“This is Pacific Place,” said Emma.  “Lots of nice shops here.  This could be fun.”

It was, in a way.  Edwin explained that they wanted some general background shots of Jill and I enjoying ourselves.  Edwin was nothing if not organised.  He gave us each a brand name shopping bag with empty boxes inside, which we carried with us.  Later on he gave us a couple more to demonstrate our progress.

Pacific Place was a huge modern shopping precinct under a tall office block.  It was clean and open and airy, with multiple mezzanines and the open spaces criss-crossed by escalators.  At one end a pianist played on a grand piano, the music echoing around the marble surfaces.

Edwin had two camera operators.  They positioned themselves on mezzanine levels and shot us in the throng of people as we window-shopped and went up and down the escalators.  At one stage he asked permission from one store manager to film inside his shop, claiming it was for a travel program, and sounding totally plausible.  The manager was delighted and was keen to show of his gorgeous antique paintings and teapots.  We looked admiringly, trying not to be conscious of the now close-up cameras.  Thank goodness it was air-conditioned, for I felt the camera would be showing every pore of my face, so close did it come.  At the same time the cold air made our bodies betray us, as our unfettered nipples poked at the thin fabric covering them.  The cameras could not help but record those, either, I noticed.

After a couple of hours there, we went to the Jade Market under a flyover on the Kowloon side, with more shots of tourists browsing amongst the stalls.  It was a small, intimate little market, predominantly under cover of awnings and very low key.  The jade was wonderful and the people friendly, but we bought nothing.  Instead Edwin paid the stallholders for the privilege of filming there.

It was dark by this stage and we were hungry and just a little tired.  Edwin took us to a restaurant nearby and we spent two enjoyable hours tasting and then stuffing ourselves with Cantonese cuisine and drinking what I reckoned was a rather dubious Chinese wine by the name of Great Wall, although admittedly the third bottle tasted pretty good.

I don’t know what time it was when we left the restaurant.  The night was sticky and humid.  Edwin wanted to do some shots in the night market nearby, so we duly tramped several blocks and spent more time wandering the jammed precincts of Temple Street, looking at the cheap clothes, pirated cassettes and all manner of garish but fun stuff.  The wine had had a decided effect on the three of us, and Jill and I were in rollicking good form, we thought, joking with the stallholders and finding much that was uproariously funny.  I explained to Jill that it all added to the character development, and that there was nothing so true to life as two tipsy Australian girls in a foreign country. 

As the stalls began to close Edwin explained that he wanted to do the final scene a couple of blocks away.  We grabbed a passing taxi and found ourselves in a quiet street between blocks of apartment buildings.  It was not an alleyway or anything – rather a deserted residential street that was reasonably well lit.

Edwin explained what he wanted.  We were to be walking back to our hotel and become conscious of a van following us at the same pace.  It was a white Toyota Hiace with no windows in the rear, which Edwin had evidently pre-arranged to meet us at this place.  We followed his directions.

The street sloped slightly upward.  We passed the Toyota parked without lights and were about fifty paces in front when it started its engine and the lights came on.  It started to crawl up the street very slowly behind us.  I gestured to Jill and we quickened our pace.  I was conscious of Emma and one of the cameramen on the other side of the street up ahead, while the second camera operator – a woman - filmed us walking towards her.  I tried to look nervous, and found it wasn’t hard.  The wine had reduced my inhibitions, as well as my coordination, and I found emotions more readily available.

The engine speeded up and we broke into a run, our heels echoing against the buildings.  Up ahead, near a streetlight, two men stepped out from a doorway.  One was solid and formidable in jeans and a dark tee shirt, while the other, dressed similarly, was short and slimmer. 

Edwin called a halt at that point while close-up shots were taken of the two men pulling flick knives from their belts, then the action was on again.  Jill grabbed me by the hand and we started to cross the road diagonally away from them, but they moved to cut us off.  We halted, looking about.  The pair looked frightening and suddenly it wasn’t difficult to act. 

We turned to retreat, but the van was almost on us.  It came to an abrupt halt with a squeal of brakes and two more men leapt out.  Jill and I went in different directions as we tried to elude the four.  There was a flash of a knife as one grabbed me by the wrist then had his arm around my throat, the knife hovering an inch from my cheek. 

“No noise!” came the harsh command. 

Jill saw me caught and hesitated, long enough to be seized herself.  Her arm was twisted behind her as we were hauled towards the van.  Here Edwin halted the proceedings long enough for the woman with the camera to climb inside ahead of us.  It only took a minute, but Jill and I remained locked in our captors’ grips.  Then we were bundled into the back of the van, thrown on our stomachs and promptly sat on by two of our assailants while the other two climbed in the front.  The engine started and we were moving, as my captor dragged my wrists behind me and proceeded to cross and tie them.

The absence of the knife and the knowledge that we wouldn’t cause a disruptive scene in the street now gave me the encouragement to struggle and protest for the benefit of the camera in the brightly lit interior of the van.  Jill joined in, screaming abuse and demanding to be freed, all of which required little motivation under the circumstances.  That was when one of the men delved into a brown leather holdall and produced two ball gags threaded on white cotton rope which were forced into our mouths with some muttered curses in Cantonese as we tried to keep our mouths shut.  The men were obviously used to this behaviour, for my man grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head back without a moment’s pause, jamming the ball behind my teeth as my mouth opened involuntarily.  The cord was tied tightly behind my head, which I didn’t like at all, for we normally use straps at Bilboes for ease and comfort. 

Comfort did not seem high on the list at this point, for more lengths of rope appeared from the holdall and my ankles were quickly crossed and bound, the tails of the ropes being tied to my wrists in what was perhaps not the most stringent hogtie I’d ever experienced, but certainly very effective.  I looked up at the woman on the camera, who had clearly got it all on film and was taking a lingering shot of Jill’s now prone form, emphasised by a hand of one of the men that roved over her legs and buttocks before sliding easily under her skirt.  Jill squirmed and mmmphed, glowering at him.  His colleague said something sharply to the man, who muttered and withdrew his hand.

By this time we had turned the corner at the end of the road.  I had seen the second cameraman filming the struggle and the pair of us being bundled into the van, and I could fully imagine the shot of the van driving off into the night.  When we turned the corner I expected us to halt and wait for the other cameraman, Edwin, and Emma.  But nothing happened.

We must have travelled for five minutes before I looked at Jill and raised a questioning eyebrow.  She nodded imperceptibly, furrowing her brow in concern.  I struggled to roll over, and was part way there when a hand seized my breast through my dress and pulled me face down again.  I squealed my outrage into the rubber ball, but it sounded pretty weak amidst the noise of the road and the engine.  The indifference of our captors and the lack of any cessation to the scene abruptly made a shiver run down my spine and I felt the cold hand of fear grip my stomach.  Jill and I had been conned.  We’d all been conned – Monica, Emma, all of us.  This was no acted scene.  This was the real thing. 

A tear rolled down my cheek and I looked at Jill, her face pressed into the shabby carpet of the van floor.  Her eyes were closed and I could see her hands exploring the ropes in their vicinity – the ropes which held her ankles crossed and her bent legs open.  I could also see there were no knots she could reach.  These men were good. 

They were also smokers.  They sat on the floor against the rear doors and chain smoked dispassionately as we drove through the night, two bound and gagged females whose futures were suddenly very, very uncertain.

*   *   *

I could not see my watch, nor those of any of the other person in the back, but I estimated we must have driven for maybe an hour or so.  The bright light in the interior remained on while the air became stuffy with smoke and the smell of five human beings in various stages of restraint, fear, and indifference.  We seemed to leave the noise of the city, and to speed up on what may have been country roads.  At one stage we climbed over some hills on a twisting, turning road that made me feel sick.  The alcohol I had drunk heightened my feelings and my thoughts kept darting about to all manner of terrifying possibilities ahead of us. 

As the journey lengthened the shocking realisation occurred to me that we were heading into China!  THE People’s Republic of China!  I nearly wet myself, such was the powerful and scary image I had of China in my mind – a place where the rule of law was irrelevant, where nobody would speak English and where no one would care what happened to us.  How would Monica or Emma ever trace us?  I began to sob to the extent that I could through the rubber ball in my mouth.  The net result was that my nose ran and tears rolled down my cheeks.  Jill looked across at me with her big empathic brown eyes that tried to comfort me but could not.

We finally pulled off the road into a driveway where gravel crunched under the tyres.  We halted momentarily and there was the sound of some sort of motorised industrial roller door opening, then closing after we had driven through.  I got the feeling we were inside some sort of warehouse, for the floor was obviously smooth concrete. 

The engine stopped and the rear doors opened.  Our two jailors untied our ankles and the connections to our wrists before hauling us to our knees and half-dragging us out of the van.  As the blood returned to our feet we stood unsteadily in the gloom of overhead fluorescent lights, only a few of which were working.  The woman with the camera, and the two men who had been in the front seat disappeared towards the door.  There was a discussion between the two remaining ones, the smaller, slimmer one evidently being in charge.  They each grabbed one of us by the arm and pulled us towards a corner of the warehouse where a partition had been built to create a separate room.

A flimsy-looking plywood door was opened and we were dragged inside.  The room was about four metres square, and contained two foam rubber mattresses covered in a gaudy material on the stained concrete floor.  The rest of the place was bare, save a bucket half full of water next to one wall.  The room was constructed in the corner of the building with outside walls of steel cladding on two sides and the timber partition on the other two.  It was all grey and dirty, with light coming from a single fluorescent light suspended from the high roof. 

The slim one reached into a corner behind one of the mattresses and came up with a long length of rusty chain, one end of which he locked around Jill’s neck.  He ran the other end between the steel corner column and the cladding then locked the other end around my throat.  I tried to recoil from the touch of his hands and the cold dirty feel of the chain, but the big man held me still, not missing the chance to grope my breasts when the other had been busy with Jill. 

The slim one pointed to the bucket.  “Toilet,” he said tersely, then the pair turned and left, locking the door behind them, leaving us standing there, staring mutely at each other.  I felt the tears of despair begin again.  Jill moved close to me and made little grunting noises, turning her back to me so that our bound wrists touched.  I realised what she intended and obediently held my hands steady as she searched for the knots and twisted her body to reach them. That’s when the lights went out and we were left in the pitch darkness.

 Because our wrists were crossed the movement was limited, and she could only use one hand at a time.  Finally she managed to undo the critical knot and I felt the ropes loosen and eventually I pulled my hands free.  I quickly undid the rope securing my gag and extracted the drool-covered ball from my mouth.  It took only a minute to free Jill.  We hugged each other in the darkness and I literally cried on her shoulder.

*   *   *

The night passed slowly in the dark recesses of that warehouse.  We had no idea if we were still in Hong Kong or if we had slipped across the border somewhere.  Jill did her best to reassure me that Monica and Emma would track us down, that we would come out of this all right, but I was not easily convinced.  We finally fell asleep in each other’s arms, trying to ignore the discomfort of the chains about our necks.

The grey light of dawn brought another warm, sticky day.  There were sounds of life in the warehouse outside our immediate prison.  At length the door opened and one of our captors from the previous night deposited two bowls of some sort of gruel on the floor for us and left without a word, despite our entreaties for him to tell us what was happening.  We ate the stuff with the small china spoons but it was bland and unappetising.

That was when the slim guy reappeared, this time with another man we had not seen before. 

“This man is Mr Tai,” said Slim.  “We call him Tiger Tai.  By coincidence with his name, he is very good with rope, and he will be looking after you with our photographer for the next little while.  You will do exactly what he says, or you will be very sorry.  Tiger has been trained in the art of Japanese rope bondage, in which you will spend some time.  It is good for white women to learn these oriental arts, and I think it will suit you.”

I studied Tiger Tai.  He was a big man – tall and well proportioned, perhaps in his late thirties.  I thought it odd that he wore glasses.  Somehow it did not fit with a more fearsome image he might have had otherwise.  Slim disappeared and Tiger stood looking at us for some moments as we knelt, chained, on the mattress, still in our bright clothes that we had worn for the shooting in the shopping centre that now seemed an age ago. 

“Both of you – on your stomachs.”

“What are you going to do to us?” Jill asked, as we reluctantly turned face down on the mattresses.

“You’re to be prepared for inspection.”

“Inspection?  By whom?  What for?  What’s going to happen to us?”

Tiger sighed.  “Girls ask so many questions.  Always chatter.  No wonder we have to shut you up.”  He knelt astride Jill and pulled her head back by the hair.  It was a gentle movement, not the rough treatment we had been accorded the previous night.  Jill tried vainly to protest as he picked up the white ball gag Jill had worn on arrival here and expertly worked it behind her teeth and knotted the rope at the nape of her neck.  Her wrists were likewise quickly bound palm-to-palm and cinched in what I recognised as an expert manner.  Within another minute I was likewise bound, with a hard rubber ball securely fastened between my jaws.

Tiger unlocked the chains from our neck and helped us to our feet before shepherding us out into the warehouse. 

In the daylight I could now get a better look around with light coming through several translucent panels in the roof, as well as from the fluorescent lights, most of which were now operating.  I guessed the place was about fifty metres by twenty, the central roofline supported by a steel column on each frame.  Much of the interior was taken up with storage of what looked like construction material – scaffolding frames, some sort of dis-assembled crane, large sections of timber formwork and so on.  A few vehicles were also parked amidst all of this, including the van we had arrived in.

At the end opposite the roller door, in the corner opposite our partitioned prison, an area seemed to have been left clear, and it was here that a woman was setting up camera equipment and lighting.  I recognised her as the video operator who had accompanied us in the van the previous night. Apart from her, the place was quiet and deserted.
Gromet's Selfbondage & Mummification Plaza
www.dajungle.com/selfbondage
“This is Serina Ng,” said Tiger, directing us toward the corner.  He pronounced the word as ‘Nnnng’, with the barest hint of a ‘g’.  More like the only sound I could make with a ball in my mouth.  “Very good photographer.”  I got my first really good look at her since the darkness and confusion of the previous night.  She was tall and slim – the usual Asian nightmare for western women to compete with – and wore black jeans and a black silk blouse with nothing under it from the look of her.  Unlike Emma, who had the Asian body with western breasts, Serina was not over-endowed in the latter department, but nor would she ever have to worry about droop.  She eyed us up with a expression that suggested she was looking forward to the morning’s events.  Whatever her thoughts, I saw no source of comfort there.  “Now,” continued Tiger, “I hope you will do as I say and life will be much more easy for all of us.”

In the corner area there were several coils of rope - some of the white cotton kind that we used at Bilboes and some brown stuff of a much coarser type, that I did not at all like the look of.  There was also a nasty-looking steel frame like a huge four-poster bed that looked as if it might have unpleasant ramifications for a couple of bound females.  I looked at Jill and she rolled her eyes.

Serina was setting up a tripod and mounting a video camera on it.  Beside her on a chair was a Canon SLR with several rolls of film.  She said something to Tiger, pointing to the beam overhead.  I looked up and my heart sank at the sight of a long rope looped over two pulleys about a metre apart, hanging from a steel beam.

Tiger unhitched the rope from where the two ends were looped over a cleat on a column, then brought one end across to me and attached it to the cinch rope on my wrists.  He positioned me under one of the pulleys then located Jill under the other.  With a steady pull using only one hand he hauled on the rope and I found myself in a nasty strappado with my arms pointing to the roof and my head to the floor.  I grunted my displeasure into the gag.  That was when he tied Jill’s wrists to the other end, while she was standing upright. 

As he let go of the rope the weight of my arms pulled them down, thus hoisting Jill’s arms upward.  The bugger was playing us off against each other over the freewheeling pulleys. 

I realised Serina had begun filming as Tiger had started tying.  She continued until we had levelled out, both in a kind of half-strappado that did not allow us to straighten out properly but at least was not as bad as my first taste.  It was an awkward position in that unlike a normal strappado I could not rest my full weight against it, without pulling Jill into a more severe position.  The more I thought about it, the more I realised how devious it was.  I had the choice of being able to stand erect and relatively comfortably – but only at the expense of seeing poor Jill bent over with her arms in the air behind her – or else the positions were reversed.  The other option was both of us being in halfway house and neither being comfortable.  This, I was later to learn, was one of the first tenets of Japanese bondage.

Serina put aside the video and began taking stills of us in various positions and with atmospheric lighting to emphasize the dinginess of the warehouse surroundings.  Obediently we took it in turns to stand up straight or to bend over as Tiger directed us, sometimes standing back to back, sometimes facing each other, sometimes side by side.  All the while Serina was doing her thing. 

I thought she had finished when she finally put the wretched camera down, only to see her start erecting white backdrop sheets for a further round of arty shots.  Then she was done, or at least for the moment, anyway, for she departed from the warehouse but left her cameras and gear behind.  My arms and shoulders were starting to hurt now.  Tiger approached me and pushed my head down again, allowing Jill to stand up.  He walked behind her and lifted her skirt above her waist.  Jill mmphed in surprise and protest as he slipped his hand under the waistband of her skimpy black knickers and pulled them down.  She tried to struggle but he simply pushed her head down, allowing the weight of my arms to pull hers up to the point of equilibrium again.  He removed the knickers entirely then smoothed her skirt down again.  Jill’s angry and startled expression was replaced by a quizzical look. 

“You won’t need these,” he said off-handedly, before turning to me.  This time I was the one allowed to straighten up as he lifted the hem of my dress and repeated the undressing process.  As though nothing had happened he then    took a spare chair and seated himself in the corner to read a newspaper. 

I looked at Jill.  Her head was level with her waist, her arms, like mine, now at forty-five degrees up from the horizontal.  Her sky blue silk blouse was the worse for wear.  We had been wearing the clothes for perhaps eighteen hours now, around the markets, then through the struggle, in the van and chained up through the night.  The morning was muggy and we were both sweating with the strain we were currently under.  Dark patches showed under Jill’s arms and in the middle of her back where the material clung to her body.  A line of saliva dropped slowly from the edge of her gagged mouth to pool on the concrete floor.Gromet's Selfbondage & Mummification Plaza - 
www.dajungle.com/selfbondage
I felt my red dress also clinging to my body with tiny drops of perspiration running down my temples and down between my breasts.  The air seemed stifling.  I wondered how long we were to be kept like this. I mmphed softly to Jill, motioning to the rope holding her and indicating her to go down.  I watched as she bent down further, forcing her arms up painfully higher, while I eased my back and straightened up again.  I counted to sixty, grateful that Jill was prepared to take my suggestion on trust without necessarily realising what I was up to.  At sixty seconds I grunted again and bent down myself.  Jill at once got the idea.

We continued this way for maybe half an hour, until there was a rattle from the other end of the warehouse and the roller door began to rise.  A white Mercedes appeared and drove down the central aisle between the stored equipment.  Tiger jumped up from his chair and came to stand beside us.

“Big boss’s man, come to make choice,” Tiger said out of the corner of his mouth.  Choice?  I thought.  What was he talking about?  I did not like the sound of this at all.

The car stopped and a tall man got out.  He was about thirty with rimless glasses and a long lean face that gave me no comfort.  His dark suit was immaculately cut and, like the car, left no doubt as to where this man stood in life’s pecking order.  He said something to Tiger who lifted my head and made me straighten up.  I squeaked into the gag because Jill was slow in bending down and the sudden move pulled at my arms.  Tiger unzipped my dress from neck to hem and pulled it wide. The man smiled coldly and moved across to stand in front of me.  He cupped my chin and turned my head slightly from side to side, then ran his hands over my breasts, squeezing each nipple as he went, making me cry out into the gag.  He grunted and let his hand drop to my crotch, his finger delving in to my sex.  I closed my eyes and squirmed. 

Abruptly the finger was gone and the back of my dress was being lifted for inspection before the man turned his attention to Jill.  Her skirt was undone and fell to the floor and her blouse was opened for examination.  She, too, received the pinch and finger treatment.  The man seemed to pause at this point, taking a step back and eyeing us critically as we stood, bent over, our heads lifted just enough to watch him.

“This one,” he said in English to Tiger, pointing to Jill.

*   *   *

When Dark Suit and his Mercedes had gone, Tiger did likewise.  Jill and I looked at each other in misery.  What had just happened?  What terrible selection had just taken place?  I could not stop the tears welling over again. 

A few minutes later Tiger was back with Serina and Slim.  Tiger was pushing a large trunk mounted on rubber-tyred castors.  It was about the size of a small office desk but slightly lower.  It was made of aluminium, in much the same way as those cases for camera gear, and was secured with two large lockable clasps.  Tiger halted in front of us.

“You two must behave while I prepare you – “ he nodded at Jill “ for travelling to Macau.”

What?  I could not believe it.  He was separating us!  And he was sending Jill to Macau, wherever that was!  Jill shook her head wildly and made desperate whining noises from behind the rubber ball wedged in her mouth.  I did likewise, terrified for Jill and at being left alone myself.  I wanted to say that we would arrange a ransom, if that was what they wanted, but my output was just a series of garbled high-pitched nasal complaints.

Tiger had the answer for our struggles, for he stood behind Jill and pulled on her rope, forcing me back into the doubled over position.  He untied the pulley rope from Jill’s wrists and re-tied it around her neck, before stepping back.  I tried to straighten instinctively, for my position was so strained, but the rope at once went tight around Jill’s neck and she whined in distress.  At once I eased off, but it was so difficult to hold the position without putting any load on the rope.

“You will stay that way while I redo these ropes,” Tiger said.  “Any problems from either of you and I will walk away and leave one of you to slowly strangle and the other to do the strangling.  Understand?”

“Uh-huh,” said Jill. 

“Uh-huh,” I repeated, knowing now that we were in the hands of a master.

I noticed that Serina was filming again.  From that point I stared at the ground, or looked between my legs at what was happening to poor Jill.  Tiger pulled up her skirt, refastening it about her waist and re-buttoning her blouse.  I thought this odd at the time, somehow out of keeping with our predicament and Tiger’s apparent role.

He undid the ropes on her wrists before retying them with her forearms horizontal across the small of her back, left hand touching right elbow and vice versa.  For this he used the ugly coarse brown rope that I was sure must be scratchy and uncomfortable.  He bound her wrists and then wrapped four turns of rope about her upper body – two above her breasts and two below, pinioning her arms to her body.  Securing these ties at her wrists he took the still-long tails over her shoulder to twist and loop between her breasts through the ropes around her body before returning over the other shoulder to be tied at the rear.

“This is called Shinju,” he said to nobody in particular. “In English, the Pearls, because of what it does to the breasts.”  He gently cupped each of Jill’s breasts in a big hand.  She shuddered, closing her eyes.  Abruptly he undid the rope about her neck and allowed me to straighten up.  I was trembling with the effort by this time, although it could not have been more than a few minutes that I had had to endure. With a few quick loops he tethered the rope around a cleat on a nearby steel post, while keeping hold of Jill in the other hand.

Serina requested a halt to proceedings at this point, as she snapped off a few shots with the Canon, before returning to the video.  Tiger made Jill sit on the ground where he bound her legs loosely above the knees and more tightly at the ankles.  This done, he walked to the corner of the warehouse and picked up a black shapeless object.  As he returned I saw that it was a discipline helmet, with only a small opening for the nose.

Jill struggled violently, shaking her head and mewing into her gag, but Tiger effortlessly rolled her on to her stomach and methodically worked the leather hood over the lovely blonde hair before lacing it up down the back.  Jill appeared to go limp, as though in final recognition that she was helpless and had no say in events that were about to happen to her. 

Slim stood up from where he had been relaxing on the trunk watching the show.  He opened the trunk and I saw that the sides were perhaps six or seven centimetres thick, made up of some sort of sandwich-type material – a foam layer between the inner and outer aluminium skins.  Inside, the box appeared to be filled with what looked like pillows or sand bags.  Tiger pulled them out in three armloads and I gathered from the way he did it and the crushing sound they made that they were simply a variety of different sized beanbags. Following the beanbags came a small aluminium box about thirty centimetres on a side, with one face missing and a kind of U- cut out in an adjacent side.  Two stiff plastic tubes trailed from the side with the cut out. 

Tiger sorted the beanbags into piles and began replacing some in the trunk. The first was one that seemed to cover the whole of the bottom of the trunk.  With this in place, Tiger picked up Jill as easily as one might a cat, and carried her to the box.  Jill was again squirming and crying, her desperate moans coming from under the helmet, but in her bound state she could do little.  Tiger laid her on her back in the trunk then bent over and spoke to her in a low voice that I could not hear.  Serina zoomed in for some more still shots.

Jill was motionless.  I could see her breasts through the silk of her blouse, heaving in their rope surrounds as she lay on the cushion, her skirt having slid back to her waist and her bound legs hanging over the top of the end panel.  She had obviously finally decided that fighting her captors would only get her hurt.  Slim made to grope her crotch but was stopped by Tiger’s big hand on his wrist and something said sharply in Cantonese.

Tiger began to methodically pack some more bags around her body before picking up the aluminium box with the tubes.  I saw at once how it fitted over her head, obviously to provide protection against the bags that were still to be placed.  Tiger secured the tubes inside, evidently poking them through holes in the floor somewhere. Then the remainder of the bags went in, as Tiger folded Jill’s legs down on her, securing her with a single wide strap over her shins that trapped her legs totally.  He finished off by removing her strappy sandals and squishing them in beside her.

I watched, tears streaming down my face as the last bags were packed around poor Jill until they were above the level of the walls of the trunk.  Tiger squished and prodded them until it seemed he could find no further space to fill, then closed the lid.  It did not shut fully, and it was only by Slim sitting on it that Tiger could do up the clasps.  I could imagine Jill pressed upon all sides by the claustrophobic bags, unable to move, see, hear or speak beneath the thick layers of insulation and filling, and I lost it at that point, as Tiger began to push the trunk towards the van.

“Nnnnnnnnnmmp!” I screamed into my gag, tugging furiously at the rope that still kept me roughly in one position.  I ran at Tiger in my rage but he was out of reach and my arms jerked upwards, pulling me to an abrupt halt.  Slim laughed as I screamed again and lashed out but I could do nothing.  Serina followed the pair with the video camera still filming, as the heavy aluminium box was loaded into the back of the van and the doors closed.  Slim climbed into the front and the van slowly drove away, taking Jill out of my life, leaving me a lonely helpless prisoner in the warehouse.