Neighbourhood Watch (8 page)

But something was amiss. He had been about to regale Megan with a litany of her favourite insults, the words that always made her nipples stiffen and her pussy moist and her body hot and receptive for him. The familiar opening phrase in this game, telling her she was baggage, was usually enough to make her moan. But this evening Megan remained silent. Not that she could moan properly with the gag in her mouth, admittedly. But she usually let out a muffled sigh to indicate that they were operating on the same wavelength and playing the same game.

They had devised it together. He began by calling her baggage and then went on to berate her for being a wayward, cock-hungry slut. He tempered the expletives with bland words that wouldn’t have suggested sexual chemistry to anyone else. When he called her a filthy little harlot, she responded as he would have expected of any woman with a fondness for humiliation. But when he used choice phrases from their personal dictionary of dirty words, calling her baggage, trash or ‘the bucket’, Megan always responded with a distinctive and eager enthusiasm.

This evening she simply remained still, silent and unmoved.

‘You’re baggage,’ he said again.

Nothing. He sliced his crop across her backside. The blow was delivered with consummate skill. He struck in a swift arc that avoided the chains and landed directly on his intended target. There was a metallic shudder as the links stretched taut, his victim stiffening in silent protest. A slender line of red crept across her porcelain-pale buttocks.

She made no sound.

He studied the red line: it curved round one buttock, vanished and returned to curve round the other. It was a perfectly delivered slash, a testament to his artistry as a disciplinarian. Her buttocks shook slightly in response to the punishment, then her entire frame shuddered as the raw hurt of the blow spread through every pore.

But her response wasn’t what he had expected.

Wondering why there should be a difference, Max raised his cane and slashed a second blow across the tops of her thighs. Before he returned to the list of insults he wanted to see some evidence of normality in Megan’s reactions. The air was broken by a whistle. The sound of the crop on her skin was like the snapping of an icy, brittle twig. Her backside shook with the force of the impact, and again she stiffened.

The cellar was momentarily filled with the hiss of her escaping breath. The ball-gag didn’t allow her the opportunity to scream. It kept her mouth wide open but muted every sound she might make. Max was used to cries of muffled suffering, but this evening there were none. His frown deepened.

A second red line crept along her flesh beneath the first. The rounded cheeks were tense and trembling. The obvious pain of the stripes was enough to make his arousal harden into an urgent, obsessive demand. Her buttocks quivered and the sounds of the chains creaking told him that his victim was shivering in her bondage.

He circled her slowly, his eyes narrowing to slits as he studied her body. Her biceps were taut and well defined. The familiar curve of her back echoed every other time he had caned her bound and suspended body in this fashion. The roundness of her rear, the way the stripes on her cheeks slowly blossomed to red and painful welts: these were all sights he had seen and enjoyed before. And yet …

He spun round, marched to the wall of the cellar and snatched a pair of nipple clamps from a shelf. He returned to her and fixed one in place and then the other. The jaws bit hard into her bound breasts. He watched the soft bulb of each nipple yield to the powerful force of the rubber-edged clamps. The outer edges were crushed to a white and bloodless agony. Her position looked unbearable, insufferable. He heard her breath deepen in a series of agonised gasps. Yet it still wasn’t quite right.

Whirling from her side, returning to the shelves that lined the cellar walls, he grabbed a pair of weights and attached them to her clamps. They tugged the chains down, dragging at her flesh, punishing her skin mercilessly. The sight was excruciatingly exciting. Her breasts had been tightly bound. The modest mounds of flesh had been transformed into painful, unsightly tubes, the skin that bulged from the top a dusky grey, darkened by trapped blood. Her areolae and nipples were flushed to the lush purple of an angry sunset. When he added the extra weights, her torment looked complete. The weights dragged her breasts downwards, tearing at her nipples and tugging on her sensitive flesh. The torture looked exquisitely arousing.

Determined to know what was wrong, Max tore the mask from her face – and immediately understood why he had perceived a difference. He unfastened the ball-gag from her mouth, tossed it into a corner and said simply, ‘Hello, Aliceon.’

‘Max.’ She smiled weakly. ‘How are you?’

‘Puzzled,’ he admitted honestly. ‘I thought you were Megan.’

‘That happens a lot,’ Aliceon admitted. Garrulous by nature, she continued: ‘Because we’re twins people often mistake us for each other. I’ve had that happen so many times where people have come up to me, thinking I was Megan and saying, “Hi, Megan”, and I have to say, “I’m not Megan. I’m her twin sister Aliceon.”’

Max said nothing.

Aliceon’s smile turned conciliatory. Whatever torment she was suffering from the two stripes on her backside and the weight of the punishing clamps, she chose not to show her discomfort in her voice or her expression. It reminded Max that, aside from her propensity to talk too much, his wife’s twin shared a lot more with her sister than physical similarity. The two women had an identical appetite for pain and punishment.

‘Megan had an errand to run,’ Aliceon explained nonchalantly. ‘She asked me to take her place in the cellar this evening. She was the one who tied me up like this. We both know you like your women bound and helpless. Neither of us thought you would mind.’

Max chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. He didn’t particularly mind that Aliceon had replaced Megan for this evening’s escapade in the cellar. He appreciated the fact that his wife and her sister were equally happy to cater for his need to dominate and humiliate. On those occasions when he had been given the opportunity to punish both sisters simultaneously, Max had enjoyed some of the most memorable sex of his life. But he wasn’t comfortable with the idea that Megan and Aliceon had worked together to deceive him. The fact that Megan had tried to hide her absence suggested
she
was doing something of which he wouldn’t approve.

‘Where is she?’

‘I expect she’ll be back soon enough. She told me it would only take a couple of hours and –’

‘Where is she?’

‘And she was thinking of you and knowing you have a lot on your mind and didn’t want to trouble you by begging for permission or –’

‘WHERE THE HELL IS SHE?’

As he roared the question Max slashed his crop against Aliceon’s exposed rear. His aim was true and the crop sliced against both ruddy cheeks. There was no artistry in it: he had only struck her to stop her prevaricating and elicit the answer he wanted.

Aliceon gave a gasp of outraged surprise. Then, quickly, clearly anxious to avoid further punishment, she gasped, ‘Megan went to see a neighbour. She got a letter. She didn’t tell me which neighbour. She only said she was going over the road.’

‘Insurrection?’ he muttered. The word echoed like a hollow death knell in the blood-red nightmare of the cellar. He reached for his mobile phone and dialled a number.

Seven

2 Cedar View

THE TELEPHONE CHIRRUPED
noisily in the background but Tanya Maxwell ignored its shrill call. She pressed her face against her front window and sneered.

That dirty old bastard Tom was still ogling everyone on the View – and it looked as though this evening everyone on the View was giving him something to watch. His huge binoculars had done a complete circuit of the cul-de-sac from number three all the way round to her neighbours at number four. She watched the grizzled figure ease himself from her garden wall where he had been sitting and straighten his pants. From where she was standing it looked as if the dirty old bastard was sporting an erection. Her upper lip curled with disgust.

Tom brushed at his pants and then took a glance at his own house. For a moment Tanya thought he was going to head back to his home and treat himself to a tin of catfood and a night in front of a one-bar electric fire, or do whatever else it was that old people did when they closed the doors of their nasty little houses. But, to her surprise, Tom headed in the other direction, trudging deeper into the View. She strained to see where he was going but her window wouldn’t allow her to see any further on her own side of the road than
number
four. Quietly cursing him she scoured the opposite side of the street in search of something interesting to watch, anything that would take her thoughts away from the grim calculations she had made on the notepad by her armchair.

The telephone continued to ring.

Before moving to Cedar View, Tanya had spent her evenings in front of the TV set, watching the soaps and greedily devouring other people’s lives. The fact that her own life lacked the excitement of television drama was not something she often dwelt on. But she had regularly wondered why, if the soaps were supposed to reflect some sort of reality, they never showed someone like herself, sitting in front of a TV and living her life vicariously through a series of poorly scripted programmes.

Not that she watched soaps any more. Now that she lived on Cedar View there was always something more interesting to see than there had ever been on the most entertaining of soap operas. Her gaze flashed across the road to number three.

She scowled at the pristine front of the Smiths’ house, despising the couple even though she barely knew them. Mrs Smith had a snooty way about her that made Tanya feel instantly inferior. She supposed the woman was probably that way with everyone but for some reason she suspected that Jane Smith was particularly aloof towards her. Her scowl deepened as she remembered Mr Smith, perpetually standing on the front doorstep with his high-and-mighty cigars, occasionally glancing in her direction, never once bothering to give her a smile. She could feel her mood darkening as she glared at the neighbours’ unlit house. Quickly, she switched her gaze further up the street to number five.

A light shone in the front room of Joanne’s house, as well as in the hall. Knowing her neighbours, Tanya
realised
this was a sign that Joanne was out for the evening. She sniffed with disdain at the transparency of those who lived on Cedar View. Her contempt escalated as she stared at the water feature over the koi carp pond in front of number five.

Joanne was a bitch to work for. Tanya cleaned the woman’s house twice a week, polishing the stupid laminate floor, squirting polish on the pretentious leather settee and getting her bottom spanked every time Joanne found something out of place. Tanya’s hands went to the substantial flesh of her backside and rubbed the memory of the most recent sting, sure that the punishment had been undeserved. A mantelpiece ornament had been put back facing the wrong way. Joanne had got out her crop, Tanya had been commanded to bend over and show her bare backside, and Joanne had administered six swift and punishing stripes, giggling as she delivered the blows. Tanya, as usual, had been confused by the thrill of pain and pleasure. Being spanked or striped was a disconcerting experience. Her body invariably reacted to the punishment with a rush of sexual anticipation. Every time her bare backside was caned she could feel her sex growing wetter and her nipples turning hard and needy. She had been surprised to discover that even being spanked by a woman inspired those responses, and she had been frustrated to find that Joanne had no interest in helping her explore further the urges she awoke. After each punishment session at number five, Joanne instructed her to finish the cleaning properly and then disappeared for half an hour to the sanctuary of her bedroom.

It didn’t help that Joanne was a demanding employer who wanted her house transformed into a show home. Yet, no matter how much polish and spray Tanya put down, there was always a strange smell
lingering
around the woman’s house. Tanya thought the odour was reminiscent of something she knew, but she couldn’t quite place it. It might have been the koi carp in the front garden pond, but Tanya didn’t think so.

She wrestled the waistband of her pink tracksuit higher around her stout midriff and shifted her gaze away from Joanne’s. Joanne’s name was on the notepad next to some of the grim calculations and she didn’t want to think about the bleak picture that those figures painted.

Her scowl deepened as she stared at the Graftons’ property. Not for the first time she wondered why she was living on a street that was filled with so many snobs and snooty bastards. Not bothering to conceal her disgust, showing her teeth in a snarl of disapproval, she glowered at the Graftons’ house and the Graftons’ car and wished one of them would come to the window so she could scowl at them. Her cat, Mr Tiddles, black and sleek, leapt on to the sill beside her. Absently, Tanya reached out and stroked his ears. And still the telephone continued to ring.

Sighing with frustration, knowing who her caller would be, Tanya grudgingly gave up her place by the window and walked towards the telephone. She picked up the handset and held it to her ear without speaking.

‘Tanya?’

She recognised Max’s voice immediately. Breathing deeply, determined not to be controlled by his casual authority, she waited coolly for a moment before grunting, ‘Yeah?’

‘Megan’s gone missing.’

‘So?’

‘She’s in one of the houses on this street.’

‘So?’

‘So you clean half the houses on this street, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think it’s that many.’

Max sighed.

The obvious exasperation in his tone was amusing on this occasion but Tanya knew better than to test his patience too far. He was her neighbour and landlord and a year ago, prior to her moving into the house on Cedar View, they had enjoyed a brief and wholly disconcerting fling. Tanya believed herself to be a strong woman, the equal of every man she had ever met, yet Max McMurray had filled her with a need to be servile that was so powerful it had been frightening. He had been the first to teach her the pleasure of being disciplined. Unlike Joanne, Max was also happy to show Tanya that she could enjoy a supreme satisfaction after being aroused by such punishing foreplay. He had made her want to suffer the cruelty of his crop and, for a while, she had dreamt of being regularly and repeatedly disciplined by him. But, because he was married to Megan and involved with Megan’s sister, Tanya thought it would be sensible to end the relationship before it became any more perverse. She had been shocked to find herself subordinate to a man, uncomfortable that she was thrilled by his despicable punishments. She had ended their affair a month after Max secured her rental of the Cedar View property. Thinking back to that time, she supposed she should have ended the affair before Max introduced her to Joanne Jackson.