paddle and whip creasing the women's arses. He looked all around the screen, then said.

"There!" He pointed to the top middle of the screen. There was a badge motif of some sort, and it turned continually with what appeared to be a flashing light."Good, you saw it, but only because you were looking for it." He turned the screen off, and showed Matt the slow version. Now he could see it quite clearly.

"If you watched that for long I reckon it could send you into a trance." Gary didn't answer at first then Matt saw him nodding grimly. He turned both screens off.

"That's what I thought, so I spoke to Hendy."

"Hendy? Christ! Is that crafty sod still around?" Henderson, well Dr. Henderson was another of those rather odd people who seem to be around when abnormal operations were taking place. He was a psychologist, who seemed able to get into the minds of the opponents they had to deal with.

"Oh yes! And still as weird as a nine shilling note. He'll be here soon. Now let's look a little further." He turned the screens on again. "See that button, right hand side, near the bottom of the screen?"

"The one that says contact."

"Yes, now when I clicked on that a telephone number came up." Matt knew what was coming.

"You're going to say it was the same number as the one on Beth's mobile."

"Yes, I'm afraid it is. That's why this site is free, they want to draw in those who could be seduced by it. Sorry." Matt was in misery for a moment. He didn't realise that his next words were said out loud.

"Oh Beth. What have you done?"

Gary waited until Matt had pulled himself together.

"You O.K. mate?"

"No, but I suppose I may has well find out the worst."

"Well it doesn't help anyway, but when you click that button it gives you the number then triggers a deletion, doesn't happen for forty-eight hours but it clears everything including the recycle bin. As I said whoever wrote this site was crack hot." Matt asked how that could be done. "It would be a virus, designed to attack one file only."

"Can we find who these people are?"

"Tried that. Come up against a blank wall. The site is hosted in the States. We can't find out anything from the host without a request from our government to the relevant department in Washington, even then it could take months. If these people heard about that they would shift the host to Russia or Mexico or somewhere. Then your problem starts all over again. Anyway, I suspect that we would only get a name of a company in the Caymans or somewhere else where privacy is more important than justice." He stopped the sequences and took them back to the beginning. "Oh and I tried to trace who owned that phone number. It was a disposable phone. Use it a few times and throw it away, get another with a different number. These people believe in covering their tracks."

"Yes, but they put that number on the site." Gary agreed.

"True, but I followed the links that your wife used and found the site on the internet yesterday. It's still the same but the number is different."

The weird Dr. Henderson rang the doorbell some forty-five minutes later. He greeted Gary then turned to Matt.

"Captain Bennett!' Matt shook his hand.

"Dr. Henderson, still trying to cure the loonies of this world?"

"Oh no. It's the psychiatrists who try to cure them. I am a psychologist, I just tell them how they can remain loony but be happy about it." He grinned. "Are you still going off to foreign parts and killing terrorists?"

"No, Hendy. I'm out of the army now. Besides soon the army will not have to go to foreign parts. This government is letting all the terrorists come here, so the army can stay home. Very convenient, and of course it saves a lot of money."

"You're a cynic, Matt." Gary joined the conversation holding more mugs of tea.

"Ah, cynicism is the refuge of sensible men, when the politicians lose the plot." Hendy liked to compose new platitudes. He took a sip of his tea. Then handed it back to Gary.

"More sugar please, Gary, then let's look at this stuff you told me about. I must say I'm intrigued."

Matt had no wish to see the files again so picked up the paper and read quietly while Gary and Hendy went through it. They rejoined him after some fifty minutes. Hendy was in a serious mood now.

"Gary's filled me in on what has happened, so the first question I am going to ask is, do you really think that your wife has been in contact with these people?" Matt was certain that she had.

"She had the number on her mobile as a received call, so she would have had to contact them to start with." Hendy nodded.

"Right, well from what I have seen, I suspect that this site was specifically aimed at women who have, or could assume a submissive character. The predominant colour of the messages is Red, which is supposedly very attractive to women; it is suggested that it relates to their sexual awareness. That is why I say the site is aimed predominantly at women. Men would not take as much notice of them. The speed at which they flash means that the messages are processed by the brain, even though the conscious doesn't appear to have seen them. But the sub-conscious does. This is called subliminal or sub-threshold stimulation. The target narrows then to women who have masochistic tendencies. Possibly latent, but the sights would intrigue them enough to make them want to find out more. The revolving motif is very hypnotic. Whilst it doesn't actually hypnotise it could induce a trance-like state which occupying the conscious mind, allows the brain to deal with the subliminal messages in the sub-conscious." Matt had questions galore, but allowed Hendy to go on with his summary. "Would you describe your wife as submissive?"

"Not the word I would choose. She has always been reserved. Naïve, yes. She is very self-contained, doesn't show her emotions."

"You say naïve. How does that manifest itself?"

"She has been very sheltered. She reads the newspaper and finds it difficult to comprehend that some people live on state benefits as a lifestyle, that some women have children by multiple partners, that children can leave school at sixteen without being able to read." Hendy nodded.

"I get the idea. I have to ask you a difficult question. Are your relations, I mean your sexual relations, good. Does she join with you fully?"

"She never initiates sex. But she never refuses me when I do."

"Ah! Was she knowledgeable about sex? Does she enjoy sex?"

"I think she does. She has said on occasions that she always has orgasms, although she isn't hugely demonstrative. She wasn't knowledgeable about sex apart from the basics. I think her mother had told her that it was something that women had to accept, and just explained the actual act and how it happened."

"Ah!"

Matt waited for the next question. "So she never initiates love-making, but never refuses. She is not active, but nonetheless has orgasms. Is that correct?"

"Yes. I think that sums it up."