Chapter 1
Cordelia Thurston had woken up early and was
feeling angry. She didn't know why. Her career as a journalist was successful, so
far as working for the Slackhurst Messenger could be classed as success. Her home was a comfortable place, even if
there was a family of exceptionally ghastly working-class people living next
door. She despised her husband David,
but they weren't about to get divorced.
She'd committed a murder and gotten away with it completely unsuspected.
Yet there she was, lying awake in a fit of frustration, negative thoughts and
angry temper. Angry, angry, angry, she thought and felt her teeth grinding.
The
time was just past six a.m. Cordelia knew she wasn't going to fall back to
sleep. Physically, she didn't feel at all unwell. She'd just had a good night's
rest, so evidently that wasn't the cure for whatever bothered her.
She
got out of bed without disturbing David. He was a tall, good-looking man aged
thirty-three, four years younger than her. In his sexual tastes he was
submissive, indeed masochistic and had a fetish for boots; perhaps he was
dreaming about boots and humiliation at that moment. Cordelia left him to it.
She put on a dressing-gown and went to look out of the window. Although David was tall, he had no advantage
in height over her. She stood six feet two inches in her bare feet and was built
to match, with a heavy figure, powerful shoulders and large breasts. Her hair
was black and she wore it short and her eyes were a deep brown. Her legs were
long and her feet were size nine.
She
held the curtains open and looked out. It was light, but nobody was about yet.
The road - the crescent: Saraband Crescent - was a long, broad curve of new
detached houses, all of them very clean, separated from one another by
stretches of grass and tall clumps of bush just suitable for an assailant to
hide in while waiting to jump somebody.
Her discontented gaze fell upon the house next door. Seen from the front
it was as clean as any other in the crescent, but its decor had an unusual
touch: the paintwork of the window frames, everywhere else white, had been done
in a black gloss that shone in the early morning sun. What awful taste. And at
the back of the house - well! Who wouldn't be grumpy sometimes, living next
door to Brickie Binman?
Come
to that, who wouldn't be depressed sometimes at living in Slackhurst? If it had been an entirely pleasant town it
would have been simply boring and in her years at the Messenger Cordelia had
spent plenty of time reporting petty burglaries, violent assaults, drug raids,
factory closures, gravediggers' strikes, ratepayers' protests and similar
squalid events. She'd risen above being a reporter now, it was true: she wrote
a weekly column with her picture at its head. Doing the column was a plum job
and had made her a local celebrity. Yes,
people recognised her in the street and more often than not made silly gape-mouthed
comments about her height. The stunted, grotty people of Slackhurst treated her
like a freak.
She
let the curtains fall, left the window and strode up and down the bedroom. Her
right hand clenched into a fist, as if to correspond to a ball of nastiness
inside her, growing and hardening and bursting to get out.
Bang!
She
pounded her fist against the wall. And
again, bang, bang, bang, bang! She swore
to herself, then aloud. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Piss! Shit! Fuck!"
"Is
something the matter?" David had woken.
"No,"
said Cordelia, irritated. "Go back to sleep."
He
lay back and turned over. Cordelia
dumped herself into a chair at her dressing table. There were sounds of
somebody getting up and coming out of an adjoining room. "Bernadette," she
called, "come in here."
The
door opened and there stood a girl of eighteen, dressed in a short kimono-style
nightgown. She was something under five feet tall and slight in figure; the
kimono left her legs bare to mid-thigh, they were shapely but very slender. Her
hair was auburn and descended past her narrow shoulders, and her face was
pretty but showed no great depths of intelligence. Its expression at that
moment was apprehensive.
"Estelle's
woke up," she said. Three words of her
accent were enough to tell you that she came from Liverpool.
"Has
she? Is that my fault, do you think?"
For
a long moment Bernadette stood with her mouth open and her tongue moving
indecisively. "Might be. Bangin' might wake someone up."
"It
might. If it was my fault, I'd deserve
to be soundly flogged for it, wouldn't I?"
Again
she hesitated. "Mightn't've done it on purpose. I wouldn't flog no one
for an accident ..."
Cordelia
looked at her thoughtfully. "No. Open up the boot wardrobe."
Relieved,
Bernadette came into the room and slid open the door of a long cupboard. Inside stood a row of pairs of ladies' size nine boots, ranked in
ascending order of leg height, from a mid-calf length lace-up pair to huge,
powerful leather waders. Most of the boots were black. All were expensive and their abnormal foot
size made even the lowest pair imposing.
"Those,"
said Cordelia, pointing to a pair in the middle of the row. They were classic in style: knee-length black
patent leather, straight in the leg, with high stiletto heels. Without another
word, Cordelia lifted first her right foot, then her left for Bernadette to
slide the boots on. She did the job neatly and comfortably and when it was done
stayed kneeling at Cordelia's feet.
Cordelia
flexed her ankles inside the boots.
Bernadette looked up at her expectantly and nervously. At last she reached down and Bernadette's
shoulders grew tense; but Cordelia gave her a pat on the head. "Go back to
bed. It's only just past six."
"What
about Estelle?"
"Go
and look at her, if you wish to."
Bernadette
got up and went, closing the bedroom door after her. A minute later she could be heard again:
"Hiya, dolly. 'Ow're you today?" Cordelia was still looking down at her feet in
the boots. She crossed one leg over the other, and admired the shine and the
shape. Boots are so thrilling. Unlike
shoes, they appear to have been made expressly for the purposes of stamping and
kicking and the high-heeled feminine boot stylises and draws attention to its
aggressive tendencies; the heel and the toe, the parts of a boot that crush and
smash, become refined points, precision tools rather than blunt
instruments. In boots, Cordelia found an
excitement that improved her mood but at the same time caused her to hunger for
a victim. She looked up to find that David had raised his head again. "I told
you to go back to sleep."
"Bernadette
woke me up."
"Did
she, indeed?" She got up, opened the door again, and called out. "Bernadette, I
want to take a bath. Get everything
ready."
"Estelle's
cryin'," came back from across the landing.
"If
I have to drag you out of that nursery by the hair, my girl, you'll regret
it. Get my bath ready." Without waiting
for an answer, Cordelia strode across to David's dresser and pulled three of
his neckties from a drawer. With one hand she whisked the sheets from the bed.
David was revealed naked, lying face down now, wrists crossed behind his back
and feet together. She climbed on to the bed and bound him tightly and
carefully; then she picked up a pillow and let it slide out of its pillow-case,
which she folded up and stuffed into his open mouth, tying the remaining
necktie around his head to keep the gag in place.
She
folded her arms and surveyed her husband, bound and gagged and writhing with
arousal. "Your own fault, David. People who won't do as they're told must
expect to be punished and that applies to you just as much as it does to
Bernadette. Just - as - much!" She gave him a ringing
slap on the buttocks. "I'm going for my bath."