Chapter 1

Edward Pembroke looked out the classroom window at the foggy northern English fields. For a moment, he forgot his school pupils silently scribbling their test and cast his mind back to when he was their age. At fourteen, he had been a short, scrawny, shy blond teenager whose only ambition had been to get the attention of one of the girls in his class, but in vain. Now fifty-two, his hair was grey and thinning, and the six-foot schoolmaster had long since abandoned hopes of controlling his protruding paunch and regaining the youthful frame he once had.

He realized failure had happened slowly, then quickly. A failed attempt at a acting career, which resembled a hobby to others, but was actually a deeply desired dream. A disappointing time at university during which he had not found anything stimulating about his law degree beyond the cute students who ignored his advances. A failed attempt at a series of clerical positions at blue-collar building companies in which he found he could not deal with the machismo of working-class builders. Finally, those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach, and at thirty-three, Pembroke had gone into teaching. His strict father had long since given up on him and died soon after. His sister had gone to Australia twenty-five years earlier and come back once, leading to an awkward catch-up at a restaurant. Family, it turns out, was not something that Pembroke was ever going to have to rely on.

Young Edward had proudly believed he would never have to rely on his family. Yet he had scorned advice to “get on the property ladder” just as the housing bubble had grown in the ‘90s, preferring to save for trips to Southeast Asia, a rather onerous recreational drug habit, and an expensive flat in London that would now cost nearly twice his monthly salary to rent.

Firmly ensconced in middle age, the death of his father had not therefore been the only reason why, just a few years earlier, he had moved from his bedsit outside of London to a flat in Willowbridge, Norfolk. His parents’ house, which he had long derided as boring and reminiscent of his authoritarian childhood, was now his only chance of spending the latter half of his life in anything other than a shoestring existence. His sister had a successful career in Australia, and Pembroke realized that this was now his ticket to the suburban life he had once dismissed as boringly easy.

One month ago, his mother had finally passed away from cancer. The caring responsibilities toward his mother, his invisibility as he went about his childhood streets, and his complete lack of social life had brought home to Pembroke that time had come and gone, and the best part of his life was now over. What had he made of it? Nothing.

Now, though, he had at last something that so many more successful workers now craved: a two-story property separated from the nearest neighbors by fifty yards in several different directions. The gifts his mother had made to him to avoid inheritance tax now meant that he could face a pretty comfortable life. His sister seemed uninterested, save for the money that she seemed to only reluctantly accept. Deep within him, he understood his sister’s unwillingness to have anything to do with her parents or him. And it seemed very unjust that he should benefit from her distaste for her own family, but so be it.

“Sir, I’m finished!” shouted a nasally voice from the back. Pembroke immediately snapped out of his thoughts and remembered he was once responsible for and facing a classroom of thirty fourteen to fifteen-year-old girls and boys. He recognized the voice before turning around. “Simon, if you are finished, just check your answers. There is still five minutes left. I hope your answers are as good as your speed,” Pembroke rasped. A few voices chuckled.

“Sir,” Simon piped up, a mischievous glint in his eyes, “I’ve checked them three times already. I’m confident they’re perfect.”

“Well, Simon, let’s not rush perfection. Go through them again. It’s a good habit,” Pembroke turned back to his desk, glancing at the clock ticking away the remaining minutes of the test.

As he resumed his vigil, a low murmur began to spread through the classroom like wildfire. It seemed that Simon’s proclamation had emboldened his classmates. Pens that should have been scratching paper were now tapping impatiently on desks, and the once neatly aligned rows of students had started to resemble a group of restless birds ready to take flight.

“Sir, I think I need more time,” called out another voice, this time from the middle row. Pembroke sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly. “You all had ample time, Lucy. Manage it wisely next time.” He couldn’t help but notice Lucy exchanging triumphant glances with her friends.

A sudden burst of laughter erupted from the back. Pembroke raised his voice, attempting to regain control, “Alright, settle down, everyone. We still have a few minutes left, and I expect you to use them wisely.”

The unruly whispers didn’t subside. Pembroke, growing increasingly exasperated, decided to take a stand. “That’s it! The next person to disrupt this class will retake this test!” This threat did not make sense, but Pembroke was growing both desperate and had his eye on the clock. The empty threat worked for less than a minute before another voice broke the silence.

“Sir, are you going to punish us if we fail?” Pembroke winced and tried to maintain his composure. The voice belonged to Sarah Mainwaring, one of the many girls in his class who used their sexuality to tease Pembroke. Pembroke knew the pitfalls of any sort of interaction with his female pupils and tried to avoid their eyes at all times. He realized he could not hide his quickening breathing as he struggled to maintain his composure and avoid blushing. As he aged, any sort of banter had become more dangerous to pursue, and the initial shy interest many girls had expressed had turned to indifferent mockery and hostility.

“Right,” sighed Pembroke audibly. “The test is over, leave the paper on the table, and I will collect them. See you next week.” Despite the class (and test) ending a minute before appropriate, there were no complaints, and the pupils loudly grabbed their bags as if to escape a burning airplane to get out of the door while a few kept scribbling. Pembroke sat at his front desk and tried to remain impassive as the laughter and glances of his departing pupils tried to attract his attention.

The last remaining pupil was Sehar Chaudhary. Her eyes were downcast and Pembroke took the opportunity to glance and run his eyes over her a second longer than was safe. Was she displaying herself for him, were her downcast eyes and tardy walk out of the classroom a bashful invitation for him to admire her? Like all the girls at his school, Chaudhary wore her skirt more akin to a clubbing outfit than a school uniform. Her brown thighs disappeared up her green skirt tantalisingly close to their meeting point. Her short socks and skirt displayed half of her body in the form of her fit sleek legs. Her black hair hung over her face with her red lips (which ignored policy on make-up) showing through the dark bangs. Pembroke decided against a last look at her backside as she walked out of the door, ever mindful of the danger of being caught even when in apparent safety.

Dealing with his irresistible sexual attraction to the young girls in his class had been tortuous for him. The glimpses of white fabric between the thighs and up the skirts of girls in his front row, the heady feeling he got when they locked eyes on him to ask or answer a question, still got to him despite his stoic repression of his own sexuality during his classroom hours. His dour demeanour was partly a by product of the suppression of much of his human instincts.

‘If those young girls knew what I really wanted to do them’, smirked Pembroke to himself. Surely they knew, they knew they had this power. He hated them and loved them for it. Sehar Chaudhary, his latest fixation, could pass for a 25 year old model yet and he had to control himself over the 14 year old whose skirt rode right up to her hips while she bit her lips listening to him explain some problem while trying to avoid staring at the garish bright colors of her panties exploding from the brown and green of her flesh and skirt. Half English half Pakistani, she had not been hard to find online, like all his pupils. Pembroke had learned to know the ways of the internet well, the crimes of Gary Glitter having been a clarion call for being discreet and safe on the internet.

Pembroke thought on the contrast between the sober school girl, Chaudhary, and her instagram pictures. If anyone saw the photos he had saved on his computer of her, they would never have suspected they were sexualised pictures of a fourteen year old, rather it could have been Gigi Hadid. His favourite pictures were those without make up, with her hair up, which displayed her innocent, clear look which enabled him to match her photo with her knowledge of her true innocence. Her tiny taut waist which only slightly flared at the hips, enough to show her womanhood but slight enough to keep her youthful physique alive.

Pembroke had never been in trouble with the police. He had seen plenty of more risqué images than Ms Chaudhary clothed in a thong bikini, both in terms of lack of clothing and in maturity of the subjects. He had a few meetings with prostitutes in Cuba and in Thailand, with girls who were obviously very young, but he could not have any idea of their true age. The internet and the dark web satisfied his urges. These had been abated by a string of semi successful relationships including one serious 8 year living together relationship he had with a fellow teacher. It fell apart years after he had lost sexual interest in her. His addiction to pornography of all kinds never really cured what really ailed him, which was his lack of interest in anyone but the most beautiful women and girls who were clearly out of his league.

Edward Pembroke entered his own abode, his family home, of three bedrooms, a living room and conservatory and kitchen and several store cupboards. He resisted the urge to have a glass of wine and instead supped on green tea while watching the latest must see Netflix series. Bored, he began to scroll his phone. A burst of flesh from another teenage influencer piqued his interest. “I prefer men over 40 but am shy about approaching them in case I am rejected” was the byline over an image of a blonde girl in nothing but gym shorts and bra sucking her finger suggestively. Pembroke chuckled, but could not get the erotic thought from his head. Reaching under his trousers, he massaged his penis while reaching for his laptop and opening his pornhub page. He only rarely lapsed into his darker tastes and only on a particular laptop he kept hidden inside a bed header.

After climaxing, he put his phone and laptop away. He hoped for the day when his libido would desert him and leave him a more sane man. But it seemed that day would never come. Rather than focusing back on the TV series, his mind instantly returned to sexual desire, specifically Sehar Chaudhary.

There was one reason why Pembroke had recently thought more of his fantasies he had fought so hard to batten down. Since moving into his parents’ house, he realised that he had access not only to the house, but to the basement his father had built decades earlier in the 1970s in a fit of nuclear war hysteria after a particularly harrowing TV series. The basement had initially served as a store of cheap radios his father had bought from China in the 1990s when trying to start a business on the side which did not take. Since then it was largely unused saved for the washing and drying machines, which had been replaced by a smaller new version in the kitchen.

The basement was reachable by a door under the stairs, which opened onto another stairwell reaching down to a larger room the size of the living room and kitchen combined. There were no windows, but there was an air conditioning vent. Pembroke’s mother had been annoyed by the excruciating whirring of the washing machine, and his father had obligingly constructed a soundproofed partition separating the door at the bottom of the stairwell and the rest of the basement. The space in between was small and useless, save for a small chest of drawers which held nothing but spare bin bags. Pembroke had never thought much of the basement and had been unaware of the extra padding and wall put in until he had moved back in with his mother. Having become aware of it anew, his mind had raced with possibility. He already had a whole house, a whole four walls and a roof with which to call his own and to safely hide himself from the world. But he also had something which was a staple of so many erotic fiction stories he had read, a place in which he could hide not just himself but anyone else, specifically, a hapless victim.

There was nothing like the faint glint of hope to awaken the desire for sexual conquest. Pembroke was old, he was getting fat, and there was no good looking young girl who would look at him with anything other than pity, disgust or indifference. It was with sorrow that he bade farewell to the chance of bedding such women in his thirties though in truth he had never had a meaningful sexual encounter with anyone he had found attractive. The only attractive women he ever had consensual sex with were prostitutes, and the only women he had meaningful sex with were women whom he avoided seeing naked such was his lack of attraction to them.

He knew he could never persuade a young woman to willingly spend time with him let along have sex with him. But the basement ... he could not think of any use of it other than as a lurid sex dungeon. He could not get rid of it or fill it in and he couldn’t think of any other use of it, so the idle fantasy of its misuse, in moral terms, filled his head.

The thought of Sehar Chaudhary in his basement came to him moments after he had climaxed over some thirty-something lesbians indulging in some extremely unhygienic behaviour on pornhub. Would these thoughts never go away? He allowed himself to entertain the whimsy but also thought of the many ways in which any idea of holding a young woman prisoner would be utterly implausible, so as to banish it from his mind.

Firstly, he would have to kidnap them. Pembroke had never so much as punched someone in his life though he had often fantasised about violence. While he had seen awful things, sexual and non-sexual, on the internet he was not sure he would be able to carry them out himself. Striking a girl was one thing, in fact he sometimes wished he could, it was only fair given their torment of him. In fact, the older he got the more he felt corporal punishment was probably necessary for girls and boys. But actually holding her down while she cried for help?

He took his laptop and brought it down to his basement. He turned up the volume, and selected a youtube video entitled, “loud screaming” and started playing it. He winced, and left after closing the inner padded door, the downstairs outer door then went upstairs and closed the door to the stairwell. He listened. From the top of basement stairdoor, in his main hall, he could hear nothing. He opened the doors back up, even from the top of the stairwell, nothing. He opened the outer door, and heard something, then the padded door and winced again at the piercing screams. He repeated this several times and went into various different rooms upstairs to see if he could hear anything. But nothing was heard of the youtube videos of screams, nor of Metallica, nor female opera music.

Pembroke brought his laptop back upstairs and sat back on his sofa. He mused to himself that he could bring a girl into his basement, and no one would hear or know. One hurdle had been cleared. But still, he laughed, the idea was ridiculous and he would never entertain it.

“Mr Pembroke, your flies open” cried Sasha Duilk, from the front row. Mr Edward Pembroke, chalk in his right hand, instinctively looked down. Cue laughter from the year 4 pupils in front of him supposedly learning their maths. Giggles erupted around the classroom from girls and boys.

“Grow up” snarled Pembroke and he turned back to the board. “You are here to learn maths, not make jokes.”

Every so softly, Pembroke heard someone whisper “paedo.” He could not help but flinch. As an unmarried middle aged male, this was the worst accusation. He ignored it but remained fixated on the floor. “Now let’s carry on with this. Thomas can you finish this?” He called out one of the better behaved boys. He tried to remain calm. He had often thought of getting a different career. The stress of these kids was not even so great as the rabble had taught in London. But he did not want to attract attention in his home town.

This class was full of attractive girls. He suddenly wished he could teach just boys, or that he could ignore these girls that were tempting him.

After class he sat in his car. He was terrified of any accusations against him or even just rumours. He absentmindedly stared into the distance then suddenly realised he was looking right at a group of girls. He awakened himself, and began to start his car. He could see the girls look back at him, frowning as if to call him a weirdo.

Driving past them, he nodded and smiled curtly, looking back he could see them laughing. He recognised one of them, a Susan Gao. Asian, super intelligent, she was a first class maths pupil. She would take great pains in class to try and get him to make a mistake in explaining some concept. She had a tongue piercing and wore extremely short skirts and had dyed red hair. He had almost developed a crush on her, but thought he had quashed it.

Damn it, he thought. I hate these girls. I cannot have them but they can easily ruin me and torment me.

That night he binged on hard core pornography, starting at porn hub before relapsing through the dark web into more questionable content while also looking at legal but immoral videos of girls being whipped red and raw while screaming in Hungarian for mercy. He sat up to 3am. As he woke up the next day, he realised he had a problem.

Weeks passed and Pembroke became more at ease with the pupils again. He did this while indulging in the fantasy about having one of them in his basement. This gave him some power in this imaginary scenario. Meanwhile, he began renovating the basement. He didn’t really think anything would come of it but it was good to fix the place up. The old washing machine and dryer went. He installed lighting and scrubbed the place clean. Meanwhile, once his mothers will had resolved he began to complete the sale of their holiday home in France. This was going to give him some hefty cash and he began to wonder what to do with it.

The school holidays came and went. Pembroke went on a holiday to France where he completed his holiday home sale. He then satisfied his urges with some prostitutes he met through telegram though the risqué nature did not make the experience enjoyable. The thought of keeping a prisoner even sought him to read the novel “the collector” by John Fowles. Absences from porn only lasted a few days before he relapsed again.

Then in August, just before school got back, some asylum seekers were moved into a hotel in the Willowbridge town centre. It was decried as being full of “military aged males” however it was also reported that there were a number of families. It was reported that children at the hotel would soon be attending Willowbridge High School.

Before school opening, Mr Pembroke was invited to give a talk to some new pupils. Other teachers had told him that it was suspected that some of the families had been trafficked as they included young children and that they did not all seem to be related.

The day before the invitation talk, Pembroke met up with some old friends from the area in the pub. He had not had many friends but felt it important to keep in touch especially as he was living here. If things did not work out here, he would probably sell up here and move to a larger city but in the meantime he did not want to seem like a weirdo.

One of these old friends was Nigel, now a police detective. He, Edward, and two others, talked for hours over pints over old times and their families. Pembroke felt a tang of regret over not having a family though did express an interest in joining some clubs to find a partner. Thoughts of schoolgirl fantasies, porn and sex disappeared from his mind as he realised he had not had much interaction outside of the teacher pupil dynamic recently.

However, this changed when Nigel brought the subject to the asylum seekers.

“You see, we don’t know who this lot are. We think they are Albanian, but they say they are Kurdish. How hard can it be to get that right?” Nigel grew exasperated. He made his feelings clear that he wanted them gone and asylum seekers sent packing, in general.

“There are a group of young girls and boys in that hotel who are supposedly sisters and brothers, but they’re not. We don’t know who they are, but they might be trafficked. Today, a bunch of them checked out of the hotel and have just legged it; it happens all the time. One of them was supposedly 15, but who knows. A lot of them have family somewhere else and don’t want to say who, as their family is here illegally. And a lot of the rest are going to work as prostitutes somewhere, but we don’t even know. No one knows.”

Pembroke started wondering about the hotel full of kids and thought of the young girls and what they were going to do here. He wondered idly if he might find them on Telegram advertising their services.

“Four days ago, this girl just upped and left. She claimed to be 16 but might have been 25. We can’t stop them leaving, and we have not got a clue where she might be now. She is either happier where she is or she is working in a cannabis factory or turning tricks in London or Manchester. Honestly, there are too many of them to cope.”

Pembroke agreed and wondered out loud when the system would collapse. “They should really bring in ID cards. She might be in Ireland now; a lot of them go over there now.”

“You’re right,” Nigel answered him. “Anyway, we can only do what we can. Unless a dead body turns up, we just make a note in the system and wait for them to appear somewhere.”

The conversation turned to other matters, and eventually, they all went their separate ways. Pembroke wondered how tomorrow’s talk would go.