Chapter 1 : When Larry Met Daphne

I first met Daphne shortly after I'd joined Freddie Clegg Enterprises. I was flying back from a trip to the Caribbean. She was on the same 'plane. My first impression of her wasn't great. She looked shabby; overweight, badly dressed, poor complexion and greasy hair. I guessed that she was about forty but it was hard to say. She could have been older.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. I'm Larry. I look after marketing for Clegg. Well at least I did when all this kicked off. This was one of the last jobs I was involved in before I moved on to run one of his new business ventures.

Clegg's organisation is what you might euphemistically call a recruitment agency; except our recruits usually weren't planning on a change of role before they met up with us. I suppose slave traders is the real name for what we are. The Caribbean trip had been to meet with a potential customer, a chap called Steve Glennis. No, he wasn't planning on using his purchases to start a new sugar plantation. I'll let you guess what he wanted them for but here's a hint. They were all young. They were all women.

Daphne just seemed like another potential client when we spoke on the flight. My first thought was that she seemed pretty greedy as she sat next to me stuffing her face with snacks. But, since it seemed likely that would extend to her tastes in slaves, I just saw that as a potential opportunity for us. She certainly had the money to pay for them according to Clegg.

After our discussion on the 'plane and her suggestion that we might do some business I asked Rick's team in our research department to do a profile of her "Daphne Challis," their report said, "was borne in Boston, USA. Her father was in the US diplomatic service, divorced shortly after she was borne but she stayed with him. She'd grown up pretty much everywhere, spending time in most of the countries across Europe. Picked up language skills in French, German and Spanish. Clever at school, but somehow she never got the knack of getting on with people socially. She read economics and accountancy at university, graduating very well. She joined a City bank as a foreign exchange trader, managed to cope with the bullying and sexism by ignoring pretty much everything except making money. Now in her mid thirties (I'd got her age wrong by at least five years — the way that most women wouldn't ever forgive you for) she was a millionaire several times over and she's mainly into investing. She used her capital in small entrepreneurial start-ups and her contacts in the city for any funding that she couldn't cover from her own resources. In her private life though she seemed to be still a lonely, awkward, socially inept, individual. Her business associates found it hard to square her business acumen and acquisitive drive with her lack of social skills - as one said, she's like a little girl with a big bag of money."

That much I could recognise in the woman I'd met on the 'plane.

"It's not clear when she first started keeping slaves." The report went on. "The first purchase transactions that we are aware of were three years ago. Anecdotal evidence suggests that she had a number of BDSM relationships in her early twenties and that at some point she made the transition from consensual to non-consensual slave ownership. There were at least three male slaves "owned" by her at first. The Clegg organisation became aware of Challis first when she offered these three for sale at an auction run by one of our competitors in the States and acquired three females as replacements. Since then she has replaced these on a fairly regular basis, keeping three or four at any one time, not retaining any of them for more than six or seven months. She always takes trained / conditioned stock under twenty five years, but of no particular racial origin. She's bought and sold around a dozen slaves that we are aware of. The money doesn't seem to be a problem because she's losing money every time she trades them in but it hasn't affected how she's been buying. To date none of her purchases have been through the Clegg Organisation, they have all been in US markets. She has been based in the Hamptons until three months ago. It is understood that she may be moving to the UK."