Master of the House

‘Sort of. Couldn’t make out the features, but it was a face. A person.’

Joss took me by the hand and led me over to the kitchen table, where he sat me on his knee on one of the chairs. I clung to him, hot and sticky on his thighs. His jeans were still around his ankles.

‘Well, perhaps it was a poacher,’ he said. ‘We do get them. They don’t usually come this close to the house.’

‘Poaching dead herbs,’ I said. ‘That garden hasn’t been tended in an age. I reckon it was a burglar, Joss. Scared away when he saw we were in.’

‘There’s nothing to burgle – at least, not in my part of the house.’

‘No, but in your guest’s?’

Joss sighed.

‘Most likely village kids daring each other,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to get worked up about it.’

‘But I saw a face! It’s creeped me out. I’m going to get dressed and take a look outside.’

‘No, Lulu, you are not,’ said Joss, and I was surprised at how readily I obeyed him. Perhaps I really was getting into this submissive mindset thing. ‘You are going to take a bath, and I’m going to make us a cup of cocoa and then we’re going to bed. No further action.’

I did as I was told but, while he took his bath and I drank my cocoa in the bedroom, I had a good look out of the window, squinting hard at the green slopes of parkland beyond the formal gardens. If there had been a trespasser, it seemed he had taken flight and was probably long gone.

All the same, the thought of him, creeping about the walls of the house, kept me awake much longer than Joss, who snored sweetly at my side pretty much the minute his head hit the feather-down.

Chapter Fifteen

Two days’ leave had been begged and granted and now I found myself walking up a narrow street in Shoreditch with Joss, on the lookout for anything that might conceivably be a BDSM club.

What the external appearance of a BDSM club might be, I would not have been able to tell you. I suppose I was thinking of barred windows and a generally dark aspect.

In fact, the converted warehouse wall was sprayed with rather artistic graffiti and the windows were blackout-blinded but not barred.

The fortified door was opened by a bald man in a suit, who raised an eyebrow but didn’t speak.

‘Oh, hello, you’re new,’ said Joss, in an attempt at ingratiating himself that didn’t quite work. ‘Or rather,’ he added, ‘I’m old. It’s been a while.’

‘Membership card?’ replied the man, and Joss took out a small laminated rectangle from his breast pocket. He’d dressed up to the nines in one of his few good suits for the occasion.

The bouncer checked it over, then looked at me.

‘She’s my guest. I’ve cleared it with Mal. He’s expecting us, actually. Would you take us up to the office?’

I looked at Joss’s membership card. He looked very young and wide-eyed in the photograph, but what really struck me was his full name.

‘Wellington?’ I said, following him up the stairs. ‘Jocelyn Montague Edward Wellington Lethbridge? You never told me that one. What a mouthful.’

‘I’ll give you a mouthful,’ he muttered, snatching the card back off me.

Was that a threat or a promise?

No time to ponder the question, for we were at the office door, in a little anteroom full of typical anteroom stuff – a spider plant, a coffee table, orange-upholstered chairs – and some atypical. Artistic photographs on the walls of people in bondage, for instance.

The bouncer knocked and was invited to enter by a female voice. I was sure Joss had said Mal was a man.

We were ushered inside and found, in a very black and silver office, a woman sitting at a desk tapping away at a keyboard. There was nothing unusual about her – she wore a smart charcoal suit and her hair was scraped into a tight bun. She could have been any chic City worker bee, until one noticed that she was chained to the computer by an elegant length of silver that ended in a cuff at her wrist.

‘Sorry, Mal’s down in the café,’ she said, glancing up at us through red-framed spectacles. ‘He’s left me with the accounts. And I don’t get unlocked until they make sense, unfortunately. Do take a seat and I’ll buzz him for you.’

I tried to catch Joss’s eye, but he looked steadily away, which was just as well, because I’d probably have done something unmannerly like giggle or make a bemused expression.