by Ashley Hind
As I calmly dressed and left I smirked at the string of ever more garbled answerphone messages from Esmerelda, the domestic, entreating me in her broken English to ring her, that something dreadful had happened, that she had taken it upon herself to ring the authorities. Then there was the last message, from the sharp man now opposite me: a sombre tone asking me to contact him as soon as possible. I practice a couple of ashen faces in the rear-view mirror of the Evoque as my gates swing open, and wear one as I rush up to the house, pleading with someone to tell me what on earth has happened.
‘Mrs Van Peer?’ asks the detective. ‘Mrs Anoushka Van Peer? I am Detective Inspector Stark. I am afraid I have some very bad news.’
It is said thinly, but I wonder at the fatness of his cock. Slighter men, from what I have seen, can be surprisingly large where it matters. I start with shocked disbelief and then move on to numbed silence, both of which win me deserved Oscars. I say I want to see my husband and the inspector tells me this isn’t wise, but then kind-of leads me upstairs anyway, to the threshold of my shard-covered bedroom. I guess he wants to gauge my reaction; see if any act will slip. It won’t. The deceased has been zipped into a bag but is still on the blood-spattered bed. I feel nothing but a fizzle of elation. The offending goose is about to be bagged up too. It is a little more defrosted now but still cold enough to let them all know it must have lethally fallen in a frozen dead state from the skies above; an unlucky chance in a billion.
‘A goose?’ I keep saying forlornly, to remind them all that it wasn’t anything to do with anyone else, and also to keep highlighting the ridiculous manner of my husband’s death.
‘I’m afraid so,’ says the inspector, his eyes darting all around the room and then flitting to my feet in their high heels and then to my breasts and then back down to my feet again.
‘But what am I to do now?’ I implore, looking lost. Then I lean over and take a hold of the detective’s crotch and give it a firm squeeze to feel it grow against my palm. Not really! I do actually feel like doing just that, since I am now a free woman seemingly constantly bubbling with insatiability, and one with power, even over men of authority like the inspector here. If he can stare at my tits in such a situation then I can surely check out the size of his package? Actually, what really happens is that he beckons over the still shaken Esmerelda and quietly asks if she could perhaps bring some coffee for us.
We take it in the drawing room, just him and me whilst others shuffle around upstairs, scraping up the mess. He sits across from me in my once-husband’s leather swivel chair, brandishing a notebook. The trousers are narrow at the bottom and his socks black. A flash man like my ex might have added some colour here to make a statement. This man is obviously of a serious nature. I like the shoes: smooth-toed and slightly pointed lace-ups; immaculate despite the use they must get. They look expensive. He must earn a decent salary but I imagine he tops it up to afford luxuries like this by taking money and then free sucks from whores. He probably sticks his fingers up their backsides too, since men seem to like to do that to girls they think dirty enough. And why wouldn’t you? Why not abuse your every power if you can? The thought gives me a sudden shiver of jealousy.
‘I’ll just need a few details,’ he tells me, addressing my cleavage. ‘It’s just procedure.’
His looks aren’t furtive as such. He isn’t apparently worried about being caught eyeing up my feet or legs or chest. They are more flitting; there for long enough to gather finer details and evaluate before darting elsewhere to collate yet more information. For some reason I feel no anger at being sized up so gratuitously. He doesn’t come across as shifty. It is more like he is assured and in command. He can look wherever he wants because it is his job to do so. You might think you have reason to complain as his eyes fix upon your chest but as soon as your tits start babbling their confession you will realise his expert technique is yielding results yet again. I might have been sent some blithering arse of a constable but instead I have this high-ranking, slick, proper detective - a man who looks like he would harry and probe and shaft his suspects and have them all cracking by supper time. Not me, though. He isn’t going to be a match for me.
‘It is Anoushka is it, Mrs Van Peer?’ he says, eyes on mine as he does so. ‘Would you spell that for me? It’s a very exotic-sounding name.’
I spell it but I won’t be drawn into explaining the whys and wherefores of its origin. I don’t need to let slip any little details like that.
‘A man I knew,’ I offer instead, ‘once told me that saying my name was like eating a peach: a sumptuous, softly fleshy mouthful to start with and then a little hardness at the end, as the teeth touch the stone. I think he thought it fitted me rather well.’
The detective studies my face a little, perhaps noting that the colour has come back to it and that the eyes are brighter. I can see he is digesting my words, wondering what I want him to take from this. It is an excuse for him to dwell on me awhile. I can tell he likes what he sees, but he maintains his composure.
‘Indeed,’ he says, his eyes going back to his notebook. ‘A peach.’
He has me go through my day. When I mention the massage his eyes drop instantly back down to my cleavage. I’m not sure if it is involuntary or calculatingly intentional. I feel more heat between my thighs, but my mind is crystal clear. I don’t make any silly mistakes like telling him he can check my alibi - a sign of a guilty person if ever there was one. I just give him the facts and assume that a man as efficient as him, despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to the goose as the culprit, might make a few discrete enquiries just to be sure. I’m rather banking on it, in fact.
He relaxes a little, realising that I’m in control of my emotions and not a woman to ever dissolve into hysterics. I can almost sense that he wishes we were meeting under totally different circumstances, where tones and words could be more flirtatious. He deserves a commendation for remaining composed in the face of my heaving chest. I hate fawning, simpering men - I could kill the whole fuck-walloping lot of them. Inspector Stark remains curt, as if to suggest he is still in control, but he adds a sympathetic tone from time to time, perhaps trying his hand at luring me into a false sense of security. I have his measure on both counts and maybe he knows such efforts are as glaringly obvious to me as they are pointless, just as I’ve stopped putting on pretend distraught expressions, since a man with his sharp eye no doubt saw through me in an instant. It’s the proving it that he will find impossible.
Still, I quite like him. He strikes me as an intellectual challenge, someone with wit and cunning, one who doesn’t use brute force and money and loud-mouthed conceit to triumph. I think he might appreciate just how clever I have been in covering my tracks so that nothing can implicate me. It’s a job not to simply tell him. He is razor-like and dangerously shrewd. His eyes are like fingers, probing into the tightest cracks to garner every intricate detail. A spouse-slayer such as me should fall apart under his close scrutiny but I feel relaxed and alive - more so when those slate eyes once again travel slowly down my stocking-clad legs to my high heels. I see the twitch in his jaw and know he has just felt a pulse in his prick. His thoughts can only be carnal now.
‘Mrs Van Peer, you say your husband left before you this morning?’
‘That is correct.’
‘And yet his body was found here, in bed, naked. Do you know of any reason why your husband might have come home to lie naked in bed?’
‘No, inspector, I do not. Nor do I know why what appears to be one of my stockings is tied to my headboard. He certainly never thought our bedtimes worthy of such spicing.’
He studies me again, jaw twitching, frown present, mind mulling the little snippet I have imparted. In his head perhaps he is on my bed now, the stocking being tied in place. His fingernails are pristine and there is no wedding ring. He will be clean. If I went on my knees to him, telling him with a look to
keep his hands on the padded arms of the chair, if I unzipped him and took out the already hardening cock, watching it grow and lengthen, gently pulling down his skin as my breath breezed over his tip, I would detect no trace of dirt, no smell to put me off. I could delight in it, use my tongue to lap and flick and tease it harder still. There would be nothing to stop me slowly sinking my mouth down onto it, gorging deeply upon it.
His fingers would grip the leather armrests but stay put. He wouldn’t try to grasp my head to push me down or close his hand over mine to dictate the speed. He would leave me to it because he understands the essence of things, because he looks so keenly at everything. He would know that his pleasure was better coming however and whenever I decided it, not him. Lips and tongues can give exquisite pleasure but teeth might add pain in an instant, so it is all about implicit trust. That is what makes the buzz become a crackle inside. That is what makes them adore you, as they should. Looks are one thing but it is the touch, the understanding, the thought that makes it everything. It is the being in their head. That brings the worship and that is your reward, your just desserts.
He would know me, because he sees through everyone. Now that the other policemen have gone, now it’s just him and me, it’s an insult to keep up the pretence. The goose will be taking the rap but this clever detective has surely already looked into me and seen my dark heart. Thus he will know that, dark it may be, but for the one who puts themselves in my hands, who puts me first now and always, the same will be given back and much, much more. He will know I adored my husband for never suffering fools, for trampling over the inconsequential to get whatever he wanted and to bring it to me. He will also know I despised him infinitely for shattering it all, for his ripping betrayal, for lusting over someone I could never now be.
He will know that I once put everything into my husband because he didn’t care for idle kindness or sympathies. This world is for takers. Passion is everything: love good wine; love richness and beautiful places; do everything in your power to ensure you have them always. Adore the flesh of another - of one other - and give yourself to them completely, believing only in them. This detective with his snake eyes will already have seen my passion and how hideously I was wronged. He will know I have been on heat since the moment I did my deed - before this in fact, since the instant the plan came to mind. He will understand how this heat, this lust, now drives me. He will know me better than my husband ever cared to.
‘I know you are a dirty bitch,’ his eyes say now, although his words have only been kind. ‘You dream in filth. You frig yourself to the nastiest thoughts and yearn that they might come true. It has always been in you but until now contentedness has suppressed it. Now you realise the contentment was all a lie, and your darkness has been unleashed. Now you want to burn and to saturate. Your cunt is like a dripping furnace. You want everyone smouldering at your feet. You want blood. He gave you money and luxury but you could have got that from anyone. You gave him your heart and soul. He wasted nearly half your life for you without batting an eyelid. It was the best part too - the part you cannot relive; the part where you could have chosen anyone other than him. There can never be enough revenge for that.’
That, at least, is what his eyes say, but his mouth says, ‘I understand you have two teenage sons both at the same boarding school in Switzerland?’
‘I do.’
I have the scars to prove it. They were both briefly the apples of my eye. Their father was their hero, even if he did want them sent away to that specific country, as if banking and high finance is in the air there to be absorbed. He wanted them to be just like him; sons to always make him proud. The eldest one is so like him I might have to put a pillow over his face while he sleeps if I have him back here.
‘So, apart from your cleaner and various other servants, there is no one else that would have a key to get in?’
‘That is correct.’
‘This is a difficult question, Mrs Van Peer, but can you think of anyone who might wish to harm your husband?’
‘Inspector, you suspect foul play?’
I imagine the foul/fowl play pun has been like an elephant in the room since he first caught sight of the goose. He jumps almost imperceptibly in his chair and I see the corners of his mouth flicker just a little. He takes his eyes off my shoes and looks directly at me, perhaps to gauge whether I have said it intentionally or not, when he has no doubt been dying to. I keep a straight face but allow a hint of amusement to register in my eyes. It is another unspoken little connection between us.
‘One must always keep one’s mind open, Mrs Van Peer. I assume you are the sole beneficiary of your husband’s will?’
‘Is that not the usual thing between married couples?’ My reply is nonchalant. His probing is the first real sign that he wants to play me a little. He might have these insights about me but does that put him in control? I don’t know. Could he stop me if I took his delicious cock out of my mouth and climbed onto his lap to sink even hotter upon him, if I let my tits spill out but ordered him not to touch me? Does he have the discipline, the instinct, to keep his hands at his side when he so wants to grasp my soft bare arse as I ride him? He thinks me a murderess so surely apprehension would force him to obey? But then again he is a catcher and defeater of killers. Would his nature allow him to not move a muscle, to take the pleasure as I gripped his hair to keep his head still and rode him slowly and gorgeously, my stiff nipples brushing those closed lips of his, banned from sucking upon me, torturing us both in equal measure? Would I be able to hold out and rob myself of this pleasure to tease him more? Just pondering who would win out is making me wet.
‘I must say, Mrs Van Peer, that you seem to be bearing up with remarkable fortitude given the circumstances.’
I don’t bat an eyelid.
‘The sight of stockings tied to headboards has tempered my grief. Death is not a concept to immediately grasp, or necessarily to feel the effects of. To realise that you have been cheated on is far easier to understand.’
‘Quite, but from a detective’s point of view you must realise it also gives you a potential motive? It is a fact, Mrs Van Peer, that most people are murdered by people who know them. That is how we dumb policemen so often manage to track down their killers. Go kill a random person and pay some attention to not leaving evidence and the likelihood is you will never be caught. But people aren’t killed at random. People are killed for a reason, and that reason is usually for crossing someone they know very well - someone who might once have held them very dear. It would be a dereliction of my duty to not look as close to home as possible.’
I allow myself a hint of a smile. I’m rather enjoying this!
‘May I suggest that it seems obvious that I was not the last person my husband saw? May I also remind you that I was elsewhere when it happened.’
What is in his head? His eyes are back on my legs and feet. I’ve imagined his cock in my mouth, so what has he pictured? Is he slavishly sucking upon my toes whilst I cane him, or does he see me on all fours, his hand over my mouth and his cock in my arse? Would he capitulate to my curves or does he think himself a worthy counterpart? He looks mean and has the power of the law behind him. Plus he has insight and the ability to dominate mentally. Does he know that for all my married life I was willing to play a more submissive role to please my husband, or that this might have been different if my dead ex had wanted to tie me, spank me, humiliate me? Does he know the dominant side of me is now unleashed, and would be irresistible to all if not for my inexperience in such things?
How can he know what I am become when I don’t really know myself? I want to crush lying, cheating men. I want to send the arrogant and the weak up in a puff of smoke but where is the fun in that? The torture has to go on longer and therefore the subject has to be built of sterner stuff. Yes, I want to chew up all men and spit them out and be adored for it in the process. The longer I can
chew on them, the better - and this man looks like a real mouthful.
‘Indeed, Mrs Van Peer, I have no doubt that you were exactly where you say you have been all day. But imagine if I was a less believing detective. I might tell you that the plotter of the deed is not necessarily the one who carried it out. People can be hired to do dirty work, especially by those able to afford to be accustomed to have others do the less pleasant things in life for them.’
He looks around at the sumptuousness of the room to enforce his point. I remain calm. It’s going to take more than that to have me spilling my guts.
‘Imagine,’ I reply coolly, ‘a betrayed wife being able to track down and hire a wild goose that was willing, through some kind of suicidal kamikaze attack, to despatch her cheating bastard of a husband.’
He stops perusing the finery to study my frown of mild disdain, worn especially because all men hate to think that they are being seen as ridiculous.
‘It does seem unlikely,’ he says finally, as if he hasn’t just said something very foolish. He manages to maintain his poker face and doesn’t blink, which is quite commendable under the circumstances, but we both know who has come out on top in our little exchange. It is my second victory over a supposedly untouchable man in a day - one I will savour in the privacy of the expensive hotel room I plan to stay in tonight. The first victory gave me enormous joy; this one is tinged with a little disappointment because I have relished playing with him. Sadly, his defeat here shows he isn’t quite the adversary I took him for, so maybe it is best I found out now. He is done and closes his notebook as a sign that there is no further business here. He rises, making no attempt to hide the slight bulge at his crotch. It is a shame he has to go because my mouth is salivating at the thought of tying him down and sucking upon that luscious cock, but as he politely nods and bids me farewell, I am in no doubt that this is the last I will ever see of Detective Inspector Stark.