Chapter 2

Victoria Berry had wonderful curves. She was blessed with large round natural breasts, each graced with a wide, perfectly pink areola and a puffy dome-shaped nipple. Her bottom was also gloriously curved: her full buttocks swayed gently as she walked, inviting the attraction of all who spied her. Her face too was round – not pudgy, but naturally broad, with cheeks whose roundness echoed that of her breasts and buttocks. Her eyes were wide and moon-shaped, giving her a permanently curious and enthusiastic air, as if she were fascinated and delighted by anything and everything she came into contact with.

At the moment, said wide eyes were gazing up into Giles Byard-Jones’ face – and he was grinning back – principally because he had already fucked her tits, and her cunt, and her arse, and was now blissfully hoping to finish off in her throat. And what a throat! The first time he had fucked it, some eight months ago, he had been amazed to discover that it was even possible for his cock – and it was a big cock, he congratulated himself – to bottom out in a woman’s gullet. His ex had hated sucking his dick, and so he had gone looking elsewhere for that particular pleasure. And here she was: Vicky Berry, the ex’s best friend – ex-best friend, that is – church youth worker, pillar of the community, admired and adored by all, gazing into his face with wide delighted eyes, as he pounded his fat cock deep into her round, open mouth.

Vicky had a way of producing the most delightfully obscene noises when he fucked her face – a sort of cross between a duck quacking and a toilet backing up. To the world it announced filth, and to Giles degradation – submission, to be precise. Giles liked that: the ex had enjoyed sex, but had not pandered to his more demanding preferences. Vicky, on the other hand, seemed to want to earn his approbation. And so she quacked and gagged just the way he liked it best, allowing her saliva to dribble and drip down her chin onto her full round tits, and letting great ropes of spit swing and dangle off his big shaft, as she gazed wide-eyed, and apparently delighted, into his face.

“Oh yeah, baby, you’re such a dirty whore,” muttered Giles.

“That’s why you like me,” grinned Vicky, removing her lover’s stiff cock from her mouth to beat her face with it, letting all those gloopy spit-strings spatter all over her cheeks and forehead, “‘cause I’m a filthy throat-fucking slut – and you like that, don’t you, babe? You like nasty, evil, adulterous church-going whores, don’t you, Mister B-J? You know how to treat me, don’t you, you dirty bastard?!”

“Oh yeah, filthy Catholic bitches who preach goodness and purity one moment and suck my big cock the next – that’s what I like!” replied Giles, warming up to Vicky’s conversational filth.

“Go on then, Mister B-J, fucking ram it in again, all the way down, make your church-whore fucking puke on that big dick! Make me – mmmggg...”

Vicky’s instructions were cut short, as Giles did precisely as she asked. Actually, not entirely precisely: he never made her puke, for her technique was too good for that – but he loved it when she said that sort of thing: it made him feel powerful, and he liked being powerful. He lifted his hand and slapped Vicky sharply on her right cheek, feeling the impulse travel through to his cock. She glubbed, pulling back off him just enough to say, “Oh yeah, slap me baby, go on, hurt this fucking slut!” before plunging her throat back onto his shaft. Giles roared his approval with a stream of obscenities, speeding up his face-fucking whilst alternately slapping her face and tits, each strike eliciting a squeal of mock-pleasure from the buxom blonde. “Yeah, harder, go on, fucking punish me, I’m such a dirty fucking whore!” screeched Vicky.

Giles sensed the cum rising from his balls, felt his throbbing shaft growing stiffer. “Oh yeah, bitch, what’ll it be today?” he grunted. “Face or throat?”

“All over my fucking slut-face, big boy!” squealed Vicky, her mouth and round eyes wide with delight. “Go on, make me even prettier!”

But it was then that the doorbell rang. “FUCK!” swore Giles, as he hastily grabbed his clothes from a pile on the floor and pulled on jeans and T-shirt. “Fucking Amazon deliveries, at this time of the morning! Stay here, babe, I’ll be back in a minute.”

As Giles’ footsteps pounded down the staircase, Vicky lay back and giggled. She tidied her hair, wiped some of the spit off her face, then lay back on the king-sized bed, massaging her large breasts as she waited.

And waited.

She heard the murmur of voices from downstairs. But she knew not to make an appearance – she was, after all, a well brought-up church-going twenty-something, and it would be best not to draw attention to the fact that she was fucking the husband of her ex-best friend. Instead, she reached over, extracted a cigarette from her pack on the night-stand and, striking a match, lit it.

Vicky relished the feeling of her lungs soaking up the nicotine, the calming tingling sensation slowly suffusing her body. She took a deep drag, lay back, and directed a perfectly-formed cone of smoke towards the ceiling, watching it bounce off, part and diffuse around the room.

And so she waited, smoking with one hand while the other cupped and squeezed her breasts, thumb and forefinger gently tweaking her full nipples, fingers lazily tracing the outline of her pussy-lips, wiping off little smears of cunt-juice which she proceeded to sniff, savour, and slurp off in-between drags of her cigarette. She smacked her lips in self-appreciation.

And waited. The voices continued to murmur downstairs, but she could not hear what they were saying. Clearly not just a delivery, though. Ah well, what the fuck, she thought, as she finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray on her bedside table.

It was at least twenty minutes (and one more cigarette) later before she heard Giles’ footsteps trudging up the stairs. Definitely trudging, not leaping or bounding as she would have expected him to. What, wasn’t he looking forward to finishing off his throatfuck? She knew what to do to get him going again, though: she flipped herself onto her hands and knees, and stuck her bottom in the air so that Giles’ first sight when he re-entered the room would be her arsehole winking at him, and her loose wet cunt-lips dangling invitingly below. She grinned, as she began to rub her clit in anticipation.

“Come and get me baby!” she trilled, as Giles entered. But he just stood there, staring at her backside, apparently impassive and unmoved.

“Get ‘em off, Gilesey-baby! Which hole do you wanna fuck first?” she continued, spreading her pussy-lips wide with two fingers. But Giles did not “get them off”; he just stood there.

“She’s dead,” he said, in a hollow voice.

“What the fuck do you mean, you don’t know how she died?” shouted Detective Inspector Jane McCann into her mobile phone. She was standing at the altar in the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, pondering, and cursing her lot in trying to make head or tail of this very strange case. “You’re telling me no signs of strangulation? ... No bruising? ... No poison? ... But it was his cum, right? So you’re saying he fucked her, and then she just died – just like that?! How the fuck does that happen?”

“What?! ‘Avada ke–’ yeah, very funny, Harry, ha fucking ha ... OK ... OK, so now we have a dead body, and a missing lecherous priest – but no evidence of any foul play at all?” D. I. McCann was having a bad day. She knew who the victim was; she knew who the prime suspect was: after all, his semen – DNA tests had confirmed it – had been seeping out of the victim’s pussy when the body was discovered. But without any indication of cause of death, she couldn’t declare this a murder investigation. This was not what she was expecting at all. “OK, OK, Harry. Look, ring me if anything else comes up. We’ve put out a search on the priest: he can’t have got far – but it’s not as if we can charge him, if there’s been no crime committed!”

The Detective Inspector hung up, muttering “fuck” under her breath again. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her thirties, her dark hair tied neatly back in a bun, wearing a grey business-style pant suit, the jacket of which sat tight around her large breasts. All around her bustled the apparatus and detritus of a would-be murder investigation: officers standing guard, detectives dusting surfaces for fingerprints, the “crime” scene – the high altar – taped off; other officers, she knew, were in the sacristy and presbytery searching for clues, and taking statements from various parish luminaries, including the young Spanish nun who had discovered the corpse.

Jane surveyed the scene. Under normal circumstances, she thought to herself, this would be quite an attractive church – certainly nicer than most of the brutalist bunkers which passed for Catholic churches in England these days. This one was old – well, a bit, anyway, nineteenth century at least – with a rather fine east window and, facing it, a large Byzantine-style cruciform icon of the Pantocrator hung over the altar, the altar upon which had been found the body. Jane smirked, shaking her head at the irony of a woundless body discovered beneath the icon of a man being tortured to death.

“Jane!” She turned to see her colleague, Detective Sergeant Nyman, enter the church through the corridor from the presbytery.

“Anything, Phil?” she asked.

“Well ... yes and no,” he replied, scratching his head. “She attends mass here regularly, apparently. But the husband says they’ve been separated for six months. He calls her his ‘ex’ – though they appear not to be officially divorced. He says she walked out on him, and insists he knows nothing about her movements or whereabouts since then. But I find that hard to believe: she’s been living alone in a flat just round the corner from here, working – and now it starts to get seriously weird – as a phone sex girl. (I didn’t even know such things still existed!) And – get this, do you know who her number one regular customer was? The parish priest, Father Wright! And her last call to him was last night!”

“Oh Jesus...” muttered the D. I. “What is it with these people? OK, but we still don’t have any evidence of foul play, do we – or do we?”

There was the sudden sound of commotion coming from the direction of the presbytery corridor. “Please, just let me speak to her – please!” came the chiselled but distraught voice of a young woman. “Detective Inspector!” D. I. McCann turned to see a short but shapely blonde, escorted by a policewoman, standing at the entrance to the nave. “I have information about Bernadette’s death, Inspector!” called the blonde, her eyes wide but bloodshot, as she wiped tears off her face. “My name’s Vicky; I was her best friend. Please let me speak to you!”

“Phil, with me,” said Jane, as she walked towards the presbytery door.

Father James Wright was driving. Not very fast. In fact, quite slowly. And rather aimlessly. He had been driving all morning. He didn’t know where he was going. He wasn’t trying to escape, as such. He was just driving. Driving away. Away from everything, he hoped in vain.

Jim didn’t really know where he was either. Somewhere up a country lane in Derbyshire, he thought: he hadn’t really been paying attention. It didn’t matter, did it? They would find him, sooner or later. They must be looking for him. They must be following him.

The midday sun peeked out from behind the clouds, momentarily blinding him, before he pulled down the visor. He trembled and groaned, recalling the dreadful events of that morning. Over and over they played in his head: the girl, the confession, the curse, the altar, the prayer book, the ... cunt. Oh God, the cunt. The beauty, the scent, the glistening pink folds, the soft moist caresses, the squeezing, the pulsating, the ecstasy. The cunt. And then, the horror, the curse. The cunt. Oh God, the horror. “OH GOD!” he screamed into the deafening silence of his heart.

And he kept driving.

“You see, Inspector,” said the girl, after they had taken seats in the parish office, which had been hastily converted into an interview room that morning, “I ... I know how Bernie died.” She was wringing her hands nervously, brushing her shoulder-length blond hair out of her face, sniffing and wiping tears off her cheeks every few seconds. She seemed somewhat unkempt, as if she had just thrown some clothes on in a hurry: her bra-strap was visible where her baggy aquamarine sweater had slipped down off one shoulder. Jane noted signs of a fairly recent love-bite on her lower neck, and the residual smell of cigarette smoke on her clothes.

“Tell me more,” said Jane, gesturing to Phil, who was sitting against the wall behind Vicky, to take notes.

“Well, it’s really upsetting, Inspector,” said the girl, blowing her nose. “I’ve not told anyone about this before because, really, I ... I shouldn’t have been there.”

“What do you mean? Mrs Byard-Jones only died this morning. Were you there?”

“No no, I mean – I knew it was going to happen, for ages. I knew it! And it was ... my fault.” The girl gave an anguished look, and tears welled in her eyes again.

“Your fault?” asked Jane, raising her eyebrows.

“Yes. You see, she was cursed.” Vicky trembled.

From behind Vicky’s back, Phil looked at Jane with that “oh God another Catholic nutter” look. But Jane kept a straight face: “Tell me what you mean.”

“Well, she said it: she said, literally, ‘I swear that no man will ever fuck this cunt again – or may God strike me dead!’” Unseen by Vicky, Phil burst into silent giggles, rolling his eyes in exasperation, but the girl continued: “I heard it, I was there, because she said it to Giles – to her husband – when she had just discovered that he was cheating on her...” The anguish in her voice rose, as she looked painfully at Jane, “ ... WITH ME!” Vicky burst into tears again, howling as she gasped over and over, “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault! I am such a hypocrite. If I hadn’t been having an affair with Giles, none of this would have happened! God help me!”

“Ah,” said Jane. Not because she believed in the power of curses – but because she was pleased to have another piece of the jigsaw fit into place. She leant forward, taking Vicky’s hand and patting it reassuringly, as she waited for the girl to calm down. “Tell me ... did anyone else know about this, er, ‘curse’?”

“Only me and Giles,” said Vicky, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes again. “And I am so sorry. I knew I should have told someone – but who? If anyone could have lifted the curse, it was Father Jim: he’s training to be an exorcist, see. And none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for me. I mean, if I hadn’t been fucking her husband, she would never have pronounced the curse, and then she wouldn’t have died, would she? It’s all my fault!” Vicky burst into tears again. From behind her, Phil rolled his eyes again, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Yvonne!” called D. I. McCann into the corridor.

A policewoman appeared at the door. “Yvonne, please could you take this young lady and get her a cup of tea? Miss Berry, thank you for speaking to me. WPC Fletcher will take care of you now, and take down your details. If it’s all right with you, may Detective Sergeant Nyman or I contact you again later for further information?”

Vicky nodded tearfully, as the policewoman put her arm around her and escorted her out. She had not been gone a second before Phil groaned, “Total fucking nutter!”

“Yes,” replied Jane, “but they all seem to be nutters here, and they’re all crotch-deep in adultery and fornication and lies – and guilt. Now, we need to speak to the nun, what’s her name? Could you go and get her for me?”

“Sister Mariana? Sure,” said Phil as he got up and moved towards the door. “She was pretty much in shock earlier on. I’ll see how she is now: I think th–”

He paused, as another commotion from outside the office impinged on their conversation. “I insist you let me speak to him straight away. This is most urgent!” came the stentorian sound of a male voice from the corridor, as WPC Fletcher’s head poked around the corner of the door.

“Detective Inspector, Bishop Kieran Conway would like to speak to you,” said Yvonne, with a concealed one-way grimace on her face.

Phil paused, eyebrows raised. Jane sighed, nodding her head. “Show him in, Yvonne. It’s OK, Phil, you can go. I can handle him alone.”

The Bishop was a broad-shouldered silver-haired man with a paternalistic, though charming, smile – which faltered slightly as he entered the room and caught sight of Jane. “Oh ... er ... Detective Inspector McCann? Have I got the right room?”

“That’s me,” replied Jane.

“Oh!” chortled the Bishop, “I am so sorry, I was expecting a man, but of course ... How jolly foolish of me! Just shows how out-of-touch we churchmen can be, doesn’t it? Please forgive me!”

“Don’t worry, Your Excellency – churchmen are not the only male chauvinists in the world, I assure you!” replied Jane, a half-smile gracing her normally-sombre face. “Please sit down. What can I do for you?”

“Well, this whole business – shocking, isn’t it? Terribly shocking, that a young lady should expire in one of our churches. And Father Wright going missing – I’m sure there must be some terrible misunderstanding, some mistake. I’ve known him for over twenty years now, such a fine fine priest, I –”

“You realise he had just had sexual intercourse with the victim?”

The Bishop stopped, a look of panic sweeping across his face like a fast-moving shadow –swiftly effaced by a re-engagement of the paternalistic smile. “Oh ... oh ... I had no idea ... I mean, this won’t need to be made public, will it? I mean, he is a celibate of course, he –”