When Chris's ex-girlfriend asks him for a favour but explains that it's actually an unsuitable job for a man, he cannot turn down the challenge. In any case, a few days by the seaside spent clearing out the effects of her deceased cousin would make a break from the routine of work. But his startling realistic dreams drive him to pursue the mystery of her death, regardless of the challenges it poses. This story is complete, but serialised over six chapters.

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.

Chapter 4

It was a five-minute walk to the river down the narrow lane through the woods that lined the sides of the valley. Although still wet from last night's rain, the trees already had most of their water shaken off them by the gentle breeze, so thankfully I didn't get badly dripped upon. The road surface was rough, but not particularly uneven or slippery, and the glimpses of the river through the trees, as lane meandered slightly left and then right, made it an absolutely delightful walk.

The trees suddenly opened out, and I was standing on the shore of the tidal river, perhaps fifty yards across at this point. On my side of river, a row of expensive looking motor-yachts were moored between buoys, in a line which stretched both upstream and downstream. Right in front of me was a simple landing stage, comprising a wooden gangway with primitive handrails, floating on fifty-gallon oil drums.

The tide was going out; the boats were beginning to tilt as they bottomed on the mud, and the walkway was floating half in the water, and half out on shore. A sign at the shore end announced: "Smugglers' Ferry. Please ring the bell on the gangway for service."

Across the river, The Smugglers looked extremely picturesque with its thatched roof, and tables with umbrellas in the garden overlooking the river. Even today, not a particularly warm day, a surprising number of people were sitting out there. It was Friday, I suddenly realised - typically the day when office workers would go out for a lunchtime drink and a meal, at a convenient and pleasant country pub.

I walked along the gangway - not a particularly enjoyable experience, as it lurched with every step I took, and I had to hang onto the handrail to stop myself being thrown to my knees. At the end was one of those large ship's bells, hanging from a post, with a length of rope tied to the clapper. I grabbed the rope and vigorously woggled it from side to side. Gong-Gong-Gong. The sound reverberated across the valley.

It took a couple of minutes before anyone came out of the pub, and I was almost on the point of ringing again. But then a man with a captain's cap on his head appeared on the quayside next to the pub. He got into a little motorboat, started the engine, cast off and chugged across to my side of the river.

***

"She was a lovely girl, Lucy was."

We had gone through that bit where, on first sight, he thought I WAS Lucy. After that, he asked me if I was a relative, to which I'd given my same evasive answer. Now, he was complying to form by telling me what an innocent, lovely girl she had been, albeit with big tits.

"She worked here as a barmaid," he continued.

"If she was such an attractive, but innocent girl," I asked, "surely some of the fellers took advantage?"

"Nah." He shook his head vehemently from side to side. "All the regulars cared for her and looked out for her. If anyone tried it on, they'd get thrown in the river."

I wondered whether Lucy had generated some jealousies. "Did that happen often?" I asked him.

"Nah." Another shake of the head. "A little warning was all it took. Blokes got the message pretty quick."

"Hmm," I said.

***

It was occurring to me that everyone I spoke to was protesting her innocence too vehemently. If she really was so sweet and childlike, why did she wear the Bustlet and Hiplet, with almost every item of her dress designed to expose as much of her breasts as possible? Surely, no woman would choose not only to have such large knockers, but to openly display them, unless she wanted to attract men like moths to a naked light bulb.

I went inside the pub, which had lots of seafaring and smuggling items such as mariners' lamps and brandy barrels (presumably empty) fixed on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. It was easy to see why so many people were sitting in the garden; inside, it was packed with people, with a three-deep crowd jostling for service at the bar.

If I'd arrived there in my car, I'd have driven off and found somewhere else, or gone back home for my bread and cheese; but the thought of getting the ferryman to again relinquish his pint and take me back across the river, was more than I could bear. I joined the queue at the bar.

There were three people serving: the middle-aged landlord and landlady, and a younger barmaid. The two women wore serving-wench uniforms - full, black skirts with colourful aprons tied around the waist; white smock blouses with peasant-style necklines, which displayed ample amounts of cleavage; and a black, front-lacing bodice, along with a white smock cap. All rather appealing, I thought. It was easy to see why the mainly male clientele flocked here, in spite of the crowd and resultant slow service.

"The Special Bitter needs the barrel changing." The barmaid at the far end had been pulling the pint - I had been admiring the way the work made her boobs squash together and then release - and she now shouted above the general hubbub of conversation in the pub.

"Can you do it, Sue?" the landlord shouted back. "Give me a shout if you need a hand."

The girl nodded and turned towards the rear of the bar, opened a four-foot high door, and bent over double before disappearing through it. The crowd sank back in front of where she had been serving, accepting it would be some minutes before she returned.

***

"The Special Bitter needs the barrel changing," I shouted at Sam above the general noise in the pub.

"Can you do it, Lucy?" he shouted back. "Give me a shout if you need a hand."

I nodded and turned towards the rear of the bar, and went through the tiny door and down the steep steps to the cellar below. Sam's wife, Sally, had shown me how to change a barrel when I'd started work as barmaid, the day before, and it had seemed pretty simple.

A few seconds was all it took to swap the pipe from the empty barrel to the full one. I'd almost finished when Sam's voice came from behind me.

"Joe decided to have a pint of Best, instead, so I've served him to it. Are you getting on all right?"

"Fine," I said.

With the low ceiling in the cellar, neither of us could stand up straight, and I was bent double over the barrel, having just connected the pipe. I had to twist my body completely round to look at him. I knew the operation would enable him to peer straight down the front of my blouse. I had on a quarter-cup bra, which pushed my boobs up and out, but wouldn't at all interfere with his view.

"Ph-e-e-w!"

"Enjoying the view?" I asked him.

"Not half," he said with a wicked grin.

"What would Sally say?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"Sally wouldn't say anything," he said. "She's gone to the cash and carry."

"Well in that case, we can't afford to keep the customers waiting," I said.

I turned back towards the barrel, bent right over it and moved forward, straddling my legs, until I was astride it. Then, with both hands, I simply flicked my skirt up my back, so that Sam could see I wasn't wearing panties.

It was a good, quick fuck; actually the first of many we were to have over the next few months in that identical position. The customers were generally quite understanding about it, as long as it wasn't too busy, and we didn't take too long. After all, most of them were getting their share of my generous nature.

***

"What will you have, luv?"

"What?" I jerked back into the real world. "Sorry, Sam, I was miles away."

Sam smiled at me, and looked a bit quizzical. "Do I know you?" he said. "Only normally I pride myself on never forgetting a face. People may come in this bar only once and I'll remember them. But not you. Mind you, you do look like someone who once worked here..."

"I'll have a half of lager, please, Sam," I said, and added in response to his query, "I'm from Lucy's aunt's side of the family. A few people have said they think there's a resemblance."

That gave him a good-enough explanation of how I knew his name, and he started talking along the same lines that everyone else had adopted. "Can I say how upset we all were over that horrible event," he said. "We simply couldn't believe it. She was such an innocent..."

"So everybody says," I agreed. I looked around at the bar. The crowd had almost gone. "What happened to them all?" I asked. "Everyone seems to have disappeared whilst I was in my daze."

"They're mostly from the offices in Seacombe," he said, "and they all arrive about the same time and don't have that long for lunch. It's a bit of a rush for a few minutes, but you're the last. They're all out in the garden now.

"Trade is starting to pick up now that spring is here," he continued. "Lucy was a godsend. She worked hard, all through last summer, and the customers really loved her. I'm trying to recruit another barmaid, but it's too far out of town for most of them, especially for the relatively short lunchtime session. Sue's only doing it for us as a favour, and she can't continue next week." He looked at me. "You're not interested, are you? If you're living in Lucy's cottage, it would be very convenient for you."

I simply don't know what I was thinking about, except continuing to wonder how I knew that the landlord's name was Sam. The only scientific explanation I could find was that someone had called him by name whilst I'd been waiting at the bar, lost in my daydream, and the name had infiltrated itself into my dream, in the same way that last night, PC Sally Wright's knocking at the front door had.

So there was a kind of explanation there, although I didn't feel particularly happy with it. My explanations were starting to appear more and more contrived. It seemed quite sensible to conduct a scientific test, and observe the results. I realised he'd asked me a question I hadn't answered.

"I'm not certain about working for you," I said. "After all, don't you have your bar staff over a barrel?"

The results of my experiment were made all the more dramatic because Sam had just taken a gulp of beer from the half-pint glass he kept below the bar. Fortunately, he wasn't pointing in my direction when the contents of his mouth sprayed liberally across the bar.

"Jesus Christ! Keep your voice down." He took an anxious glance across the lounge towards where his wife was clearing glasses from a table, whilst talking to a couple of men.

"Look, I don't know what Lucy said to you, but it's all untrue."

"If you don't know what she said, how do you know it's untrue?"

He energetically applied himself to cleaning the mess he had made on the bar, saying nothing, but looking extremely worried.

Since he hadn't responded, I decided to apply a little pressure. "Having your staff over a barrel is a common expression, so why did you react so strongly?"

"Exactly," he said. "No reason at all. It's simply that my beer went down the wrong way."

"So there's no problem in me talking to the police about it?"

"Jesus! Don't do that. They'll suspect me, and start asking all kinds of embarrassing questions, and then the whole story will come out. What do you want?" he asked.

"I want to know the truth," I said.

He nodded, slowly, eying his wife as he did so. "Fair enough," he said, "but not now. Were you really serious about working here as a barmaid, because we certainly need someone, and we could talk properly then. And, er..." He gave a smile. "No barrel. Okay?"

Afterwards, I couldn't believe what I said in response. For I replied, "Okay."

***

As I walked home, I recounted my latest daydream, and the simple experiment I had conducted on its authenticity. There had to be a scientific explanation. There just had to be.

It came to me in a flash - a totally obvious solution. The barmaid had shouted, "The Special Bitter needs the barrel changing." In the general mutter of conversation, I hadn't consciously heard anything, but my sub-conscious had detected some wag muttering words to the effect of, "I bet Sam sends her down to do it and then he'll go down and give her one over the barrel." From that, my imagination had leapt into action, and created another highly effective daydream.

I shook my head. It was an explanation of a sort, but...

It was also strange, I thought, that I had arrived at Lucy's house less than twenty-four hours ago, but I already felt completely at ease with dressing in her clothes, staying in her house, and living her life. In particular, the very idea of dressing as a woman had never crossed my mind when Suzanne talked about an unsuitable job for a man. Yet hadn't there been a bit of cross-dressing involved in that book by P D James? And now, I had agreed to take on Lucy's job as a barmaid, and I didn't feel at all stressed by it. Weird!

I went inside the cottage and went upstairs to check my wardrobe. Sam had said that Lucy's Smugglers Inn gear had never been returned to the pub. It hadn't, and I tried it all on. Lucy had been right to choose a quarter-cup bra to wear with it, since the bodice itself provided no support for my breasts, and the bra really pushed them up nicely, and I looked extremely pretty.

"Damn!" I muttered. Of course, it had been my imagination that had provided the quarter-cup bra, not any communication from Lucy. Which proved, I guessed, that I actually knew far more about women's attire than I had previously assumed. As well as, I reminded myself, the expert way in which I applied my make-up - a task which many women had difficulty with.

I shook my head in frustration. I was letting my imagination take hold again. Everything had a scientific explanation. Everything.

***

I'd agreed with Sam that I would work lunchtimes, a rota which suited me - since I didn't want to work until late at night and then negotiate the ferry, followed by a climb up the dark, narrow lane on my own. It also mirrored, Sam said, the rota Lucy had done, as he found it much easier to get evening staff who would generally arrive by car.

I'd also agreed that I would start work the next morning - Saturday. I would go in early so that I could be given a brief introductory training session. In fact it was Sam's wife, Sally, who gave me most of the training - yes I know that was her name in my dream, but just like all the other things, I must have heard someone call her that before my dream started.

"She was a nymphomaniac, you know?"

"Pardon?" I said. Sally and I were in the cellar, and she had been showing me how to change a barrel of beer. Although I'd never done this activity before, I realised my dream had been uncannily accurate. Still, it was fairly obvious stuff, really. Wasn't it?

"The doctors call it Compulsive Sexual Behaviour, but everyone else knows it as nymphomania," Sally said. "Lucy told me that. She admitted quite freely that she had it, which is why she had sex with most of the men in this pub."

"Oh," I said, thinking, "Christ, this is getting onto sensitive ground."

"It's all right," Sally said, "I know that Sam had sex with her as often as everyone else - probably more often, knowing him - but I didn't mind. He became much more gentle when he was having sex with me, you see. It was about us pleasing each other, rather than seeing how quickly he could spurt inside me. I think we both benefited from Lucy's nymphomania."

"Right," I said.

"That's the way most of the other wives felt, as well," she continued. "You've probably heard lots of people saying how nice Lucy was, and thinking that didn't square with the Lucy you knew. But she really was a wonderful person; we all loved her. Most of the men had sex with her, and there was no jealousy, or anything like that.

"That's why we all agreed to keep quiet about Lucy's little problem when she was so horribly murdered. We knew the police would simply waste all their time investigating us, and not look for anyone else. Our lives would be turned upside down and exposed in the gutter-press, and the killers would get away with it."

"I see," I said. I did too. Here was a bunch of people with obvious motives for Lucy's murder, and whom the police knew nothing about. Maybe most of them were totally innocent, but one of them could have got jealous or obsessive. Now I understood why Lucy had brought me into this job.

"Damn!" I muttered. It had been my decision to work here, not some figment of my dream.

"I can understand why you think someone here was the killer," Sally went on, virtually reading my mind, "and why you wanted to work here to discover who it was. But honestly, I'm convinced it was some men from outside the area."

"Weren't you worried about Sam, er, catching anything from Lucy?" I asked.

"Oh no!" Sally said. "That wasn't a problem. She explained to me straight away, and I gradually told all the other women, so it just became common knowledge."

"What did?" I asked.

"Apparently a doctor in Bournemouth recommended it. Said it was very good for people with her kind of compulsion. It was called a Hiplet, or something like that. It contained the equivalent of a permanent female condom, which fitted into her vagina. You still get most of the feeling, but you can't get pregnant, or catch anything, and as long as you douche out afterwards so there's no sticky stuff left around, disease can't be carried between your partners. Sounds ideal to me."

So that's why Lucy had started wearing the Hiplet, I thought. "Do men know it's there?" I asked.

"Apparently not," Sally said, "or they didn't until one of the wives let it out the bag. Sounded quite good actually, and I thought I might get one, until Lucy told me they cost well over a thousand pounds."

"Where did Lucy get that kind of money?" I gasped.

"She used to work in a club in Bournemouth, she told me. And you really don't want to know how she made so much money. Needless to say, it involved lots of men, and her favourite occupation."

I nodded. I could imagine.

***

Over the next week, I really got into the swing of being a barmaid. I also got to know most of the customers very well, especially the males. I won't go through all the names, but there were a few characters of note.

Jack was the ferryman. Apparently, he had an arrangement with Sam to spend most of his time in the pub - with an occasional refill over the course of the day - and work the ferry as needed. In the summer, it would virtually be a non-stop job. Now it was April, there were only the occasional users such as Mick Walters (who was in the pub most lunch-times) and me. Jack and Mick would spend hours talking to me, whenever I was free.

It was quite obvious from conversations I had with Mick and Jack that they, too, had had sex with Lucy. At their ages! It was disgusting. But I quickly ruled out both Jack and Mick as murder suspects. After all, why would they? They were probably getting more frequent sex with Lucy than they had had all through their adult lives.

As Sally had intimated, that also appeared to be the case with almost every other male regular in the pub. As soon as they knew that I knew Lucy's medical problem (to put it delicately), they were completely open (except in front of their wives or girlfriends). All of them clearly liked her, and were terribly distressed by her death.

The one regular male visitor to the pub who didn't have sex with Lucy was pointed out to me as a novelty. He always came into the pub with his wife, who kept him on a short leash. He hadn't even been allowed to go to the pub toilet, the regulars joked, in case Lucy crept in with him. Edward and Elizabeth, the couple were called - definitely not Ted and Liz - and they were recently retired with presumably, a fairly comfortable pension to go with it.

Edward owned one of the smart cruisers moored in the river across from the Smugglers, and it was called Bolshoi - presumably after the name of the Russian ballet company. However, most of the regulars called it Bolshie - and thought it a highly appropriate name, based upon the prickly nature of her owners.

They would often have lunch in the pub before he rowed his tender across to Bolshoi. Elizabeth would watch until he had cast anchor (or whatever you do to mooring buoys) and motored down the river towards the sea.

Later, I was told, she would arrive back at the Smugglers in good time to watch him motor up river to the mooring, tie up and row back to the Smugglers, where, if the time was right, they would have an evening meal.

Unless one could count not having sex with someone as adequate reason to murder them - a complete reversal of normal - that meant I had to rule out Edward.

Which left, for suspects... Absolutely no one, apart from the names of the two men in my dream, who I was determined, I would not try to identify. I certainly wasn't going to condemn a person whose name just happened to be the same as someone I dreamt about. In any case, if I went to the police they would laugh me out of the police station, or charge me with wasting police time, or perhaps even try to frame me for the murder.

You can see that I was settling in to my life as the new Lucifer. Quite surprisingly, I really enjoyed my work as a barmaid. I'd expected that, since I'd never worked in a bar before, I would have tremendous difficulty in learning the ropes, remembering the price of everything and recognising the strange drinks that many people ordered - in my formative years, it had been halves or pints, mild or bitter. But I grasped all of that fairly easily, and Sam and Sally remarked how quickly I had settled into the job.

I also discovered that the changed location made me enjoy my own professional computer consultancy business far more than I had for many months - probably since Suzanne had left me. One of the advantages of being a computer consultant is that you can work wherever you take your laptop. On Monday, I'd started working on A Round Tuit - a project which had to be done but which I'd being meaning to get 'around to it' for some time, as I expected it to be incredibly boring. In fact, I as soon as I got into it, I found it much more challenging than I'd expected.

I adapted my working day to suit my own preferences. I would usually wake up about four am, and immediately get up, have breakfast and do my professional work almost unbroken until ten, when it was time to prepare for my bar duty at the Smugglers. I'd put on my make-up and uniform, arriving at the pub by eleven, and have an early (by most people's body clocks) lunch on the house.

I would serve all lunchtime, and be back at the cottage by about three pm, whereupon my body clock was telling me it was time for bed! I'd sleep for a few hours, then get up, do another couple of hours professional work, followed by a normal evening in front of the TV, before having an early night to bed.

The fact that I was able to continue my normal business, as well as making a bit of pocket money as barmaid at the Smugglers, made me decide I could pay the rent on the cottage for a few additional weeks' stay. The agent was delighted, and gave me a good deal on the rent if I stayed for another month. I took him up on his offer.

***

I wasn't quite certain how important the cross-dressing aspect was to my enjoyment. In the course of my bar work, I obviously met lots of blokes, and it was inevitable that they tried to chat me up. After all, I did have tits the size of melons (Okay, small melons), and even with my expert make-up, I was no beauty, but when has that stopped a man from fancying a shag? If only they knew the truth!

I often played mental 'what ifs' with myself. What if he offered to take me out, would I accept? What if he squeezed my bum, would I punch him on the nose, or tell him he was 'saucy'? What if he asked me to give him a blowjob around the back of the pub, where Lucy used to operate?

Blokes would often offer me a drink, and mostly, I'd take a half of bitter or a glass of wine - even the house-white was pretty decent - or charge for it and slip the money into my tips box. However, on the day that I made the breakthrough, the customer looked fairly wealthy so I said I'd have a brandy, instead.

Well, he looked a bit shocked by that, so rather than taking a glass of the Courvoisier, as I'd planned, I put the glass under the optic on the standard house brandy and poured out a measure. It was a quite cheap brandy, and I was surprised how popular it was with many of the regulars. Even the customer was mollified when I told him the price.

But when I took my first sip of the brandy, I realised this was a drink of real quality, at a damn good price. I took another look at the label. Impossible. There was no way this nectar came from that bottle.

Except that, of course, in a pub called the Smugglers Inn, there was one way in which quality brandy could be sold at a knock-down price. I thought again about the quality of the house wine, and the superb collection of wines that Lucy had at home. (At least, when I first arrived, she had - they all seemed to have disappeared now.) It would be very good, I thought, to restock her wine cellar. Therefore, I needed to find the supplier. But there was a sudden flurry of customers, and I didn't have chance to think about it until later.

***

As I walked back to the cottage, my mind kept thinking about smuggling. The inn was on a tidal river, with the sea just a few miles downstream and from there, France was the next stop. Plenty of sailing and motor boats along the South coast would cross the Channel, spend a day or two there, load up with all the booze and tobacco they could carry and sail back to England.

One of the incredible benefits of being in the EU was that it was all perfectly legal, provided it was for 'personal use only' - you didn't even have to declare it. Only if you subsequently sold the goods would you have been guilty of smuggling. And once the stuff had been sold to someone else, it would be difficult to prove it had been smuggled.

There was, of course, one obvious contender as smuggler: Edward, with his motor cruiser, Bolshoi, moored just across river from the Smugglers. On the one hand, so what if Edward was a smuggler? It was hardly as though it was harming me or anyone else. You could theoretically argue it was damaging the economy, but it had the kind of value that the Chancellor of the Exchequer wouldn't bother to pick up if it dropped out of his back pocket as he was running for a bus. (Even supposing he could remember what a bus was!)

But the more I thought about it, the whole issue started to take on a lot greater importance than being able to buy a few bottles of wine at a knock-down price. I knew that violence and death often accompanied the work of serious smugglers. Suppose Jason had got involved with Edward in bringing a little white powder across the Channel? That would put the smuggling into a very different ball game - a game where a drug smuggler and his girlfriend might very easily get 'taken out', because they had strayed onto someone else's ground.

It would be good, I decided, to surreptitiously have a closer look at Bolshoi. I would wait until it was dark, and then go down to the river. With that thought, I went up to the bedroom for my customary afternoon nap.