The high powered CEO invents another persona to explore her dark side but what happens when the fiction becomes real?
Part of the reason for Avril’s success in the corporate world was her attention to detail and her understanding of the need for preparation.
So, when she gave in to her deep need for humiliation and abuse, it was natural that she would do it properly. The first thing was to visit charity shops and purchase various clothing items to support her new life. These would be taken home and tried out in front of her bedroom mirror. The underwear was old and worn to give the impression of a loser who lacked self-respect and it was matched with very short skirts, tarty high heels and tight tops. She also had a small shoulder bag on a fake gold chain. Of course, heavy face makeup would enhance the overall impression.
Stage two was to tour the red-light area around Boscombe to talk to working girls and ask them about rooming houses. Avril was careful to use the mode of speech which she had rehearsed at home. Fortunately, this was way outside her comfort zone and her natural nervousness dispelled any possible idea that she might be a cop or a journalist. The girls did not really have time for long chats as they were constantly on the lookout for trade but, over time, Avril collected the information which she needed. It was during this time that Avril fixed on her “Whore Name” of Katy.
It is said that every woman has a whore fantasy at some time and, in Avril, this was multiplied by her kink. Some people say that kinks are triggered by trauma but I think that some kinky tendency has to be inborn. Certainly, Avril could not remember a time when she had not masturbated to dark fantasies and when even the mention of certain words would create a tingling in her secret center. It may be that a person is born with an inclination towards paraphilia but it then needs to be triggered by some event and, without such an experience, it would lie dormant and perhaps even fade away. In Avril’s case the trigger had almost certainly been Miss Piggy, the games mistress at her boarding school. Miss Piggy was a predator who loved to humiliate and dominate her victims but that is a story which probably needs to be left alone.
Stage three for Avril/Katy was to rent a room in her new identity. In that world, any name could be scrawled on a rent agreement and all transactions would be in cash. The research done in stage two ensured that Katy was pretty sure that her landlord was also a pimp who would accept his rent in cash from turning tricks. Any girl who imagines that she can just stand on a street corner and launch her hooking career will find herself attacked by girls already there who do not welcome the competition. Even if that does not happen, the guy who controls the girls will make very clear that he does not want anyone stealing trade from his girls. The only way around this problem is to arrange to be protected at the start by the local pimp. If he knows that the new girl is beholden to him, he will have no objection to a new source of income on the street.
Katy’s “Man” was called Dan and he was both landlord and pimp. Half of every fare had to go to Dan in addition to the weekly rent which was collected by his runner who called round every Friday. Falling short or withholding money would not be a good survival move.
To Katy, with her deep flaw, this total exploitation was so delicious that she almost drowned in pleasure. As she demeaned herself for clients, she was aware that most of the rewards would be due to Dan who owned not only her earnings but also her home, dump that it was.
Of course, this was slightly mitigated by the existence of Avril’s house in Canford Cliffs but, even so, the danger of being cut up if her earnings dropped or if Dan even suspected she was keeping money back, was very real. Katy was not in a position to argue or negotiate; if Dan believed, even wrongly, that she was cheating he would definitely impose a violent sanction and he may even hurt her for no other reason than to remind her of who was boss. As if that were not enough, Katy was dealing with Dan’s runner, a mountain of lard called Pete. Dan would believe whatever Pete told him so Pete had to be kept sweet and that involved Pete having a free run to screw her whenever he felt like it. In Avril’s world she was a mistress of negotiation and she could take the opposition to pieces and emerge triumphant and this total inversion of her situation was somehow liberating. She was anything but free and yet it felt so good not to have to bear the weight of responsibility or the burden of preparing for corporate battles. Here she had no power at all and impotence is a sort of simplicity and freedom. All Katy had to do was to keep hooking on the street and giving satisfaction so that she built a loyal client base albeit a base of deeply unpleasant men who would take it for granted that she would do whatever she was told to do. This was the absolute bottom of the sex trade; a trick cost a mere £60 and the client base was as low as it could possibly be.
There were many girls on the street who were younger and more appealing that Katy so, in order to keep up with Dan’s demands for income, Katy had to be willing to do things which other girls could refuse. When Pete fucked her, it was rough and painful and, given that she dare not refuse him, it was pretty much rape. He first hit her seriously after several weeks when he made his Friday visit to collect her earnings. He had been shouting at her because the money was down and, as he turned to leave, he swung his open palm at her cheek so hard that she fell back against the wall and her legs bucked under her. She ended up in a heap on the floor with her head against the wall and the tears flowing. Oddly, it never occurred to her to just leave the room and return to being Avril; she just picked herself up and went out to the street to resume work.
Katy had begun this life by just working weekends and then evenings but, realistically, that was never going to satisfy Dan’s demands for cash so her old life just fell away. We know this from the journal which she kept in her room. We also know that she had set herself an iron rule that she would never use Avril’s money to bail her out; Katy had to sink or swim on her own resources or the experience would not be real.
When her body was found, her bloodstream was full of heroin although she did not have needle tracks. She does not mention drug taking in her journal so it was speculated that a client or perhaps Dan or Pete had, for the fun of it, held the drug up to her nose and forced her to snort. Katy is unlikely to have died from doing this just once although it is possible that the dose of the drug was unusually strong or that it was laced with something lethal. Perhaps she just happened to attract a client who set out to deliberately murder her for the buzz which it would give him but the verdict was accidental death.
Before Katy was found, Avril had been reported as a missing person. People at work reported that her behavior had been erratic and secretive before she went missing and the police found that she had been drawing unusual amounts of cash before she disappeared. Her house was locked, her car was in the garage and her credit cards were in her bedroom.
There were no leads in Avril’s case until Katy was found and her journal was read as this was the first time that the two women were connected.