Clive Bedford: Mistress of torment

Detective Inspector Harold Wilson of New Scotland Yard Criminal Investigation Department removed his hat in order to facilitate scratching his head. It needed scratching, but for once this habit failed to stimulate his brain. Wilson was a good, solid, stolid policeman who, by dint of doing as he was told and not arguing, had worked himself up in the CID as far as he would ever go. In a year he would retire, if not in a blaze of glory, at least not in a shower of mud! This was beyond his experience, and with the wariness of his age and nature, he could see one thing very clearly. There was likely to be a lot of trouble here! And Wilson did not want trouble. It was the very last thing he wanted.

He spoke to the young intern who stood patiently by.

"I'll have to make a special report about this," he said at last. "You'll have to hold the body for autopsy, but I want you to take special precautions. Do these, things lock?"

Wilson pointed to the rows of gruesome refrigerated cabinets that lined one side of the wall.

"Yes. There's two keys. The attendant has one, and the secretary of the hospital keeps the other in his safe."

"Hmm. I'd better have the attendant's key, now please. And then I'll come with you and collect the other one." They closed the drawer containing the young man's corpse with that degree of respect that most people give to the dead even if they withhold it from the living!

As they went along the corridor, the inspector said, "I suppose we'll have to get a disinter men order for the other one – the woman. That's a bloody nuisance, I can tell you! Every time that happens some maniac or other starts squawking about 'desecration'! Where was she buried?"

"Highgate, I believe."

"Christ, right in the middle of London! We'll have to keep the press away with bloody barbed wire!"

Wilson collected both keys gloomily, signed for them and went outside the hospital to where his driver was waiting. Detective Sergeant Gerry Glasner was an entirely different kind of police ma from his boss. For one thing he had not yet arrived and had practically nothing to lose. For another, he had come into the force from university, and had a well disciplined and enquiring mind. For a third he was by no means sure he had made a wise decision in his career choice, and did not much care whether what he did met with approval or not!

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"Trouble?" he asked, sympathetically, studying Wilson's gloomy face.

"Another one of those damned chastity belt corpses," said Wilson.

"Another one? Another girl?"

"No. A man this time – or a boy really. Only about sixteen years old."

A week before the body of a girl had been pulled out of the Thames at Teddington Lock. She was about eighteen years old, a virgin. Her clothes were good, having been mostly bought in the King's Road, Chelsea. She had been well-groomed and manicured – and dead. There had been no sign of injury, yet the autopsy had proved that she had not drowned. She had been dead before she got into the river. Yet there was no bruising or any other sign of her having been thrown in.

All that was bad enough. Already it had involved Inspector Wilson in the thing he most hated, trouble. He had some twenty Murder Squad men working around the clock, trying to trace the identity of the girl. Until they knew who she was, there was not much hope of tracing her friends, or anyone who might know anything about her death. So far, some fifteen hundred individual contacts and enquiries had drawn a blank. But the worst feature of the affair had been that the girl had been wearing a most odd appliance. It seemed to be made of some kind of grey metal, cold to the touch. Yet it yielded like rubber, so that it fitted her body like a second skin. Worst of all, it did not stretch, and all the efforts of nurses and doctors had utterly failed to remove it. There was no joint, no fastening. It might have been molded over the girl's body.

The staff of the hospital were not altogether unused to removing chastity belts! Especially from men. Every few weeks someone would be brought in from a road accident and if he was conscious his reluctance to be undressed would prove to be due to the fact that he was wearing a more-or-less complex arrangement of chains around the waist and loins – sometimes even along the torso to a metal collar as well. And, at the end of all the chains, there would usually be a metal box of some kind that completely enclosed his genitals, with a small hole in the box for toilet purposes. Sometimes the chastity belts were fastened on with padlocks. Some of them were soldered on. Only last month there had been an extremely complex and unpleasant one, with sharp spikes inside the box which would have made an erection terribly painful, and that had been welded on so that the doctor bad to send for a maintenance engineer with oxy-gas equipment to cut it off!

The standard story was that the patient had put the thing on himself, although in most cases this was manifestly impossible unless he had also been a contortionist! The inference was that the man had been playing sex-games with a woman or another man who found pleasure in depriving him of sex-satisfaction. One or two claimed they had had the chastity belts fitted for religious reasons! It was embarrassing all round, but that was the end of it. If a man cared to wear a chastity belt, that was his affair and no one else's.

But the girl, and now the boy had both been found dead in unusual circumstances. And both had been wearing these curious belts, of an unfamiliar material. Not wishing to publicize the oddity, the police had, in fact, conspired to conceal the facts surrounding the girl. They could not be concealed again. Trouble was in the air! Wilson groaned aloud. Gerry Glasner reached for a bottle lying under the dashboard.

"Indigestion?" he asked.

"I shall have! Not now… Do you know, at the hospital they've tried getting that damned thing off with bolt cutters, and couldn't even dent it! Yet its surface feels like satin… They'll have to cut it off! Or if not, I'm afraid they'll have to cut up the body and get it off that way. We've got to have it – and I guess we'll have to have the one off the girl now. It's the only clue we have."

Back in his office, Wilson asked for the file on the girl. In it were several photos.

"Look at these, Sergeant," he said to Gerry Glasner. They studied them together, with a new interest.

The sight of the young, slender body, lying stiff and cold brought a spasm of anger to them both. This, after all, was what their lives were about; punishment for this, and prevention for the future. Yet, there was no proof of murder, except that the girl could not have thrown herself in the river after she was dead! And she had not drowned. That was all they had to go on, except for the chastity belt. The soft, yielding metal thing fitted over the girl's breasts, proving that she had had a beautiful, full figure. The cups totally covered the breasts and there was an area of the metallic substance flat against her chest. This was shaped like a brassiere, and led around her chest to her back. There was no clasp or fastening of any kind. The report said that the cups over the breasts were hard as glass, but the rest was soft and resilient. The girl would have been unable to feel any sensation through the metal of the cups.

Attached to the breast strap was a wide vertical one that joined to a kind of waist belt, about four inches wide and perfectly shaped to fit between her rib-cage and hip-bones. This was as tight as it could be, cutting deep into the flesh, compressing her vital organs. In front of the waist band was a shaped piece that covered her belly and proceeded down to curve up between her thighs, narrowing as it went, and up between her buttocks to join the waist band at the back. Between the thighs was a hole about a half-inch in diameter, and there was another round hole about an inch in diameter over the anus. Investigation had shown that to each of these holes was attached a tube of the same size and same material. The front tube seemed to enter the urethra, and the rear tube was clearly in the rectum. The length of the tubes could not be determined because the metal of the belt was opaque to X-rays. Despairing of removing this garment without desecrating the body they had buried the girl in it. Now she would have to be disinterred and, somehow or other the garment would have to be recovered.