"Have you any proof of any of this?"

"None you'd accept. Nothing that would convince you empirically."

I turned to her. "And what was it that convinced you, Mrs M? One instant you're a lecturer; bit truculent, bit misfit, but a star of common room and lecture hall and marked for greatness, according to the rumours; the next you're some sort of bandit queen. An outlaw. Wanted everywhere."

"Wanted everywhere," she agreed beneath a flexed brow. "Unwelcome throughout."

"So what happened?"

She hesitated, gaze flicking restlessly across the table for a few moments. "You really want to know?"

"Well, I thought I did. Why? Am I going to regret asking?"

Another uncharacteristic hesitation. She sighed, tossed a chip to a nearby square on the table and sat back. I placed some chips on another part of the table. She kept looking at the table while she talked quietly. I had to sit closer to hear her, hunched over the giant ball that was my borrowed belly. "There is a facility at a place called Esemier," she said. "I was never privileged with the exact world coordinates, I was always tandemed there by somebody with impeccable security clearance. It's on a large island covered in trees on a big lake or inland freshwater sea. Wherever it is, it's where Madame d'Ortolan used to carry out research and test some of her theories, especially on those transitioners with an abnormal twist to their talents. Both the official line and what you might call the top layer of rumour have it that it's gone now, the remaining research decentralised, distributed, but Esemier is where the important programmes started. Maybe where they're still going on. One day I might go back there, find out."

"I've never heard of it."

"That would please her."

"Go on."

"As you say, I was seen as promising; a future high-flyer. Madame d'Ortolan likes to have such people on her side, or at least brought before her so that she can test them; evaluate them while they think they're the ones doing the evaluating. I was invited to take part in a programme investigating amongst other things the possibility of involuntary transitioning; the theoretical possibility that changes in the structure of an adept's mind might let them flit without septus, or at least without a specific pre-enabling dose."

"I thought that was completely impossible."

"Well, quite, and if you ever ascend to the clearance levels that allow you access to the results of the research I'm talking about you'll learn it was this programme that's credited with determining that."

"And did it?"

"After a fashion. It was more thorough and wide-ranging than just that, though. The full programme was aimed at establishing what randomisers were capable of, removing the myths and superst.i.tions a.s.sociated with their weird-s.h.i.t powers and giving the field a proper scientific grounding, but septus-free transitioning was the pinnacle, the platinum-standard goal we were never likely to achieve but should never quite lose sight of, either."

"What did it involve?"

"Torture," she said, fixing her gaze on me for a moment. "In time, it involved torture." She looked back at the gaming table as the chips we'd placed were raked away. She reached out, placed another on the same square. I placed some of mine nearby. "The randomisers ranged from the cretinous through the educationally subnormal and the socially awkward to the odd disturbed genius. Initially it was harmless. We were convinced we were helping these misfit people. And it was fascinating, enthralling; it was a privilege to be spending a vacation researching something that was almost certainly impossible but which would be simply astounding if it proved to be a viable technique, the sort of breakthrough that resounds across the many worlds and down the centuries, the kind of achievement that means your name is known for evermore. Even if it proved to be an entirely mythical talent as we suspected we were finding out lots of stuff. It was the single most exciting time of my life. When the autumn came and I was supposed to resume work at UPT, I volunteered to take a year's special leave so that I could stay on at the facility and keep working on the problem. Madame d'O herself smoothed away any problems the faculty might have offered. For most people, that was when I disappeared." She looked at me. "I'm sorry I never did say goodbye to you, not properly. I thought I would see you at the start of the new term, then... well, I'm sorry." She looked away again.

Quite. I had no intention of telling her how much I had missed her throughout all these years, or that I had felt, at the time, as though my heart had been broken, or that I became a different person thereafter, and became so specifically because of that abrupt abandonment, turning from a prospective career in academia or research to the training required to become a transitionary, an operative, an agent; eventually, an a.s.sa.s.sin. It would only have sounded maudlin, and what good would it have done?

"I think," she continued, "Theodora mistook my fascination with the theoretical side of the research for outright zeal, a shared pa.s.sion." She glanced at me and a smile, soon gone, flickered across her face. She stared at the chip on the table again. It was sc.r.a.ped away too and she replaced it with another.

"It was during that year, after the people who'd just been there for the vacation had gone back to their studies, that we started to make real progress. Just the hard core were left. We had our own septus techs on the staff, seconded from wherever they actually formulate the stuff; experts in its manufacture, use and side effects. That was a privilege in itself; you never get to meet these people. Did you know there are trace elements put into septus to make transitioners easier to track?" She glanced at me, long enough to see my eyes widen. "Trackers would have a much more difficult job if those trace elements weren't present. They would have to rely on something like pure instinct. As it is, with the elements there in every standard dose of septus, it's as though they see a puff of smoke left behind where somebody has just transitioned, and can follow a faint line of that discharge to the next embodiment."

"Seriously?" I asked.

"Absolutely seriously." Mrs Mulverhill nodded slowly, still staring at the gaming table. "And Madame d'Ortolan was absolutely serious about what we were doing, too. She spent a lot of time at the facility, directing our research, guiding our enquiries, even helping to refine some of the abstract, speculative stuff. I spent a few evenings doing nothing but talk with her about transitioning theory. She has quite a fine mind, for a psychopath. At the time, I didn't know that was possible. However, she was... overenthusiastic. Wanting what she did so much, she took risks, cut corners, overextended herself. She let transitioners and trackers and septus chemists get together properly for the first time in centuries, and some of us learned things we were never supposed to know."

"Like the trace-elements thing."

"Like the trace-elements thing." She nodded again. "I think she a.s.sumed my hunger to know was directed solely at the problem in hand: finding out what the randomisers were really capable of and grasping after septus-free flitting. I don't think it occurred to her that I might just have a general urge to find out all I could about everything, especially whatever was being kept purposefully hidden."

More of our chips had disappeared. Some people left the table, to be replaced by others. Mrs M put another chip on the same square. I placed mine on the square next to hers. "The randomisers were troublesome. Socially inept, highly neurotic, riddled with problems and often medically challenged. Continence seemed to be a particular problem. It was possible to grow to despise them, certainly to dismiss them, to forget their humanity. One began to feel that they kept their secrets locked away inside them deliberately, just to spite us. We were encouraged never to fraternise, to treat them as experimental subjects, in the name of objectivity. They were broken, mostly useless people; a threat to themselves as well as society. We were doing them a favour, almost enn.o.bling them, by containing their awkward, undisciplined powers and giving them a purpose, making them a part of a programme which would benefit everybody.

"We began to stress them. It was quite easy to do. They were like uncooperative children: wilful, perverse, often knowingly obstructive, sometimes aggressive. Stressing them severely rationing their food and water, depriving them of sleep, giving them impossible puzzles while they were forced to listen to painfully intense noise felt like a necessary discipline, like a sort of small collateral punishment they had already asked for, yet at the same time it seemed perfectly excusable because it was for research, for science, for progress and the good of all, and we weren't enjoying it; in fact we suffered maybe as much as they did because we knew more fully what we were doing. They were something like brutes while we were properly functioning human beings: educated, cultured, sensitive. Only the best could be asked to do the worst, as Madame d'Ortolan liked to say.

"When I went to Theodora with some misgivings, after watching what was basically a torture session when a man strapped to a bed was injected with a mixture of psychotropic drugs and corrosive chemicals, she told me about the menace we were all facing. She'd convinced herself that the Concern and every world it could reach was under some terrible threat from outside, that there was some diabolic force forever pressing at its boundaries wherever they were supposed to be and we had to prepare ourselves for onslaught. I pressed as much as I thought I could get away with to get her to be more specific, but whether she was talking about a sort of anti-Concern, some equally worlds-spanning shadow organisation opposed to everything we tried to do, or was hinting at s.p.a.ce aliens or supernatural demons from unglimpsed dimensions it was impossible to tell. All that mattered was that it they posed an unmitigated and existential threat to the Concern. In that cause, nothing was too great a sacrifice and no action was inexcusable. Our inescapable duty and solemn obligation was to explore without stint absolutely everything that might help us prevail when our time of testing came, entirely regardless of any petty and irrelevant qualms we might feel. We could not afford to indulge our own squeamishness; we had to be brave.

"She talked to me for a long time. During that hour or so I calmed down, I relaxed a little and I realised that I no longer felt quite so distressed. I accepted a handkerchief from her and dried my tears, I took a few deep breaths, I nodded at what she said, I clutched at her hand when she offered it to me and I hugged her when that seemed like the right thing to do. I thanked her for listening and for suggesting that I take the rest of the day off, which I did. I did all this and I felt relieved in that way because I'd realised she was mad and that soon this would all be over, or at least my part in it would soon be over, because I had to get away from that place for my own sanity, my own peace of mind, and if, as I suspected, Madame d'Ortolan would rather have had me imprisoned or even killed than let me go from there while I might be harbouring any doubts about what was being done, then at least making the attempt would bring an end to it one way or the other. It hadn't occurred to me that she was more likely to turn me from one of the investigating to one of the investigated. If she'd caught me I'd have been the one in the padded cell or the strap-down bed. I heard that happened to a couple of other dissenters, later."

Our chips were removed. Mrs M leant forward to replace hers with another, almost colliding with the retreating rake removing the previous one. She hesitated, then she nodded at our two piles of chips. "Shall we put them together?"

"You have more to lose," I pointed out.

"Even so."

"Then, certainly." I used my hand as a blade, pushing my small pile into hers. She took all our remaining chips and stacked them onto the square she had been favouring.

"Theodora had miscalculated," she continued. "I knew people. I'd made friends with some of the trackers and the septus chemists, taken a few as lovers. Some of them had misgivings too. Some just needed somebody to talk to. Some only wanted s.e.x. When I left, very suddenly and without warning despite the fact that Theodora was having me watched by a team of spotters and trackers brought in specially, immediately after our talk it was without a trace, without the traditional puff of smoke, and with a plastic drum the size of my head containing a supply of untraceable septus in micropill form that will last me into my dotage, or until Theodora finally captures me or has me killed. I even have enough to share around, Tem," she told me, glancing at me. "I am a bandit queen with a following these days. I have my own small band of outlaws. Care to join?"

I sat back, took a deep breath, put a hand to my bald head and smoothed my hand over my naked scalp. "What would I be supposed to do?"

"Nothing direct yet. Just keep what I've said in mind. Keep your eyes and ears open and, when you're asked to jump, jump the right way."

"Is that that all? You could have sent a note." all? You could have sent a note."

"You'll remember tonight, Tem," she said, with a wintry smile. "I've risked a lot to come and see you like this. That... emprise is a signifier of both my seriousness and that of the situation."

"And why me, anyway?"

"You're Theodora's golden boy, aren't you?"

"Am I?"

"Have you had to f.u.c.k her yet?"

"No, I haven't."

"Astonishing. She must actually like you."

"So why do you think I would act against her?"

"Because I know that she's an evil old f.u.c.k and I hope that you're not."

"What if you're wrong?"

"And you're an evil old f.u.c.k too?"

"I meant about her; but either."

"Then we are lost. Because I am not not wrong about her." wrong about her."

"Hmm?" I said in response to somebody nudging my elbow. I looked round and saw a substantial pile of chips being pushed up the table towards us like an untidily clacking wave of gleaming plastic.

"Isn't that just the way?" she breathed, and swung herself onto my lap, draped herself over my paunch, threw her arms around me and in the midst of a deep kiss, with her legs wrapping around mine under the table, we transitioned back to the dark bedroom of my house just in time for her to slip off me and me out of her.

She placed a single straight finger across my lips and then rose, dressed and left.

She had left two tiny pills on my bedside cabinet. They were exactly like septus micropills except that each had an almost invisibly small red dot, rather than the standard blue one, centred on the top surface.

The Philosopher.

I met GF in the doctor's surgery. GF were her initials as well as being what she was. She was one year below me in school. I had seen her a few times in town, at bus stops and in the library. She was tall and skinny and had thin brown hair. She always walked with her head down and shoulders hunched as though she felt she was too tall or was always looking for something on the ground. She wore braces and cheap gla.s.ses and always dressed in long dark dresses and long-sleeved tops even on hot days. Often she wore a sort of shapeless hat which looked like it had been pulled down hard over her ears. Her face and nose were both elongated. Her eyes looked quite big until she took her gla.s.ses off.

I had left school that spring and was in a training college. Even though I was now a young man I didn't know how to approach girls so I followed her home from the surgery and got up very early the next morning so that I could be waiting at her bus stop when she got the school bus. When she arrived at the bus stop I said h.e.l.lo and left it at that, burying my face in my newspaper. I had intended to engage her in conversation but decided that it would be better to take things more gradually. Two other girls in school uniform turned up but they didn't talk to her. The bus came and they got on. I couldn't, of course, because it was a school bus and I wasn't in school any more.

The next two days were the weekend and I hung around places in town where I'd seen her before but she didn't show up. At the start of the next week I went back to her bus stop. This time I smiled and said h.e.l.lo and attempted to engage her in conversation but she was very quiet and looked embarra.s.sed. When the other two girls appeared she stopped talking altogether and stood at the far end of the bus shelter. The other two girls looked at me strangely. I took the next ordinary bus that came along even though it wasn't the one I needed.

I returned the next day, undaunted. I spoke to her again. She wore sungla.s.ses even though it was a dull day. I thought perhaps she imagined that I would not recognise her, though this was wrong. The other two girls huddled together and glanced at her and giggled and sn.i.g.g.e.red. One of them asked if she had walked into a door and she ran away in the direction of her home and appeared to be crying. She missed the school bus, which the two girls boarded.

She had left her school bag behind. I looked in it and found school books, pencils and pens and a girl's magazine as well as some sweets. Something rattled inside her pencil sharpener, which was of the type that comes contained in its own cylindrical waste-shavings bin. I unscrewed it and discovered four spare blades for the sharpener, though no small screwdriver with which to facilitate the replacement of one blade by another. Two of the spare blades had what looked like dried blood on them. I kept one and replaced everything else as it had been, save for a Sugar Cherry, which I ate.

I remained, awaiting my own bus, and she reappeared. I said h.e.l.lo again and handed her the school bag and asked if she was all right. She muttered something and nodded. She got on the same bus as me but sat elsewhere.

The next day she still wore the dark gla.s.ses. She stood in the bus stop and stared at me, though she ignored my attempts at polite conversation. When the two other girls appeared to be joined later by another she ignored them too. When the school bus came she ignored that also. The driver shrugged and drove off. When my bus came she got on it with me and asked to sit beside me. I of course said yes, and was happy at this unexpected turn of events. I was beside the window, she was by the aisle.

When the bus was moving she turned to me and hissed, "Where's my other blade? What have you done with it? Where is it?"

I was sitting so close to her and the light fell in such a way that I could see that behind the dark gla.s.ses she had bruises around her eyes and the top of her nose.

I had meant to study the blade that I had removed from the pencil sharpener, perhaps using an old microscope I knew I still had at the back of a cupboard. However, there had hardly been time. It had been a busy day at the college yesterday. I had forgotten about an exam which was not like me and I had been involved in a fist fight with another boy. This was also not a common occurrence, certainly not since mum had left and I'd renounced her idiotic sect and taken up the True Faith. The tiny blade had slipped my mind until that morning. I'd looked at it while walking to the bus stop but this had revealed nothing.

Initially I denied all knowledge of what she was talking about, but she was adamant that the blade had been present before she had left the house the morning before, and she knew that I must have looked in the bag when she had left it behind and removed the blade. She accused me of stealing a Sugar Cherry, too. I remember that I started to panic, realising that she did indeed know what had happened and that I was guilty, but then a strange calmness seemed to descend on me and I thought about what I could say that would be convincing and yet leave me relatively blameless in her eyes. I told her that now I remembered; the two girls had looked inside her bag and had been messing around with the stuff inside for a while and one of them must have removed it then. They had found a dead mouse in the bus shelter and put it in her bag but when they had gone on their bus I had taken the dead mouse out again, though I hadn't wanted to say anything because I felt bad about looking inside her bag even if it was just to search for the mouse and remove it. The girls must have taken the sweet, too; I didn't even like Sugar Cherries.

She frowned, and the bruised skin above her nose trembled. I knew then that I had convinced her, and I felt a sense of great relief and victory. I was especially pleased with the bit about the mouse.

"It was one of them?" she asked, still sounding suspicious.

I nodded.

"Which one?"

I said I didn't know. I hadn't actually seen either of the girls take anything from her bag, but n.o.body else had touched it so it had to be them. She appeared to accept this.

I introduced myself. She told me her name too. Her initials were GF. I pointed out that if she was somebody's girlfriend then she had the right initials, and she seemed amused at this, though she did not actually laugh. When she smiled she would always put her hand to her mouth to hide her braces and teeth.

I threw the tiny sharpener blade down a drain outside the college.

I started to meet her after school, at a cafe. I told her jokes and amusing things that had happened at the college. She talked of pop stars and other celebrities and sometimes we listened to the music she liked, sharing one earphone each. She had no brothers or sisters and her mother was dead so she lived alone with her father. I told her she was lucky to have no annoying siblings but she did not seem to share this view. It was very hard to get her to talk about her father or her life at home at all.

GF first let me kiss her at a bus stop while she waited for a bus back home. Her braces proved less of an enc.u.mbrance than I'd antic.i.p.ated, though it still felt odd. We went to a dance for young people at the town Youth Club and danced very close throughout the closing songs of the evening. I think she could feel my erection through our clothes but far from holding back, as I'd feared, she pressed herself amorously against me. Later, in a shop doorway, we kissed very pa.s.sionately, and I was allowed to put my hand up her blouse to feel her bra and b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

One day on a weekend she came to my house when my family were away visiting a dying relation. I had been expected to go as well but I'd claimed I was supposed to go on Work Experience that day. She brought a quarter-bottle of spirits with her and we got a little drunk. She had also brought some of her music and so we danced in my parents' lounge, which felt odd. This time when we danced and kissed she let me undo her bra inside her blouse and put my hands on her behind through her long skirt, allowing me to cup her b.u.t.tocks and tease them apart and slide my hands as deeply into the s.p.a.ce between her legs as the skirt would allow. Her fingers dug into my back through my shirt and she made a cage of her fingers and clutched at my head, ramming my mouth against hers.

"Do you want to f.u.c.k me?" she asked. She looked and sounded very serious. I felt extremely nervous. I had meant to say "Nothing would give either of us greater pleasure!," which was a line I'd heard in a film, but in the end I just nodded and said yes, I did.

"Where's your room?" she asked, taking me by the hand. "We'll have to close the curtains."

I had kissed a few girls, and one, since gone away to university, had put her hand into my pants and w.a.n.ked me off, but I was otherwise still a virgin. I had hoped to see things, to get to look at a girl's body properly, in close-up, in soft sunlight or full moonlight, but she wanted the curtains closed and no lights on. I had a packet of condoms I'd stolen from my mother's bedside cabinet but she a.s.sured me there was no need for these. I came very quickly the first time. She wanted to be taken from behind, her holding onto the headboard of my narrow bed, me kneeling behind her. Later she took me in her mouth. I thought this was a bit dirty at first, but she just gave a single snorting laugh when I mentioned this. I had become very hard again and could feel, against the skin of my c.o.c.k, the braces imprisoning her teeth. I began to pull out as I felt myself approaching o.r.g.a.s.m, gasping and telling her this, but she kept me in her mouth and let me come there. Later again we made love face to face, though her eyes remained tightly closed throughout. Her nails drew blood on my back, though I only realised this later. At the time the pain was not so bad and I remember thinking this was interesting. She laughed at the fact that I always wanted to clean up immediately, with tissues.

The room was dim but nowhere near fully dark and I had already noticed the various scars and burn marks distributed over a large proportion of her body. Even if the room had been pitch black or I had been blind, I would have felt the welts of raised scar tissue on her arms and thighs and torso. I had already half guessed, and one or two boys I knew I would hardly call them friends, but we hung around together sometimes had suggested that there was a reason she always wore long clothes and was excused gym cla.s.ses and swimming lessons.

We had s.e.x whenever we could. My dad's garden shed was probably where we did it most, usually at night. It was hidden from the house and it was easy to get the key from near the back door. Sometimes we would pretend to do things to each other with items like the saws and hammers and the heavy vice that sat clamped to the workbench. We were invited to a party at the flat of some of her friends and had s.e.x in a bedroom that had been set aside for just this activity; there was a queue.

GF had long been in a girls' organisation called the Girl Foresters and had risen to the rank of junior officer. One time I got to f.u.c.k her while she wore the uniform of this organisation and that felt especially good. I fantasised that one day she would become a police officer and I would get to f.u.c.k her while she wore that uniform.

One time, for nearly a week, we had the run of a house belonging to an old lady who she cleaned for sometimes, when the old lady was in hospital. We f.u.c.ked until we were both sore. She had bruises on her arms and the backs of her legs that I had not caused.

"Of course it's my dad," she said one evening, lying on the floor. If we did lie down to have s.e.x, we always did so on a sheet spread over a quilt on the floor; she would not use the beds in the old lady's house. I had asked her if the bruises came from her father. I had wanted to ask her this for some months now but had never felt the time was right. In all honesty I wasn't sure the time was actually right then and perhaps if I'd thought about it more deeply I'd have realised the time would perhaps never be right, but I did want to know and I felt we were in a relationship of sufficient long-standing and even commitment that I deserved the prerogative of being able to enquire regarding such matters.

I asked whether he had always. .h.i.t her. "Long as I can remember," she replied. "Ever since mum left."

I said I thought her mum was dead.

"He says she is," she told me. "Won't say where she went or where she ended up before she died. If she is is dead." She rolled over onto her front. I stroked her b.u.t.tocks, which were very firm and round and smooth and one of the few places on her body that she had never marked with the various implements she used to cut herself. I wanted to ask her if her father had abused her in other ways, if he had abused her s.e.xually as well. I had already guessed that he had but I wanted to be sure. However, I was worried that this might prove a rather difficult subject. GF could be very nervous and highly strung and was liable, when faced with a conversational subject she felt uncomfortable with or a line of questioning she objected to, to burst into tears, fly into a rage or storm out of a room. dead." She rolled over onto her front. I stroked her b.u.t.tocks, which were very firm and round and smooth and one of the few places on her body that she had never marked with the various implements she used to cut herself. I wanted to ask her if her father had abused her in other ways, if he had abused her s.e.xually as well. I had already guessed that he had but I wanted to be sure. However, I was worried that this might prove a rather difficult subject. GF could be very nervous and highly strung and was liable, when faced with a conversational subject she felt uncomfortable with or a line of questioning she objected to, to burst into tears, fly into a rage or storm out of a room.

"I know what you're thinking," she said as I gently caressed her behind and she pushed back the cuticle on each finger to inspect the pale moon of nail beneath before biting on the ragged edges of her fingernails. I hesitated, wondering if she really had guessed what I was thinking. I decided, with a disturbed feeling, that she probably had guessed correctly. However, I did not say anything. I kept on stroking the glossy skin of her backside. "It is what you're thinking, about him, isn't it? What else he might have done to me if he does this to me. That's what you want to know, isn't it?" she said. Still I said nothing. She continued to worry at her fingernails, biting them and tearing at them. She still didn't turn round to look at me. "Well, what do you you think?" she asked. think?" she asked.

I could tell from her voice exactly what I should think but I told her I didn't know what to think. I said this partly to be completely sure and partly because I felt that doing so kept me in a better situation.

"Well, he did," she said. "From when I was nine." There was a long pause during which she slapped my stroking hand away from her behind. "He still does."

She turned and stared back at me then, with a fierce and terrible look on her face. She rolled over onto her back, drew her legs up and let them fall apart so that her genitals were fully revealed, still moist and glistening from our last bout of lovemaking ten minutes earlier. "Still want to f.u.c.k me now?" she asked, her expression and tone of voice both defiant and desperate. I looked at that raw wound, then into her eyes.

I told her to stay where she was, then got up and went through to the utility room where I found a clothes line. I went back to the room where she lay just as I'd left her. I asked her if she trusted me and she thought about it and then said that she did. I told her to roll back onto her front, which she did. I brought her hands together behind her back and tied them at the wrists. I could hear her crying but trying not to make too much noise about it. I moved an old heavy chair into position and tied each of her feet to its two front legs so that she could not move them, then brought the companion chair round in front of her and carefully raised her by the shoulders and laid her chest and head across the seat.

I told her that of course I still wanted to f.u.c.k her, and I did so, though not aggressively or hard. Instead I f.u.c.ked her very gently and slowly, until I came. Later I untied her and held her while she cried and I told her that she wasn't to let her father f.u.c.k her ever again, but that was the wrong thing to say because she went into one of her rages and tried to slap and punch and bite me, screaming that she couldn't stop him.

We tied each other up occasionally after that. I did not enjoy being immobilised, though, and so we stopped. I like to think that she stood up to her father and he abused her less after this time but he did not stop altogether and I always knew when he had done so, either from the bruises or from the reopened cutting sites on her body.

I shall be completely honest and record here that I think people make too big a fuss about incest these days. I'm sure it has always gone on. However I had grown to hate Mr F, GF's father, and this was as much about the physical damage he did to her and the physical damage that he caused her to do to herself as about the fact that he had raped her from the age of nine, taken her virginity, made her distrust everybody and had treated her like a s.e.x toy rather than a person or a daughter. It seemed to me that he had done something quite literally unforgivable, even if GF had been inclined to forgive him.

I rather lost the plot with Mr F. I went too far. I got carried away. It was not so much that I had let it become personal as that it started out as nothing but personal, because I knew nothing else back then.

I broke into their house when GF was away at a camp with the Girl Foresters. She would be absent for a full week. I crept out of our house, took my bike down the lanes and dark back-roads to their house and used the key that I knew lay under a particular flowerpot to let myself in. I had never been to her house but I had a rough idea of the layout of the place. I knew that Mr F would be drunk and fast asleep that night after his weekly Chamber of Commerce dinner. He was in the bedroom, with the light still on. He was lying on top of the bed, face down, half undressed. He was a tall man, gone to fat about the upper chest and belly, but not as well developed as my old man.

I'd grown up and become quite strong. I'd made myself a cosh from a pair of old socks and a load of piggy-bank change. I whacked him on the back of the head and did it again when he started to rear up, roaring. He went down, gurgling, breath spluttering from his mouth as though he was trying to snore.

I gagged him with thick tape, right round his head twice, and tied him up, then dragged him down to the cellar feet first with his head thumping off each step and tied him to the central-heating unit. I made sure he was well secured and properly gagged, then went up to ransack the house so that it would look like it had been a burglary gone wrong. I was wearing charity-shop gloves and a woollen ski mask that looked like an ordinary hat until you pulled it down. On my feet I was wearing a pair of old sneakers I'd found hanging from a tree in the forest a couple of months earlier. I'd padded them with socks because they were far too big for me. In my rucksack I'd brought another pair of shoes, ones my dad thought he'd thrown out and which were even bigger. I changed into them and walked around in them for a bit, opening drawers and pulling stuff out and pulling back carpets and using a crowbar to prise up a few floorboards. I went into what was obviously GF's room and treated that just the same; I couldn't not. Even that felt oddly good. When I thought I heard a m.u.f.fled noise below, I went back to the cellar and Mr F.

I would have liked to have done something to him like he'd done to his daughter, but that would have been to leave a clue, so I just used kettles of boiling water, an old-fashioned blowtorch and a hammer. When I used the hammer I covered his feet or his hands as appropriate with a towel, so that no blood would splash on me, though there wasn't actually that much. Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees. He screamed through the gag so much that I had to cover his whole head in a sack, and then with a bin bag, just to try to shut him up.