Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (38 page)

At present, though, it contained no cars. Nothing but a set of very specialised equipment.

Lydia continued to stare around. Her blue-green eyes were wide, her expression unreadable.

Barnaby waited with bated breath. When was she going to speak? Was she going to say anything at all?

“What,” she said at last, “the hell,” she went on, “is this?”

“What does it look like?”

“I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like a medieval torture chamber crossed with a brothel boudoir.”

Which was more or less correct.

The basement was a sex dungeon, kitted out with an array of bondage and domination furniture, all of it handcrafted and designed to Barnaby’s own specifications. Everything was made from the very finest materials: Brazilian rosewood, Sheffield steel, top-grain calfskin leather. The walls and ceiling were flock-papered, underneath which was a layer of sound-absorbent tiles, while the floor was tight-packed parquet, smoothly varnished and easy to wipe clean.

Barnaby was inordinately proud of it. He had worked hard to get the place exactly right, and he maintained it himself, doing all the cleaning, giving it a thorough once-over with duster, vacuum and mop every month. No housekeeper had ever come down here. None of his private staff had a clue the dungeon even existed, save for Jakob.

There was a pillory with padded holes for neck and wrists. There was a spanking bench with cuffs and restraints. There was a Berkley Horse, a six-foot-tall A-frame contraption for upright flogging. There was a bondage table with a pair of shackles at either end. There was a St Andrew’s Cross frame, for spread-eagling.

There were various thick hooks screwed into the ceiling, for the purposes of suspension and strappado. There were ringbolts fitted to the walls to accommodate chains of assorted diameters.

Shelves and cubbyholes were filled with fetish paraphernalia: harnesses, gags, fetters, hoods, blindfolds, clamps, muzzles and spreader bars. These were arranged methodically according to type and size. Display cabinets contained whips, riding crops, bamboo canes, knouts and paddles. Drawers held cotton ropes of every conceivable thickness and length, plus lubricants, disposable latex gloves, and an astonishingly broad selection of dildos and vibrators.

“So?” Barnaby said.

Lydia slowly rotated her head to look at him.

“It’s...” she said. “It’s incredible.”

He felt his spirits leap. “You think? I put my heart and soul into it. I sourced the best BDSM furniture makers. Germans, mostly. They have the real expertise in this field, by general acknowledgement. I chose every item personally. I had it all tailor-made. You won’t find anything here in any shop or on any website. It’s bespoke stuff, unique, the best that money can –”

“No.” She held up a hand – which, he noted, was shaking. “No, you misunderstand. It’s incredible as in ‘I can’t fucking believe it.’ This. All along, in your house, there’s been
this
. Barnaby...”

Her face registered a range of emotions, none of them good. Hurt. Anger. Bafflement. Horror. Disgust. Contempt.

“This is you, isn’t it?” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ, this is what you really are. I always sensed there was something off about you, something I was missing, wasn’t getting. I put it down to you being so rich. Billionaires are never normal. Now I know what it actually is. Oh, my God. It was so obvious. So bloody obvious.”

He reached for her, placing a hand on her arm.

She snatched the arm away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said tightly. “Just... don’t.”

“Lydia...”

“You big fucking pervert!”

She wheeled round, away from him, making for the doorway.

“Lydia, please.”

“You silly sick sod!”

She scuttled up the stairs, tripping a couple of times.

Barnaby followed. He was wracked with dismay.

“Lydia, please don’t run away. I’m sorry you’re not taking it well.”

“Taking it well?” she shrieked. “How am I supposed to take it? My boyfriend’s a fucking pervo freak. He’s got a bloody sex dungeon in his house that he’s neglected to mention to me in all the five months we’ve been going out together, until one day we have a little bit of mildly rough horseplay and suddenly he thinks I’ve turned all kinky and I’m going to bend over and beg to be flogged. Jesus!”

She hurtled along the ground-floor hallway. She rushed up the stairs. Barnaby remained in pursuit, still imploring.

“Just hear me out, will you? I have certain predilections, that’s all. I’m... I’m into things that quite a few people are but most people aren’t. That doesn’t make me bad or wrong.”

“Predilections!” she echoed, framing the word in a bitter howl of laughter. She was halfway along the upstairs landing now, sailing towards the bedroom. “That’s like saying the Borgias were ‘a little bit naughty.’ I should have guessed when I saw you take that book down. That’s when the penny should have dropped. The Marquis de bloody Sade! Shit, shit, shitty shitting shit.”

“It’s part of my makeup. It’s something I just can’t help.”

“And that makes it better how exactly?” Lydia said, and she slammed the bedroom door behind her.

Barnaby stood outside, frozen in a paroxysm of anguish. “Lydia? Lydia!”

No answer.

Should he go in?

He couldn’t decide. He was no longer Barnaby Pollard, the ruthless business magnate who pursued his aims with single-minded tenacity and regarded wavering as weakness. He had been totally unmanned. He had expected anything from Lydia except this outburst of shock and vituperation.

Finally, he made up his mind and determinedly grasped the doorknob.

It turned before he could turn it, and Lydia strode out. She had dressed in a hurry. Her blouse was misbuttoned, her skirt on back to front.

She shoved past him.

He seized her elbow.

“Let go,” she said with quiet menace.

“Just hear me out.”

“Let go this instant.”

“I only want to expl –”

“You’re hurting me. I bet you enjoy that. I bet that’s what you want; hurting women. What you get off on. I don’t. So let go, or I’ll call the police. I will.”

She held up her smartphone so that he could see the screen. The numbers 999 had already been inputted. Her thumb hovered over the
Call
icon, less than a centimetre away from activating it.

Reluctantly Barnaby relinquished his grip on her.

“Yes,” she said. “Didn’t think you’d want that. Didn’t think you’d care for a big scene with the authorities
chez
Pollard. I’m leaving now, Barnaby. I’m going, and you aren’t to contact me. You aren’t to try and visit. You’re to leave me alone. Got that?”

“But Lydia...”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. Furious tears. “I loved you, you fucking idiot. We were terrific together. And now you’ve gone and... and utterly buggered it up. Why didn’t I see it earlier? Why didn’t I realise all this was too good to be true?”

She spun on her heel and stormed off. Moments later, Barnaby heard the front door open and then
whump
shut. He went to the window and watched Lydia cross the driveway and exit via the deliveries gate at the side. Out on the street, she raised a hand. A taxi drew up. She climbed in.

Barnaby remained at the window for half an hour, looking out at the desultory to-and-fro of summer night traffic and pedestrians. A full moon hung high above London, pale and lonely and desolate.

WHITE AND RED

H
E DID AS
she asked and refrained from contacting her. That wasn’t to say he didn’t keep tabs on her. He hired a private investigator to maintain discreet surveillance. At any time, on any given day, he knew where she was and what she was up to. Just by calling the investigator, he could find out what she had had for breakfast, who she had met for lunch, and where she planned on eating dinner. The man even sent him jpegs of long-lens photographs of Lydia. Here she was, glimpsed through her living-room window. Here, trotting down the street to catch the bus. Here, coming home with a bag of groceries.

Technically it was stalking. But Barnaby was able to justify it to himself on the grounds that he had revealed something about himself to Lydia which he would rather the rest of the world not know. He needed to keep a close watch on her, for his own sake and the sake of GloCo, just in case she did something impetuous. He doubted she would, but there was always the risk, and risks should be minimised.

Previous girlfriends had all understood the deal. The fabulously expensive gifts he lavished on them were the price of their silence. Most of them, besides, were into sadomasochism. If that wasn’t the case to start with, it soon proved to be, once they had undergone two or three sessions in his dungeon. They responded to the crack of the whip as though it awoke some truth in them they hadn’t hitherto been aware of. They learned that they had been born to enjoy pain and submission, and that it gave them an erotic thrill. The tighter he tied the knots that bound them, the harder he thwacked their bare flesh, the more they loved it. Barnaby would listen as their whimpers of discomfort were replaced by moans of delight, and he would be transported. He would push them to greater heights of delirious suffering, sometimes beating them until they passed out. Afterwards, they would be drained and fragile, holding themselves as delicately as though they were broken china, but the look in their eyes – gratitude and gratification – told him everything he needed to know. And they almost without exception came back for more. Whenever he rang one of them up, she would be glad to hear from him. She might take a little cajoling, a little bribing, but soon enough a contract would have been agreed for the night, a safeword established, and she would be letting him fasten her to one of the items of apparatus, quivering as she awaited the snap and smart of the first blow.

Barnaby’s own satisfaction was always deferred until he was sure he had wrung every last drop of ecstasy and humiliation he could out of his disciplinee. He would be in a state of iron-hard tumescence through the process of inflicting pain on her, but would never touch himself or allow himself to be touched before she had achieved full arousal and climax, whether through the beating alone or with the aid of a sex toy or, occasionally, intercourse. Only then, as she was coming down from her endorphin high, would he permit himself ejaculation.

It was about control. Control of himself. Control of another.

Often his semen would mingle with blood spatters on the floor, white coiling amid red. Those were the purest colours imaginable, in Barnaby’s eyes. The two most precious fluids in the human body, mutually spilled, falling onto the floor in a libation to the gods of lust.

HASN’T IT BEEN A

STRANGE SUMMER?

I
T WAS THE
private investigator who alerted Barnaby to the article in the
Daily Mail
. The investigator had been tipped off by an insider contact, a subeditor, who informed him that Lydia Laidlaw had been commissioned to write an opinion piece for the paper. Lydia’s new-found celebrity status meant that she would now command a handsome per-word rate, and that if she pitched for an article it was unlikely to be turned down. The investigator was able to obtain a preview of the text, in return for a sizeable sweetener which the poorly-paid subeditor was only too happy to accept.

He passed the file on to Barnaby via email late one evening, with a note saying,
‘Thought you might like to see this. It’s going in tomorrow’s edition, but unfortunately the presses are already rolling, so we’re too late to do anything about it if we wanted to. Doesn’t appear defamatory to me, but you may be able to read a subtext I can’t.’

The article was entitled ‘Hasn’t It Been A Strange Summer?’ and appeared in the pages of the paper’s
Femail
section.

You’ve probably noticed we haven’t seen much of the sun here in Britain lately.

It rained throughout May, June and July. August was mostly overcast and not particularly warm. As we edge into autumn, the mercury’s dropping but there are still no clear skies.