Chapter 1

Emma didn't consider herself to be a bad girl as girls go these days. She swore a lot, punctuating her sentences with "cunts" and "fucks" like her role models in the media, and so did all her friends. She smoked - and not just tobacco! She frequently drank far more than she ought and had consumed her first drink at the age of fifteen, having fooled the bar person by plastering her sweet face with an impasto of make up. But all girls behaved like that.

At University she had an affair with a young man, several years older than she, followed by an abortion. But she was doing no more than exercise A Woman's Right to Choose What She Did With Her Own Body. And this was the Twenty First Century. It was a shock when her parents disowned her, though.

After a few months at College, she dropped out, despite having been winner of a coveted Classical scholarship, and did some "modelling". Emma had a lovely face, a tempting if flabby body, and the kind of golden hair that is seen less and less these days unless it comes out of a bottle. She was also very photogenic and soon came to be in great demand.

She posed for many extremely steamy sessions and even a pornographic movie, her voluptuous nudity giving much happiness to many tired businessmen! Although she was willing to pose for mainstream artistic work and was very popular with some of the most distinguished photographers, she seemed drawn to the less reputable aspects of her new profession.

Emma's future descent into a life of liberated hedonism seemed assured until she met Count Alexander Dobrynin. And the Professor.

The Count was the great grandson of a canny Russian émigré who had skipped his country not long before the tragic collapse of the old order and well before the abomination of Communism destroyed all that was good in his nation before going on to afflict and corrupt the rest of the world with its Godless wickedness.

The exiled Count had first converted most of his property into easily transportable jewellery, which he had used to build a prosperous manufacturing company. The present Count lived well but not too extravagantly on his family's wealth, leaving the running of the business to others, although he maintained some interest in its affairs.

Some of these others were very clever people. Clever and ambitious. One of them, known as the Professor, was the cleverest of them all and he had very big ideas. The Count had, of late, become more and more immersed in the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and increasingly horrified at the debauchery and decadence he saw around him. The Professor knew of the Count's concerns and had talked him into agreeing to and financing one of his pet projects.

It was this project that Emma was to play such a part in bringing to fruition. One night in late May she was on her way home after a photo shoot. Work had been followed by a binge drinking session with friends. She was more than a little tipsy and feeling very happy, as she always was after a heavy drinking session.

Following payment for displaying her private parts and apparently allowing them to be penetrated by a stupendously well endowed young gentleman of West African provenance (who had been one of her companions in the bar later on) she was now able to afford that longed for trip to the Antipodes.

All her life she had longed to visit the Great Barrier Reef. At first it was the name that had taken her fancy and then she had read everything about it she could lay her hands on. Emma had become more and more fascinated as she learned about the wonders that lay beneath the surface of that part of the wide Pacific. To go there would be the very best holiday she had ever had and now she could afford it. Her mind was distracted by alcohol and thoughts of the trip of a lifetime, because she almost stepped off the kerb and under a bus. But Destiny intervened in the shape of a tall bearded man.