To Seek a Master (3 page)

‘Never without it.’

Laura reached a decision. It was better to be ticked off by the boss immediately than make a complete fool of herself, lose him several hundred pounds and then get ticked off.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I didn’t know we’d be playing.’

‘Be prepared for the unexpected, Laura.’

Miss Manston-Jones had stood up.

‘Don’t worry, I expect I can find you something.’

As she spoke her eyes had flicked up and down Laura’s body, a survey she seemed to find amusing, to judge by her faint smile. Laura soon found out why. She’d been telling herself that their figures were similar, but the white slacks she was given proved at least a size too small, making it difficult to wriggle her bottom into them and leaving her deeply conscious of her rear view as they walked out onto the links. Mr Henderson made one of his mildly ambiguous remarks.

‘Glad to see you found something, Laura. You’ll do very nicely like that, I’m sure.’

He had held out a club to her as he spoke, leaving it open as to whether he meant she’d do nicely at golf or for their visual entertainment in between strokes, and as usual Laura was left wondering if it wasn’t just her imagination. Even if it was, she couldn’t agree with him, as she was certain she wasn’t going to do well no matter how she was dressed.

Both men had bags of clubs, and Laura felt her heart sink further as Miss Manston-Jones made a confident selection. She’d obviously played before, and when she hit her ball it flew arrow straight and over halfway down the fairway. Doing her best to feign confidence, Laura went through the same ritual, selecting a ball, noting the number on her score card, and
balancing
it on a tee, where it stayed after her third attempt. Standing back, she gave the club an experimental swing, which felt surprisingly good. Sure that she could hit the ball a reasonable distance and in more or less the right direction, she stepped forwards a little, braced herself and swung the club down as hard as she could, sending the ball backwards about three feet. Miss Manston-Jones was trying not to snigger as she spoke.

‘Let me show you how to stand.’

Laura stood aside, feeling helpless as the other woman quickly teed the ball up a second time, then demonstrated the correct stance.

‘You need to place your feet about shoulder width apart, with your knees bent slightly so that your weight is evenly distributed between your heels and the balls of your feet, and far enough back so that you’re comfortable with the clubface positioned directly behind the ball. Try it.’

Laura nodded doubtfully and attempted the stance, immediately failing to meet Miss Manston-Jones’ approval.

‘No, no. The ball should be midway between your feet.’

Laura tried again, painfully conscious that both men were looking on with obvious amusement. Again Miss Manston-Jones was unsatisfied.

‘No. Let me show you.’

Miss Manston-Jones stepped close behind Laura, pressed against her as she demonstrated how best to hold and swing the club. Laura did her best to concentrate on what she was being told and not on the fact that had either man been in the same position as Miss Manston-Jones it would have left what was between his legs pressed firmly against the over tight seat of her slacks. At last the other woman seemed satisfied and stepped back.

‘Now try.’

Laura swung again, doing her best to follow instructions. This time her club hit the ball, sending it high in the air to fall at the edge of the fairway slightly less than half as far down as the others. Miss Manston-Jones gave a firm nod.

‘Not bad at all, for a beginner.’

A grateful smile forced itself onto Laura’s face in defiance of a deeper urge to plant one muddy shoe hard against the seat of Miss Manston-Jones’ slacks.

The game began, for Laura, a long series of embarrassments. Not only did Miss Manston-Jones insist on correcting her at every opportunity, usually with physical assistance, but her ball seemed to be possessed by a particularly malicious gremlin with a taste for sand, water, trees and long grass. Despite Mr Henderson’s best efforts they lost hole after hole, until Mr Drake finally inflicted the final humiliation by offering to scrap the bet.

Laura declined, adopting her stance for the seventh hole with a new determination, her muscles tense, her legs well braced, fired with aggression as she swung her club high and brought it down with a crack that sent the ball down the fairway on a perfect line, to bounce twice and land on the green no more than a yard from the hole. Thoroughly pleased with herself, she turned to receive the adulation she was due from the others, only to find all three of them looking at her, but not her face. Miss Manston-Jones’ raised a finger.

‘Laura, I think you ought to cover yourself behind. Your trousers have split.’

Laura spent the rest of the meeting flushing pink at every look from either Mr Henderson or Mr Drake. Both had thought her accident highly amusing, despite superficial attempts at sympathy. Miss Manston-Jones had been little better, helping Laura as best she could but with laughter in her voice even
after
they had changed once more. Most galling of all, when they gathered in the dining room she discovered that the incident had helped create camaraderie between the two men at her expense, which enabled Mr Henderson to leave with the coveted contract in his briefcase and his face set in what Laura considered a thoroughly fatuous grin.

As they drove back he spoke of his promotion, now considered in the bag, and hinted that as PA to the head of marketing she could expect an increment in her own salary. Laura gave an absent-minded thanks, wondering if she’d even have the nerve to stay on at all when the story of what had happened that morning was sure to have circulated around the entire company within days, if not hours. Mr Henderson was known for his fund of funny stories, often at the expense of his colleagues, and yet there had to be at least a chance of persuading him to keep quite. Asking couldn’t make the situation any worse.

‘Um … Mr Henderson, I’d be very grateful if you don’t tell anybody what happened this morning.’

He laughed.

‘I bet you would! Don’t worry, you can count on my discretion.’

He’d reached out as he spoke, and for one moment she thought he was going to place his hand on her knee, only for him to change gear instead. Laura let out her breath to dispel the sudden tension, wondering if the gesture had been innocent, or a hint that some little favour would be needed to ensure her silence. He said nothing more, instead starting to explain the work she would need to do in support of the order they’d secured. Laura relaxed, sure that she was being unfairly suspicious and that both his subtly ambiguous remarks and the implication of the gesture he’d just made were no more than the products of her over-active imagination.

Once back at EAS she was kept busy liaising with other departments to organise the work they had brought in and writing up Mr Henderson’s report to his line manager. It was nearly five o’clock before she’d finished, and she opened Outlook Express in the hope that there would be no emails that needed attending to before she went home. There were only four in all, one from Brian, the company humorist, with a series of jokes about different farm animals changing light bulbs, two queries from colleagues she was able to answer immediately and without difficulty, and a fourth, from somebody called simply The Controller, which she nearly deleted as spam before curiosity got the better of her. Clicking on it, she brought the message window up to reveal a single line.
WEAR STOCKINGS TOMORROW
.

Laura stared at the message, possibilities flicking through her mind: first that it was merely spam after all, then that it was somebody playing a joke on her, which almost certainly meant that Mr Henderson had broken his promise, and finally that it might be from Mr Henderson himself, as the opening gambit in a game of blackmail and seduction. Immediately angry, she called up the message source, reading carefully though the data to see if she could shed any further light on the message.

It certainly wasn’t from Mr Henderson’s normal address, or anybody else’s within EAS, but that meant very little. He, or anybody else, could have used an anonymous server, thus covering their trail in case she complained. That made it seem likely that it was Mr Henderson, and that her suspicions had been right all along, with him merely waiting his chance before making his move. She rose, determined to confront him, only to sit down again. He would simply deny it, and she had no proof. The accusation would annoy him, whether he had sent the message or not, and he would then undoubtedly tell everybody
about
her splitting her slacks, making her the laughing stock of the office. She could already imagine how much fun Brian would have, and they’d never got on.

After a moment’s hesitation she deleted the message, then consigned it to oblivion, telling herself that whoever had sent it couldn’t possibly know she’d read it first. She shut her computer down and began to tidy up, all the while with the incident preying on her mind. As she walked to the station she was trying to work out who could have sent it, why, and what she could do. There seemed to be three main options.

The message might simply be from a joker, a random pervert who didn’t even know her, or some chancer, in which case it was best ignored and there would be no consequences.

It might be genuine, in which case she could ignore it and hope that whoever had sent it gave up, which was the sensible option but almost certainly meant she’d never catch him.

It might be genuine and she could do as she was told, pretending to go along with him so that she could catch the bastard. That would be highly satisfying, and there was no denying her curiosity, but the idea of putting on stockings at the command of some unknown man gave her an all-body hot flush compounded of indignation, shame and something else, to which she was very definitely not going to admit.

3

AS SHE RODE
the train back towards King’s Lynn, Laura found it impossible to concentrate on her book. It should have been a good part too, with Lord Jasper tying Evangeline to the branch of a tree with her hands above her head for some unspecified fate, only for her to be rescued in the nick of time once more. Normally her fertile imagination would have provided a dozen ways to specify the heroine’s fate, leaving her in the state of arousal and anticipation in which she liked to keep herself for the evening. Now it was impossible, with reality intruding no matter how hard she tried to concentrate.

Nothing in the message had suggested any real threat, yet she found a new comfort in Smudge as she walked him along the river and she made doubly sure her door was locked. Simply ignoring the message was clearly not an option, and as she ate the Chinese meal she had treated herself to in order to compensate for a thoroughly bad day, she found herself thinking about it once again, but in terms of the sort of crime one of her favourite detectives might have been called on to solve.

Mr Henderson was definitely her prime suspect. He liked stockings, and seemed to fancy her, which supplied his motive, while he knew her work email and might feel he had a hold over her, which supplied his means. The only evidence against him was that in four years as her boss he had never actually made a move on her.

Everybody else at work, quite a few friends and numerous clients knew her work email, so that wasn’t much help, but the message had at least implied that whoever had sent it knew she hadn’t been wearing stockings that day. Mr Henderson had known, because it had been chilly enough on the golf course for her to want to keep her tights on under the now ruined slacks, so he’d seen. It was just as well she had too, because otherwise he and Mr Drake would have been treated to a view of her knickers, which showed a large pink teddy bear mooning and had ‘A Bear Behind’ written across the seat.

As far as she knew, the only other people who could possibly have known she had tights on were Mr Drake and Miss Manston-Jones, both of whom had seen, and both of whom had her work email on the information sheets she’d given them that morning. Miss Manston-Jones didn’t seem a very likely suspect, even if she had seemed just a bit too keen to get to grips with Laura when trying to teach her golf. It wasn’t hard to imagine her as a dyke, and quite a butch one at that, yet it was hard to imagine her, or any woman, using that approach.

Mr Drake was a more serious possibility, and one she found hard to resent. He was very much her type of man: tall, self-confident, just a little stern. The idea of being under his control appealed, so much so that she knew she would be prepared to forgive him what from any ordinary man would have been a disturbing, even creepy, approach. Unfortunately she would not be seeing him the following day, so he had nothing to gain from the knowledge that she was wearing stockings, nor have any way of finding out if she’d obeyed. The same was true for Miss Manston-Jones, which left the finger of suspicion pointed very firmly at Mr Henderson.

She could not be certain. Another man at EAS might have
seen
far enough up her skirt to realise she was wearing tights, even Brian, who might well have sent her the message as a childish and kinky joke. There had been other women in the changing rooms at Setchal Manor, but they could be ruled out easily, as could any of her fellow passengers on the train into work. Neither group knew who she was.

Then again, if one of the commuters had picked up the bookmark she’d lost they would know her work email. She pondered the possibility, but she was sure she’d dropped it when she got out at King’s Lynn, either in the train or on the platform and both Darcy and Mr Brown had got out before her. Hovis Boy had lingered, tangled up in the rucksack he’d been carrying, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him as the sort of little pervert who’d look up her skirt. He had to be a possibility, which was a relief in that she would have no difficulty at all in confronting him.

In fact, it might even be possible to conduct an experiment.

As she rolled her stockings up her legs the following morning, Laura was telling herself firmly that she was not wearing them for the pleasure of a man, let alone the man who had sent the message. She was doing so in order to gauge Hovis Boy’s reaction on the train. If he’d got her email address somehow and sent the message he’d be looking, but that wasn’t enough. Only if she was actually wearing stockings would he be bold enough to make the move which would allow her to report the little pervert to the police. That meant flashing her stockings for him, and possibly others, perhaps even Darcy, a highly embarrassing prospect that was quite definitely not the cause of the arousal she’d been unable to shrug off ever since making her decision.