red and green ivy that clung thickly about its frontage was kept neatly trimmed away from its dozens upon dozens of leaded windows. Clusters of chimney stacks poked like missiles into the blue Oxfordshire sky, providing a lofty perch for the crows that circled and cawed in the tranquil silence. Down below, parked on the ocean of ornamental gravel surrounding the big house were rows of Aston Martins and Bentleys and classic Porsches, nothing as vulgar as a Ferrari.
The place might have been the personal residence of someone extremely wealthy, a marquis or a viscount, or the ancestor of some Victorian merchant dynasty still reaping the fruits of the family empire. Old money. Or new money, like a dot-com multimillionaire or whizzkid software developer who’d struck lucky with some new gimmick that had set the world on fire. Whatever the case, they would have required a live-in service staff to keep it on an even keel. At least one butler, maybe two, plus the requisite contingent of housekeepers and kitchen staff and gardeners. Or else the fine house might have been open to the public, as a gallery or a museum or a National Trust heritage venue ushering crowds of visitors through its many grandiose rooms during the months of the tourist season.
It was none of those things. Instead, it was a place of business. A going concern, providing a variety of services to its clients. A polished brass plaque above the doorway read, in bold gothic font, THE ATREUS CLUB. Named after a king of ancient Greece, the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, not that the name bore any connection to the nature and purpose of the establishment. A nature and purpose to which, in turn, few people were ever privy.
The Atreus Club was strictly private, hence the locked gates, and hence the broken glass on the walls. Members only. Expensive to join, and only certain individuals need apply to enjoy the secluded and discreet haven it provided for its exclusive, distinguished membership.
And for good reason, considering some of the activities those pillars of society enjoyed there.
Behind a tall balcony window, up on the fourth floor, one of those activities was currently taking place. The room was large but quite sparsely decorated. It had been a bedroom, and sometimes still was used as such, depending on need. Today, though, it was something else. At its centre stood an antiquated wooden school desk, the kind with the flip-up top and a recess for an inkwell. In front of it was a larger teacher’s desk, behind which stood an equally old-fashioned classroom blackboard, complete with chalk and duster. Scrawled in slanting chalk script across the board were the words, I must not be a naughty boy; I must not be a naughty boy. Over and over.
At the far side of the room, in the light from the tall window, stood a metal frame, seven feet high with a steel bar supported between sturdy mounts either side. Attached to the overhead bar, arms raised above his head by the rubber manacles and rubber chains that bound him firmly in place, stood one of the room’s two occupants. He was naked apart from his socks. A man in his early sixties, grey-haired, tall, slightly stooped, and not in the best of shape physically. His bare buttocks were pinched and somewhat shrivelled and very white, except for where they were striped red from the whipmarks that the room’s other occupant had spent the last few minutes inflicting on him.
She was blonde-haired and attractive in a stern, Slavic kind of way, and at least forty years younger than her client. But not naked, not yet, as specified by the instructions that had to be followed to the exact letter. All part of the expensive services provided by the Atreus Club. And this particular client had specified, as he always specified on his frequent visits here, that the girl be wearing a mortarboard and one of the abbreviated black academic gowns that Oxford University tradition dubbed a Commoners’ gown. Both items duly obtained from the official university outfitters, Shepherd and Woodward’s of the High. No expense spared. Aside from the academic garb and the matching black fishnet stockings, garters and suspender belt, she was wearing nothing else. Again, as per instructions. The instrument of torture was a whippy rattan cane, the type that schoolmasters had once used to inflict corporal punishment on disobedient pupils, back in the day. The client had never been caned at school, however. He had always been a model pupil, set for academic glory.
‘Have you had enough, you bad, bad professor, you?’ the blonde asked with a wicked smile on her red lips. ‘Professor’ was what she was instructed to call him in their fantasy role-play. She spoke with an Eastern European accent that drove him even more crazy.
‘No! Hit me again! Ah!’
The client’s cry of pain and pleasure was drowned out by the whoosh and sharp crack of the cane as she whipped it through the air and added another fresh, livid stripe to his pale rear end. The velvety tassel on her mortarboard swung with the movement.
‘Again! More!’
Whoosh. Crack.
This could go on for quite some time. As the blonde knew very well, because it usually did and she was his regular pick. She had the technique down better than any of the other girls. Something in the wrist action. For some reason, she was a natural at it. He knew her as Angelique, which, needless to say, wasn’t her real name.
Another piece of information the client lacked was that the private session he was currently enjoying was, in fact, anything but.
The tall, mature oak tree on the front lawn was about as close to the house as it was possible for a hidden observer to get without being spotted from the windows, and you could reach it easily enough by darting from hedge to bush. Plenty close enough, for the man who was perched high up in its branches. The only challenging part of his job had been getting over the wall unscathed. The rest was easy. Almost fun. He had an excellent view through the window in question, and at this range the telephoto lens on his camera was capable of producing crystal-clear close-ups of both the client and the girl whipping him.
The watcher wasn’t so interested in the girl. The client was another matter. Just a few more snaps, and the watcher would descend unseen from his perch and make his way back out of the grounds and over the wall to his vehicle.
The watcher permitted himself a smile as he watched the blonde step back to give herself space, then swing the cane and whack the old perv again. He could almost hear the snap of the thin rattan against soft, loose, white flesh. Framed in the viewfinder the client’s eyes were rolled upwards and his mouth was open with a sigh of ecstasy.
The shutter clicked one more time.
A perfect shot.
Someone was going to be happy.
Ben Hope sat on the edge of the single bed with his old green canvas bag wedged between his feet and gazed around him at his strange, yet so familiar, surroundings.
And wondered, What the hell am I doing back here?
In some ways he felt like much the same person who had once lived in this very room, slept in this very bed, done all the things that a restless nineteen-year-old with the devil inside him and too many troubles for his young mind to bear is wont to do. In other ways, he was a very different person now. Twenty-something years of the kind of existence Ben had led since leaving this place couldn’t but profoundly change a man, if it didn’t kill him altogether.
But one thing was for sure. The place itself had barely changed at all during his long, long absence. Old Library 7 still had the same fusty smell of a building overdue for renovation by a century or longer. The yellowed and chipped woodwork of the ancient bow window was maybe a little more in need of repair. The carpet was still worn in all the same places he remembered. The thinly upholstered armchairs were the same ones he’d sprawled in evening after evening, meant to be reading but usually ending up asleep with the book upturned and dog-eared on his lap. Even the battered desk was original equipment, still bearing the black marks of cigarette burns and the scar from the time he’d smashed a bottle against it in some drunken fit of anger.
He’d been angry a lot of the time back in those days. Drunk even more of the time. Not the best of memories.
The only thing missing from the room was