CHAPTER ONE

[In which the big knob rolls in.]

 

Relaxing in the back of his stretch limousine, Kenzo Ohtsuka felt the stresses of the past few weeks drop away like scales. The vaguely perceived world beyond the darkly tinted glass ceased to be an object for manipulation and dissolved into a nondescript and inconsequential landscape.

Beyond the internal partition, his young brunette chauffeuse steered the car skilfully through the Friday evening motorway traffic. Staffordshire came closer with every second and with it a weekend of fun and frolic.

Kenzo - or Ken, as he preferred to be known - was no swinger. His taste was for the kind of frolicking where he held sole and unchallengeable sway. Even at the top of the heap, business was a frustrating amalgam of negotiation and compromise and he liked to take his pleasures neat and uncontested.

He began to undress. As they passed the M6 turn-off, leaving Birmingham to its own devices, he opened the built-in wardrobe and removed a powder blue tracksuit and matching silk jockstrap. Putting them on, he started on a series of isometric warm-up exercises. The finishing touch was to slip his feet into a pair of the most expensive trainers a charge card could buy,

Forewarned, the driver turned into the next service area. Parking as far as possible from the crowd, she opened the door for Pan-Global Electronics Inc.'s Vice President to alight.

He set off to jog round the perimeter of the car park.

After folding and storing his discarded clothing, she took up sentry duty by the passenger door.

Powder blue was Pan-Global's company colour. The sight of her distinctively clad figure immediately drew admiring glances from other travellers. A twinkle in the eye was her only sign of acknowledgement as she watched homeward bound businessmen and away-from-homeward bound men with families on board, run a gauntlet of near misses as they ogled her.

Whether it was the tightly fitting two piece uniform, the cheeky little forage cap, or her hour-glass figure which impressed them most, none seemed able to resist a third and fourth look.

Ken gradually increased his pace. By the twentieth circuit, he was sprinting flat out. As he swerved towards her, she opened the car door. Without breaking stride, he ducked inside and collapsed across the seat in a breathless heap.

She followed him in and closed the door, causing a sideswiping collision between two cars whose drivers' minds were too occupied with cursing 'those bloody foreigners' who seem to 'have all the fucking luck' to watch where they were going!

In fact, sex was far from Ken's mind. Although the girl was a highly rated graduate of the corporation's training school for women - the Seminary - he was averse to screwing about on his own running board, so to speak. Consequently, his genitalia remained erotically unmoved when she divested him of the tracksuit and peeled the damp jockstrap away.

. He did lift his arms and legs and twist and turn as necessary on the leather upholstery; but only to facilitate the cleansing process as the girl freshened him up, using wet wipes impregnated with his exclusive cologne.

With a touch as coolly deft and professional as a nurse's, she pampered her chief like a baby. Paying as much attention to his face, chest and armpits as to the buttock cleft, scrotum and feet, she soon had him looking and smelling sweet.

Bundling the sweaty gear into a locker, she reached to the wardrobe for fresh clothes. He stopped her with a shake of his head. "Not yet. I'm fine like this. Drive on for a while."

Ken leaned back with a beatific smile. He felt regenerated already. With lungs full of rural air only mildly contaminated with exhaust fumes and blood pounding from healthy exertion instead of some stress-induced boardroom high, clothing represented an encumbrance and constraint he could presently do witho

Forewarned by mobile phone from Ken's car, Carlton Anstruther-Rigg, Principal of the Pan-Global Seminary, formed one half of the reception committee at the massive iron gates set in the estate's unassailable stone boundary wall.

Miyako Antrobus - Japanese widow of an Englishman who allegedly froze to death between the icy thighs of her indifference - comprised the other. She was the Seminary's Head Girl and Company Spy, living with the pupils and reporting on their good and bad points. In addition to her official duties, she was Carlton's confederate in sexual opportunism.

He was formally dressed in mortarboard and black gown, over a clerical grey, chalk-stripe suit.

She wore the standard Seminary uniform of Old Gold polyester. The blazer - worn only for formal and public occasions - concealed the obligatory quarter-cup bra, on which perched her small, almost translucently teated breasts. A pleated micro skirt just about covered an ass bare except for the Prefect's badge of office - a g-string. Matching socks and trainers completed the ensemble.

The tall, sombre man and short, picturesque woman made an incongruous team.

When the limousine purred into view, Drab and Gaudy opened the gates. It pulled up and waited while they closed and secured them: by means of a padlock and chain so heavy it required either two pairs of hands or a great deal of patience and cursing.

The chauffeuse remained behind the wheel while they climbed aboard and greeted their overlord.

"Ken! Good to see you," Carlton smarmed.

"Good evening, sir," Miyako murmured with cool reserve.

Looking calm and composed in a white cotton roll neck sweater and navy blue linen slacks, Ken's only response was an abstracted nod. His gaze was fixed on the view unrolling before the windscreen, waiting for something.

The Seminary came into sight between the trees, and he sighed and smiled. The large house on a knoll was just as he remembered it, sailing through the countryside like a square rigger driven by the wind catching its forest of chimney stacks.

One of his fondest memories was of seeing it for the first time. In mid winter, with scudding clouds brushing the roof, the building had seemed so steeped in a history different from his own that he'd been compelled to buy it on the spot. Despite its primary purpose as a training school, part of him still considered it his personal refuge,

He glanced at his wristwatch. "Almost time for dinner."

Carlton jumped at the chance to effuse. "The girls are already assembled in your honour, Ken. A most excellent crop they are, too."

Miyako Antrobus nodded agreement.

Both had good reason to impress their visitor. The premature graduation of a group of prefects had resulted in one of them proving unfit for the very first task assigned her and the loss to the Corporation of a major business deal. The secondary reason for Ken's presence that weekend was to receive their reports on the errant girl's training and satisfy himself as to the staff's fitness for their posts.

In addition to the desire for professional survival, there was the hidden agenda of safeguarding certain 'arrangements' they'd contrived to utilise the pupils for their own sexual gratification. The pupils were sent to the Seminary to learn obedience and the sexual arts for the company's benefit, not its minions'. It went without saying that the more distracted the Vice President became, the safer their necks would be!

They arrived at broad stone steps leading up to the impressively arched entrance. Miyako was dispatched to escort the car back through the gates, while Carlton conducted Ken on a tour of reminiscence.

Basically, the three storied main building was still in its original state, wooden floored and panelled throughout. Oil paintings, chandeliers, sconces, ornately plastered ceilings: everything was as stately as ever. The ground floor, containing the administrative offices and two huge reception rooms, lacked only the bewigged and crinolined inhabitants to turn back the clock a century or two. The Principal's quarters and guest suites on the first floor had been made over, and the staff rooms on the second floor decorated to the individual occupant's taste, but seemingly without structural remodelling.

Carlton put a foot on the stairs to lead the way up to the third floor, but Ken declined. Those 'special' rooms would keep.

The wings were a different proposition, though. Extensively modernised, the two floors of the East Wing now contained the dormitories and utility rooms, below which were classrooms and the library. In the West Wing, the Dining-cum-Assembly Hall sat on top of the Gymnasium.

They inspected each floor minutely, finding not one speck of dust. Nor, indeed, any sign of all the effort the girls had made to get it into that pristine condition.

The dining hall was the last stop, as that was where they were due to eat.

 

*** *** ***

 

Miyako was fuming. The chauffeuse was one of 'her' girls, now not only able, but eager to give the Head Girl the finger. Which was literally what she'd done as she drove away from the gates, leaving Miyako's ears ringing from the well grabbed chance to tell the Japanese bitch a few home truths.

Stamping her feet and swearing loudly, she set off on the long walk back to the house. Her mind was full of plots to get her own back. And it didn't matter one jot who she got it back on.

A short list of likely candidates came readily to mind. Topmost was Lara Cocker, the auburn haired slag who'd caused more trouble in her first two days than some girls did in the whole course of their training. Miyako had made an example of her by catching her in the showers and shaving her pubic hair. The girl was under orders to keep her snatch that way and carried the bared groin as a mark of disfavour.

Second-most was Melanie Bohanon, a black American girl. She'd only just been demoted from prefect status and been given a thrashing before the assembled Seminary for disobedience to a guest of Carlton's - which was just what they'd left her with little option but to do.

The intention was to get Melanie and Lara onto an equal footing and develop them as a double act for exploitation behind the Corporations' back. But that didn't mean they were beyond Miyako's wrath. What Carlton didn't know about, he couldn't prevent in time. Could he?

Yes, definitely Lara and Melanie. Both tall, superbly built, in their early twenties and fit enough for anything. Fitness apart, they represented everything Miyako detested about the weak, pampered Western women of which Pan-Global were, incomprehensibly, so enamoured.