Author's note: Apart from obvious place names such as Bournemouth and London, all people, places and events are entirely fictional. Seacombe is a fictitious seaside town on the south coast of England. The story contains adult actions, some of which are naughty, but nice, and others are plain naughty and evil. Don't read it if you're not an adult, or if you may be upset or offended by the content. Apologies to PD James, from whose book I adapted the title, and gained the idea of the plot.

***

The pickup went as smoothly as the drop off. The Bolshoi was precisely where Edward said it would be, at the right time, and having prepared my hot-water jackets exactly as Lucy had shown me the evening before, the swim in the cold water was bearable - just.

Edward helped me onto deck from the bathing platform, and then led the way to the saloon. He handed me a towel, then went and switched in the autopilot, and the boat surged forward, on its way back to Seacombe.

"Just a moment, my dear."

I paused, my dress in my hands, prior to pulling it over my head.

"What's the problem?"

"You may think me an old fool with regard to Lucy, but I'm not a complete fool. I'm going to search you, just as I used to search Lucy. I want to make certain you aren't carrying any illegal products."

I might have quarrelled with him over that, in view of the dozens of boxes of wine, spirits and beer packing the saloon, and which I could also see stacked down below. But the contents of the villa made me keep my peace. I wondered just how thorough a search he had made of Lucy - obviously, not thorough enough.

"Your bikini, please." He nodded at my only coverings, and I shrugged, removed both top and bottom, and handed them to him. He felt them carefully, to make certain there was nothing in the lining, and then dropped them on the settee.

Then he turned his attention to me. "Stand up straight and let me look at you."

I did so.

"Now turn around and face the bulkhead."

Once again I complied, thinking that when it came to him examining my swimming bag, he was going to get a little surprise. I guess I should have left that  £50,000 behind in the villa, but I am only human.

"Let me see your fingernails. Put your hands behind your back."

I did so.

Click-click.

"What the hell?" My hands were secured behind me. I turned, furiously towards him.

"What do you think you're doing? Take these handcuffs off me, immediately!"

"I'm afraid I'm not going to do that."

"This is illegal. I'll have the police on you."

"Oh, I think not. Now, come here. I really have been missing the pleasure of Lucy's company, and I think it's time to make up for that."

He stepped forward, his hands reaching towards my tits. I kicked furiously towards his bollocks, but he simply smiled, twisted, and his hands had grasped my ankle and were lifting it higher, and higher, into the air. I toppled backward onto the settee and he came with me, so he flopped down between my legs and onto my body, driving the breath out of me.

"Bastard! You bastard!" Struggle as I might, with my hands secured behind me, and my legs either side of his body, I couldn't push him away. "You fuck pig!"

"I really do not like young ladies swearing, you know," he said, "and nowadays, many seem to do it all the time. Fortunately, I came prepared." His hands were reaching behind my head.

When they came into view again, they were clutching a length of parcel tape, which he pressed across my mouth.

"Bushtard." I could barely squeeze out the word. And after he had applied two more layers of tape across my mouth, I could make no sound apart from "Mmmm!"

"That's much better, my dear," Edward said. "Now, I am really going to enjoy fucking you. It's been so long since I had Lucy."

His hands were at the belt of his trousers, then he was lifting his body off me so he could slide his trousers down, before dropping back down, and I could sense he was penetrating me.

"You fucking bitch!" He thrust downwards.

Surprisingly, I felt something. I'd thought that I would be totally senseless down there, but I wasn't.

"You're no better than that fucking bitch, Lucy."

Another hard thrust which wasn't particularly unpleasant. Dear God! I thought back to the dream I'd had that first night. This was definitely deja vu.

He must have seen some expression of surprise on my face, for he said, "That shocks you, does it, you cunt? That I should call Lucy a fucking bitch, when everyone else says she was an angel. Well, I know what she was bringing into the country - just as I know what you're bringing in."

He clearly wasn't talking about the money, although with the parcel tape over my mouth, I could hardly tell him that. He gave another massive thrust, which again was not unpleasant - well, actually, it was rather nice.

"You think I'm that stupid to fall for the same trick twice?" (Thrust. Mmmm. Yummy.) "It was obvious, once I knew what to look for. Oh fuck."

He slammed inside me harder, giving me another pleasant surprise. And then again. And again. It was obvious this particular round was reaching a conclusion, and unlike Lucy in my dream, this was not going to be one of those wonderful joint orgasms. He slammed once more, and then I could feel him spurting inside me. I had a cunt made of plastic! How on earth could I feel anything? It was impossible.

Two more smaller thrusts, and he was done. He looked at me, with a curl to his lip. "You cunt," he said. "You evil cunt."

I shook my head as he stood, and pulled up his trousers, and fastened them.

"You're wondering how I knew what you were up to? Simple. Your bra was warm."

What on earth was Edward talking about? If only he'd take off this gag, we could have a proper conversation.

"Still trying to play dumb?"

That was hardly fair. I had no choice. I gave another, "Mmmm," just to make the point.

"Well, let me tell you how I found Lucy out. Last September, Elizabeth hosted a ladies bridge evening at our house. I made myself scarce for most of the time, but I did pop into the kitchen to make myself a coffee, and that's when I overheard the conversation through the serving hatch. They were talking about Lucy, so I kept quiet and listened in.

"Sally was there, from the Smugglers," he continued. "She was telling everyone how Lucy had breasts that were inflated with water to make them so enormous. And her hips and bum were the same. 'What a laugh,' Sally was saying, 'even her pussy is false and none of the men have a clue.'"

Edward's face revealed unimaginable rage. Right from my first night in Seacombe, I had considered that blokes would get pretty pissed off when they discovered the truth about Lucy's tits, but I'd never realised just how pissed off they might get.

"That's when the truth hit me," Edward continued. "I'd been diligently searching Lucy every time she came back aboard, when all she had to do was dissolve the drugs into hot water, and pump it into her inflatable breasts and arse. She'd taken me for sucker alright, but she didn't know who she'd taken on."

Edward's face softened temporarily. "You see, three years ago, our son got hooked on heroin and eventually, he died from an overdose." The look on Edward's face hardened again. "And I'd been helping Lucy smuggle the shit into the country."

He shrugged. "That's why she and her no good boyfriend had to die."

Gulp! This was a confession that, in my rather precarious position, I didn't particularly want to hear. But obviously, there was nothing I could say to dissuade him. There was nothing I could say, full stop.

"I had these friends from my army days - long time back. Oh, I was an officer, and they were only privates, but they owed me a favour; a big favour. I'd saved their miserable lives in the Falklands. I knew they'd gone bad ways since, so I went to Bournemouth and offered them five thousand pounds each to kill Lucy and Jason."

Gulp!

"They already knew Jason from when he'd lived in Bournemouth, and they'd had a few arguments with him then, so they were more than willing to do me a favour. Since Jason had got Lucy into the filthy business, I told them to make it a slow and painful death.

"On the other hand, I couldn't be as hard on Lucy. I told them to kill her quickly. It was probably an act of humanity on their part to give her a last request - knowing what she was like, there was only one thing she'd want."

He looked down at me, dispassionately. "And you come back on board my boat trying exactly the same trick, with your tits full of hot water mixed with drugs. You must think I'm absolutely stupid."

I vigorously shook my head from side to side. He had to understand I'd washed the stuff into the sea.

Instead, he shook his head, rather sadly. "I'm afraid you're going for a little swim - with a length of anchor chain around your feet."

Oh shit! Someone help me.

"I don't think so."

We were both taken by surprise at the voice behind Edward. He swivelled around but I could already see the young woman standing there wearing my dark-blue beach dress - how had she got that out of the bag without me noticing?

"Lucy," Edward gasped, but I guess I already knew that.

She was a slim woman without her Bustlet and Hiplet - with a pretty face and short blonde hair which had always been concealed from the people of Seacombe by her dark-brown wig.

At first sight, it was impossible to understand why so many people had confused her with me, but then she had that certain look in her eye, and that way of standing which I realised I had been sub-consciously mimicking, even though I had never met her! I found her whole appearance so incredibly attractive that it was also easy to see why countless men had enjoyed fucking her.

She took a step toward him, and he a step back.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Retribution," she said, and took another step towards him, and another and another. And with each step forward, he took a step back, until he was edging out of the saloon onto the rear deck.

Still they shuffled along until they were right at the stern of the boat. As the boat ploughed through the next wave with a judder, Lucy pushed at Edward with both hands, and her hands and arms simply went straight through his chest! The look of fear on Edward's face turned into absolute terror, and he lurched backward over the stern and disappeared from sight. There was an audible clunk, presumably as his head crashed onto the bathing platform below, and then silence - apart from all the other crashing that was the norm for a motor boat travelling at speed in a choppy sea.

Lucy came back inside and stepped over to me.

"Well, you took your time getting the confession," she said, ripping off the tape from my mouth. "Still, I'm glad you did. Even in the afterlife, I'd never been able to work out why Ed and Barry killed us - and you can't go on to the other place until the reason for your own death has been resolved. That's why I had to work so hard on you to take over my role."

"You mean you've been directing me - you made me dress up in your clothes?" I was gob-smacked. One simply could not have these kinds of conversations with a ghost. I must be hallucinating.

She smiled at me. "I couldn't MAKE you or anyone else do anything. Let's just say I exposed your latent desire, and when that was combined with your scientific craving for knowledge, it turned you into a passable detective. I'm afraid I also encouraged those drunken slobs to nick your car so you were stranded without your clothes."

She shrugged in an innocent way, and with such honesty, I could instantly see why everyone she had met had fallen in love with her.

She nodded down at my bag, where the thick wad of money could be seen through the transparent sides. "I see you've taken my money."

"It seemed a shame to waste it." Why was I justifying myself to a figment of my own imagination?

"Of course," she said with a shrug. "I can't take it with me, and you can have it as a reward for services rendered."

"But..."

"Why did I smuggle drugs?"

She accurately forecast my unasked question, but since she was in my imagination, that shouldn't have been a surprise.

I nodded.

She smiled. "You know, I think I really must have the devil inside me," she said. "I was always wicked, and drug smuggling was exciting, it was fun, and it made us a lot of money - for a short time. Jason was just a small-time villain - he hadn't got the brains to work everything out, or the guts to put it into action. But he had a lot of contacts, and I thought that if we did get caught, he could conveniently take the blame.

"He was also incredibly good at sex," she continued. "So when we moved to Seacombe, I really enjoyed playing the innocent wife, and portraying Jason as the evil husband. I didn't expect it all to end quite so soon, but still that's life - and death."

She gave me an angelic smile. It was easy to see why she'd fooled everyone into believing her an innocent. "Enjoy yourself," she said.

Then she quite simply disappeared. The dress she was wearing floated down to the floor, as though she had never been wearing it, and I was alone in a boat full of contraband, charging across the English Channel, having lost its owner overboard, with my hands handcuffed behind me, and having just witnessed a ghost disappear.

***

You can probably understand that afterwards I had a great deal of trouble trying to rationalise what happened on the Bolshoi that evening with any kind of scientific explanation. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that when I'd slit open the plastic bags in the surf, I had probably ingested sufficient of the contents to cause me to hallucinate.

Edward, of course, must have accidentally fallen overboard in the process of trying to throw me into the sea, and my imagination had built the dream around that, just as all my dreams since arriving in Seacombe had been constructed around other bits of information I'd picked up.

If Lucy and Jason had been using their cottage as a laboratory to extract the drug from the solution, then her clothes might well have been covered in a fine layer of dust, and I could have been inhaling it, right from that very first night that I'd worn them. Which could explain all of my vivid dreams.

Well, that's to say that the logical side of my mind concluded that was the explanation. My irrational side decided that there were more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, even by my mind.

***

I guess that after Edward 'fell' overboard, I should have done something about rescuing him. Afterwards, I noticed there was a 'Man Overboard' button on the GPS autopilot that would presumably automatically bring the boat back to the exact spot where the button had been pushed. But in the dark, it would have still been almost impossible to find him.

And what if I had? With my hands handcuffed behind me, I could hardly have got him on board if he'd been unconscious. And if he'd been conscious, I would never have let him back on board, to give him another chance at murdering me.

Apart from the practicalities, one develops a certain hardness about someone who has tried to murder you. If I had found him swimming around in front of the boat, I'd probably have opened the throttle and run him down, rather than trying to save him.

But that's the kind of feeling one can never openly admit, so I had all kinds of excuses ready as the boat approached Seacombe. Fortunately, I'd found some bolt cutters in Edward's extensive tool kit, and eventually managed to remove the handcuffs without also removing any of my fingers. After that, I found some nylon gloves and spent some time cleaning every surface that my fingers might have touched whilst on board, for I hoped not to argue such philosophical issues with the local police force.

Thanks to the GPS autopilot, it all worked perfectly. It was around five am and still dark, but the autopilot cut speed as we headed into the river at Seacombe, it negotiated all the turns in the river up to the Smugglers Inn, and then did a neat U turn to halt directly next to the buoy where Bolshoi was normally moored. Once there, it adjusted engine speed so it kept precisely on station in the slight current as the tide slackened.

I was all set, with my Bustlet and Hiplet filled with hot water, ready to slip into the river and swim back to shore. Once there, I slipped on my dress and shoes, and walked up the hill to my cottage. My home.

***

The next day I learnt that Elizabeth had been waiting in the car at the Smugglers for the Bolshoi to arrive. When Edward failed to appear on deck to moor the boat, she had woken Sam who, in turn, had got hold of ferryman Jack, and they'd gone over to the Bolshoi to find her deserted.

Fortunately, they'd had the presence of mind to bring the Bolshoi back to the wharf by the inn, where they'd unloaded her contraband cargo and hidden it, before calling the coastguard, and reporting Edward missing.

Edward's body eventually turned up, several days later, and a lot further up the Channel, and the police were apparently satisfied that he'd accidentally fallen off the Bolshoi after suffering a massive heart attack. Case closed.

***

Incidentally, my stolen car was discovered in Bournemouth shortly after they recovered Edward's body. Fortunately, it was still in reasonable shape, so of course, I'd had to go all the way there to collect it. However, I took the opportunity to do a bit of shopping whilst I was there, and also send a few post cards and a letter, since there was no post box near to the cottage or the Smugglers.

As for me, I'm continuing to stay on in Seacombe, and still working lunchtimes at the Smugglers, and really enjoying myself. You see, as I previously mentioned, when Edward raped me, I could feel his prick inside the false vagina on my Hiplet.

I re-read the instruction manual, and it appeared there was a facility called Sensotouch built into both the Bustlet and the Hiplet. The skin had a touch-sensitive membrane, similar to that used on a computer screen, and the signals from that were amplified and then applied, by means of tiny electrodes against my own skin. What's more, the sensitivity could be adjusted by a remote control.

Up until that time, the sensitivity had been set to Level One. However, when I located the remote control and increased the sensitivity, I started getting feelings that were remarkably intense! A stroke of my breast would have me gasping; a finger slipped into my vagina would bring me to a shattering orgasm within a few minutes. No wonder Lucy had had such fun!

So I guess it was only natural that after I'd played with myself for a while, that I wanted to experiment with other people, and see what different kind of pleasures they could give me. All I can say is that being a barmaid at the Smugglers was a wonderful opportunity, both for the customers and me.

***

Oh, one last thing to say is that, a couple of weeks after Edward's death, two guys named Ed Little and Barry Tool from Bournemouth were charged with the murder, rape and torture of Lucy and Jason.

The pair protested complete innocence. However, during the subsequent trial, it was revealed that the police had found a condom floating in the toilet bowl in the cottage on the night of the murder; traces of recently coughed phlegm had also been found on the floor. DNA testing proved the pair of them had been there that night, and their subsequent conviction rested on that evidence.

Apparently, they had only been apprehended because of an anonymous letter posted in their home town. Although the police were never able to trace the sender, it was presumed to have been sent by someone they knew, to whom they had let slip their guilty secret. Fortunately, no one ever connected the letter with my visit to Bournemouth, the day before it was received!

So, the moral of the story is that when you can no longer trust in science, then trust your instincts. Oh, and also there's no such thing as an unsuitable job for a man!