Chapter 40: I have to see Miss Smith

It was my birthday and I wanted to enjoy it. I had worked very hard the day before, and I felt entitled to reward myself. I was going to have a nice, easy, relaxing day fucking whom I chose when I chose, with no conveyer belt, no rotas, and no surprises.

Things never work out as we plan them.

I had slept in the main bedroom with Florence and Kylie, who had arrived the evening before and who both, I felt, needed my attention. Florence had evidently been obeying my orders to eat; she was noticeably bigger and her monster of a bra was beginning to pinch her most uncomfortably. She looked much more at ease wandering the house naked, and the sheer size of her tits drew fascinated looks from the other girls.

As for other sleeping arrangements, I noticed that a certain pecking order, based on seniority, had tacitly asserted itself. Wendy came top, of course. As a much older woman than the others, as the chief organiser, and above all as my wife, she was treated with due respect by all the other girls. This was only to be expected, but I also noticed that the earlier recruits to my harem seemed to assume, and were generally accorded, a degree of priority. Fran was the head of this group but Connie, Gabby, Alicia and even Kylie found themselves deferred to and took advantage to claim the best sleeping quarters in the twins' rooms and the three guest bedrooms. With much bed-sharing about a dozen girls slept in relative comfort leaving all the others to find what resting-places they could in a variety of chairs, sofas, sleeping bags and, if all else failed, blankets on the floor.

Wendy exempted herself from the general rule of nakedness, either because of her status as my wife or because, as a woman in her forties, albeit looking very good for her age, she could not compete with the more youthful flesh displayed elsewhere. She wore a light summery frock well suited to a weekend in the country. Going clothed was her idea, not mine, but I decided not to interfere.

After breakfast in bed and a refreshing shower, I turned my attention first to the twins then to Elspeth and Yvonne, all of whom I wanted to thank for their efforts the day before. I had just carried the latter two off to recover and was relaxing with a cup of tea before inviting Gina and another (perhaps Olga, I thought) to join me. After that I might go downstairs and chat with a few girls and try to put a few names and personalities to the fleeting faces I remembered from yesterday. It was at this juncture, when I was feeling thoroughly smug and self-satisfied, that Fran rushed in with a look of alarm on her face and, what worried me even more, a handful of clothing. As she struggled into it she told me breathlessly there was a mystery woman outside. At that moment the doorbell rang.

Laura, for it was of course she, waited at the door with growing unease. Ever since she had arrived at her mother's house the night before, she had been haunted by a fear that she was about to make a monumental idiot of herself. Her mother had asked shrewd questions about her sudden decision to visit and Laura, feeling that it was impossible to explain the situation to anyone else, had been obliged to give vague and evasive replies. In the morning as she sat in her car in the driveway of her mother's house she seriously thought for a moment of giving the whole thing up and going straight back to Cambridge.

But the thought that she might thereby pass up a unique opportunity to discover what on earth was going on was even harder to bear than the prospect of making herself look foolish. "And there is something going on," she said aloud. "I know it." So she turned right instead of left and headed into deepest Surrey.

As Laura drove she reviewed the situation. That Elspeth was seeing an unsuitable man and lying about it she knew for sure, but by itself that was none of her business and would certainly not have brought her all this way to investigate. What was so disturbing about it was the way Elspeth's manner had changed in ways that were too sudden and dramatic for normal explanation. At the least, the girl must be on drugs of some kind, but she had never seen or heard of symptoms like these. And there was more to it even than that; Elspeth's responses to questioning had been not merely evasive but peculiar, as if she herself were confused. Laura's best guess, at this point, was that Elspeth had got mixed up with some cult, was probably in thrall to its charismatic leader, and was taking some sort of drugs it supplied to devotees. She was far from satisfied with this theory, which left far too much unexplained (Elspeth did not remotely fit the personality profile for involvement in cults. Why would such an organisation use the house of a leading City banker? What had caused Elspeth's sudden academic brilliance?). But for the moment she could come up with nothing better.

Laura was backing her instinct, too, her emotional intelligence. She did not share the disdain felt by most of her academic colleagues for "female intuition". She thought in its way it was every bit as valid and useful as more formal reasoning; the latter had the merit of producing definable and provable results but was (as she argued in her book) limited to matters that could be reduced to mathematics or very formal language. But women had a sensitivity to subtleties of expression and behaviour far too fine to be expressed in words; they should, she argued, show more confidence in this valuable aptitude and make more use of it. So this morning, she was following not only her intuition but her own advice.

She little knew where they would lead her.

When she reached the house she was disappointed to find that it lay at the end of a long drive. She stopped outside the gateway (there was no actual gate) and pondered what to do. Her hope had been that some activity would have been evident that was either so reassuring that she could drive off unnoticed or so alarming that she would be justified in taking some definite action such as calling the police. But there was nothing; all she could see was the house at the far end of the drive and a few cars parked in front of it. The green one looked like Elspeth's, but from this distance she could not be sure.

She did not want to enter the premises. She was terrified that Elspeth would suddenly appear with some totally innocent explanation of all that had been going on. How then would Laura explain herself? It would be bad enough being seen on the public highway: "Hello, Elspeth, what a coincidence! I just happened to be driving by." It would be a tough sell, but maybe she could get away with it. But, "Hello, Elspeth, I was just going for a quiet drive into the grounds of this private house," was hardly practical politics.

Nevertheless Laura, having come so far, could not back off now. Heart in mouth, she drove slowly through the gateway and up to the house. The front door was closed and, oddly on a lovely summer's day, the curtains of all the downstairs windows were drawn. There seemed to be no one about. Cautiously she got out and walked over to the green car. She could not be certain, since Elspeth's registration number was one of the few things she did not have in her head, but the car certainly looked like Elspeth's and it had a Cambridge City parking permit in the windscreen.

Laura peered at the car, then at the house. Suddenly she thought she caught the faint sound of girlish laughter. She approached the front door and listened intently. Were those voices, female voices, she could hear?

At this moment Fran, happening to pass the upstairs window and idly glancing out, was horrified to see an unfamiliar car outside. Warily approaching the window, she saw an unknown woman by the front door, standing very still, possibly listening for something. Fran grabbed her clothes and ran to find Wendy and me.

Laura had reached a decision. She had to come up with an excuse to ring the doorbell. The best she could think of was that her car had overheated and she needed water. Even now she hesitated a moment at the door. Yes, she was sure of it now; she could hear women's voices from inside. She rang the bell.