Life Class (27 page)

But Stefan
did
come back and Dory had to face him. He’d been teaching them now for the last couple of weeks, yet he’d said nothing to her other than an occasional terse comment on her work. His manner had been so remote that she’d not dared broach any subject, let alone his house. Perhaps he’d been so offended by her offer that he was ignoring it? Realistically it was probably best that they both continue to behave as if she’d never made it. Stefan was right. Kitesnest House was a white elephant. But … The earthy, resinous scent as she’d walked up through the trees behind it came back to her, and the childhood memory of meeting the boy there. Then another image intruded into her mind. Seen in her rear-view mirror, she recalled the front of the house, apricot in the setting sun, and the boy now grown-up – Stefan – watching her drive away.

It was ridiculous to mope. All she had to do was wait. Her emotions would catch up with her logic. She was a woman on her own. Sinking such a large financial and personal investment into a house like his was ludicrous. Though she continued to flick through the property pages of local rags and glanced at the house details sent by her favoured estate agents, her interest had fizzled. Even more worrying was that doubts had reinvaded her mind about the whole project. Did she even want to commit to moving back here?

And there was one other factor adding to her gloom. Despite patient confidentiality being an unassailable tenet by which she’d conducted her professional life, she’d blurted out personal details of one of the clinic’s clients. And why? Because she was cross with her sister. Recalling that moment, in the class storeroom, her cheeks still flamed. Her loss of control shocked her. Where had that rage come from? Fran was the emotional, volatile sister. She had always been calm and dispassionate. Even Malcolm, in the days when they’d been happy, had called her his Snow Queen.

Since the incident, the sisters had been civil to one another. Dory had said sorry for losing her temper, Fran had said sorry for being a pain, but trips out together for lunch, for shopping or even just for a coffee, had ceased. Apart from the Friday-morning life class, her sister had become almost reclusive as far as Dory was concerned. She certainly hadn’t mentioned Dominic since the argument and, perversely, Dory almost missed her girly confessions. Her resolve to work on the relationship with her sister, to try to build it into an adult friendship, now looked laughable.

Had there not been a witness, however, Dory wondered if her conscience would have been much troubled by her indiscretion. Fran deserved to know what a fool she was making of herself. What had made her outburst so mortifying was the identity of the man who’d overheard her. Before Christmas, it had seemed as if they could be friends. Since then, she’d insulted him twice. After saying how much she loved his house, she’d put in an offer that at best must have been a disappointment. She’d also been a blabbermouth, broadcasting intimate details about someone with whom he had a connection, in his hearing. No wonder Stefan was so disgusted that he disdained even to inform her that he wasn’t interested in her offer. But why did she regret so intensely the estrangement between them? There was no apparent reason. She did not understand herself. What was she even doing here? Why not cut her losses and return to the capital?

To Dory’s left, another stretch of high, chain-link fence began, delineating the boundary of one of the old mills dotted along the valley. Lost in glum introspection, Dory was abruptly brought back to the present by a movement, a flash of disturbance at the margins of the canal. Was it a water vole? Even an otter? She’d heard they were re-colonising the waterways around here. Most likely it was a rat. Whatever it was, her attention was divided between keeping an eye on where she was treading and the spot where she thought something had shimmied up onto the far bank.

The canal was beginning to curve to the left, obscuring what lay ahead on the path. There was another plop, slightly behind her this time. She twisted round but again was too late to see what had broken the surface. Turning back, there was a sickening, soft squelch underfoot.

‘Bloody wildlife!’ She stopped and lifted her foot to inspect the damage. ‘I am such a fool!’ Another voice cut across her disgusted scrutiny of the sole of her boot.

‘First sign of madness.’

Five metres further on, a man wearing a pale T-shirt sat by the path. The short beard that defined the angle of his jaw and the mahogany burnish given his dark hair by the afternoon sun made him instantly recognisable. He’d been concealed by the bend and it was only the last couple of paces – those vital steps when she’d not been looking where she was going – which allowed them to see one another.

A sudden jolt flipped her stomach over. Why was she being so ridiculous? What was the matter with her? Mentally squaring her shoulders, she continued her approach.

Chapter Twenty-eight - Fran

Just the sight of the computer had once filled her with a queasy excitement. Since the day she’d blithely clicked on that link, any excitement had abruptly vanished. An intensified queasiness was still there, mixed now with an irresistible compulsion to know the worst. Every morning, between opening her eyes and getting out of bed, she reaffirmed her resolution, but it was useless. Thank God Peter was out. His presence in the house would only ratchet up the tension she already felt. Berating herself for her lack of will, she switched on the PC and clicked through to Hotmail.

After the first shock of opening up the link a few weeks earlier, she’d fumbled to switch off and obliterate the image. Could her eyes have deceived her? It may only have been on the screen for a second, but what she thought she’d seen turned her blood to ice. Staring blankly at the dead monitor, she sat stunned and immobile. Her heart thumped rapidly and waves of shivers washed over her skin.

She’d never been a prude. In the books she read and the movies she watched, she enjoyed the sex scenes –
if
they were soft focus and well-choreographed. This was different. She could have sworn she’d been looking at a torture chamber – one where all manner of sexual depravity was taking place. But surely the image was some lurid fantasy drawn up from her subconscious and overlaid onto a scene of erotic make-believe? Uncertainty could only make it worse, her imagination fermenting it into a tableau of horrific grotesquery. She had to look again to be sure, then delete it from the system and dismiss it from her mind.

Her head buzzed with impatience and dread while the PC booted up again. It seemed to take even longer than usual. Reproving notices kept popping up on the screen.
Windows was incorrectly shutdown. An illegal operation has occurred. There has been a fatal error.
She was not going to be reprimanded by a bloody machine! But the machine had the last laugh. This time it shut itself down, due to an
unforeseen problem.
Fran went into the kitchen to make a coffee. As she paced up and down, waiting for the kettle to boil, her legs felt suddenly wobbly. She sank down onto a stool, head in hands. Within minutes, she was back in the study.

‘Come on, Come on,’ she muttered, as the PC clicked and grumbled its way through its set-up processes. She wanted to get this over and done with quickly, but could almost picture the machine thumbing its nose at her. At last, the welcome page opened up. She clicked to Hotmail. Hotmail rejected her password. She must have mistyped. She retyped the password slowly, hitting the keys harder, as if increased pressure would somehow convince the site she was who she said she was. Again she was rejected.

‘Shit! Shit! Shitty shit shitting shit!’ she yelled at the monitor. It stared blankly back at her. Again, she put in her password, again without success. Fran took several deep breaths, rubbed her hands over her face, and tried calmly to consider what the problem might be. Eventually she hit the Caps Lock key and retyped it. Problem solved. The Hotmail page opened. ‘Now, calm down.’ Taking another slow intake of breath, she went to her inbox, reopened db’s email, and clicked on the link. The scene of sex and torture unfurled itself onto the screen.

Now that she’d prepared herself, she was able to study the site a little more dispassionately. This time she realised the initial image was one of many. She scrolled through. All the photographs had been taken in what looked like a torture chamber, where the participants were engaged in an orgy of pain and excess. Some of them had chosen to display a lot of flesh, but it was flesh pierced with a variety of studs and rings and criss-crossed with chains, studded straps, and buckles. Other individuals were almost entirely swathed, even down to full-face masks, in suits of black leather or latex. Their unzipped genitals were sometimes all that differentiated the men from the women. In others, the clincher was in the footwear – a choice between studded biker boots or the thigh-high, leg-hugging variety with needle-thin heels.

The tortured were restrained with handcuffs or straps around wrists and ankles. The exposed flesh was marked in broken and bloodied striations. The blood could be fake, but it looked as if the torturers – wearing masks and wielding whips – had inflicted real injury. In following images, hooks on chains pierced the flesh of the individual who lay beneath. It could all be some elaborate set-up, a series of theatrical tableaux – but for what reason? The way the flesh was tented away from the torsos, the way the woman’s heel disappeared into the man’s back made it look too sickeningly real.

The infliction of pain was only half of what was going on. Simultaneously, perpetrators and victims were engaged in multiple sexual couplings. The variety of ways in which people could join their sexual organs with the orifices of one or more others – male, female, or both – was mind-boggling. If the viewer was in any doubt as to what was going on, there were helpful close-ups. One of the men had an erection so enormous it was almost laughable – like a giant dildo – as thick and as long as her forearm. Was he a participant on this site just to show off what nature had endowed him with?

Fran had known such sites existed, even if she’d never imagined the detail, but she’d always assumed they could only be accessed with a payment. There’d been no request for a card number; she’d simply clicked on the link. Was it all just an exercise in exhibitionism, then? The man with the ludicrous cock suggested it might be. It was hard to believe it was flesh and blood. Real or not, there were subsequent images where he demonstrated its uses. She winced. There was nothing funny about it. Too stunned to do anything but gape at the screen, she stared in a paralysed fascination. It had been a delusion to think that being prepared would defuse the impact. Objectivity had flown out the window. Whether she wanted them or not, those images would be stuck in her mind for ever.

Fran shuddered, closing down the window, returning to the familiar screensaver image of Jimbo and Nelson at a few weeks old. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, and her head buzzed. She was numb and unresponsive to her dogs’ adorable puppy-hood. If those scenes had been faked, it was convincingly done. It was hard to tell whether the expressions on the participants’ faces were of agony, ecstasy, or simply play-acting. She may have led a sheltered life but she wasn’t so naïve that she didn’t know that there were people who derived sexual pleasure from being hurt. If real harm was being inflicted, it was obviously consensual, whether or not
she
could understand the appeal.

Still sitting in the study, Fran thought back to the young man she’d known. There had been a physical relationship but it was unmemorable. At the time she was an innocent, incapable of judging if there was anything unusual about it, let alone something that suggested a tendency towards S&M. Hard to equate the lad she remembered – a gentle soul, maybe even a bit weak and indecisive – with the kind of excess she’d just seen. People changed. Even
if
db was the real Dan Brown from her college days, she had to acknowledge that she no longer knew him.

Another chill swept her body, aware that she’d consciously admitted for the first time that her correspondent could be anyone. She had so profoundly wanted it to be true that she’d suppressed her doubts. Her initial emails had gone out at random. He need only be an opportunist with the right initials and a taste for online flirting amongst other, less savoury interests.

Admittedly, she’d been conjuring her own fantasies, but she’d never really intended to enact them, had she? The canopied bed, the candles, the music, the satin sheets seemed laughable now. Compared to this orgy of sadomasochism, she was a hopeless romantic. Had db really anticipated approval, or expected her to want to join in? You and he have very different agendas, she told herself. Yours is a soft-porn fantasy, and fantasy is where it should stay. But his? His tastes were for something far more sordid, involving real sweat, real pain, real blood, real semen.

Whoever he was, this correspondence was at an end. Her decision was final.

Since that day – a fortnight ago – he’d continued to harry her with sleazy messages and even sleazier images and links. Of course she should ignore them. She needn’t even know there were any waiting for her. Despite her resolution, some weird addiction drove her to go into her secret email account. Like letters lying on the doormat, she could not leave them unopened. And once read, she had to reply – even if all she did was to request, demand,
plead
that he stop.

Now, just as she’d known there would be, she found several new emails from db sitting in her Hotmail inbox.

Chapter Twenty-nine - Dory

Her stomach was still fluttering as he exhaled a cloud of smoke and stood up.

‘I’m supposed to have given these up.’ With a shake of his head he pinched out the half–smoked cigarette and dropped it into his pocket. As she neared him she saw that the boulder where he’d been sitting was actually a solidified bag of cement. He went on, ‘Talking to yourself. Said to be the first sign of madness.’

She tried to match his inconsequential tone. ‘If you’d stepped in what
I’ve
just stepped in,
you’d
be mad too.’