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He’d thought it was called a ‘beta site’. Blenkinsop had no technical understanding of that term, if it was a real term. As far as he was aware, ‘beta site’ referred to a website without a name, just a string of randomly chosen numbers and letters – mainly because it wanted to remain beneath most people’s notice. There could be any number of reasons for this, but none of the ones Blenkinsop could think of were particularly edifying.

He scrubbed a hand through his uncombed hair.

This was the second day running that he’d come to work so untidy that fellow employees had commented. Sally had asked him if he was feeling no better and if he wanted a paracetamol. He’d grunted a curt reply before closing himself in his office.

Beyond the window, radiant mid-morning sunshine bathed the dome of St Paul’s. Directly below, Cornhill and Threadneedle Street were packed with cars, the pavements thronging with City types. It was the throb of business, the pulse of commerce, the arterial flow of the world famous Square Mile. As yesterday, however, the vibrant scene did little to uplift his spirits. In fact now it was even worse, because now he wasn’t just riddled with guilt, now he was touched by fear.

A ‘beta site’.

That was what he believed it was called. There were probably hundreds of them, thousands, millions. Yet he doubted any could be as abhorrent as the one that had so quickly come to occupy his every waking thought.

What a two-edged sword the internet could be.

On its first arrival back in the 1990s, he’d considered it a porn explorer’s godsend. Online, you could get anything you wanted – literally anything. Talk about a refreshing change after the days of his youth, when in straight-laced, buttoned-up Britain you’d had to content yourselves with girlie mags containing nothing more than tits, bums and snatch. It didn’t matter what your kink, the net could cater for it. Nothing was too extreme or bizarre, and of course it was all completely clean and non-judgmental. There was no stern-faced shop lady to stare after you as you scuttled out of the newsagents, your new purchase stowed in your briefcase; no visit was required to a dingy back alley and seedy shop, where the odious old men in raincoats and the stains on the video tape covers made you feel soiled simply for being there.

But in recent years, after some of his trips abroad and with his developing interest in getting ‘hands-on’ in such matters, these frolics in cyberspace had come to seem tame. The worst thing about this blasted summer had not been that his wife, Yvonne, and his daughter, Carly’s annual two-month pilgrimage to the Med would leave him on his own, but that his scheduled trip to the Gulf in early September had been cancelled. The next one was only due in February – six months away. Until then he’d have to make do with the sanitised fantasies of the internet.

At least, this was what he’d thought – but then, two days after Yvonne and Carly had embarked for the family villa in Italy, the card had arrived.

That was all it was: just a square piece of white card inside a brown envelope, delivered with the morning post. Blenkinsop’s name and address were printed on the front in a basic typeface. Not surprisingly, there’d been no return address. Junk mail, he’d presumed, and when he’d ripped it open, intending to throw it away after a single glance, he’d been right – in a way.

‘Dear Ian,’ it had said in that same standard type, ‘here is something that will interest you.’ And underneath it was that fateful line of letters and digits – which he’d identified as a web address, as a beta site.

It was a mark of how enthralled he was to the ‘thrill-seeker’ side of his personality that he’d immediately gone online to check it out. He’d known instinctively that it would be a sex site of some sort, but instead of feeling alarm that these people, whoever they were, had made contact with him at his home (he’d written that off as an inevitability of having used his credit card to join so many sites in the past), he’d been excited and rather absurdly, he now realised, he’d regarded it as the commencement of a summer of online adult adventuring that might be a little bit more interesting than usual.

Despite all that had happened since, it seemed incredible to Ian Blenkinsop that a man at his station in life could ever be described as credulous, gullible, naive. And yet … he glanced across the office to his desk, where his laptop was sitting open, its screen blank. Again, fear gnawed at his innards. There was no reason at all to assume that the person who’d been eavesdropping on his conversation in Mad Jack’s last night had been …

But of course there was reason.

There was every reason.

And there was even more reason to be afraid because of it.

He took a diary from his overcoat pocket and thumbed through its pages until he reached the back. There, sandwiched between two of his many legitimate contacts, was that string of digits; he’d destroyed the original card, and this reprint here was scribbled lightly in pencil in case he ever had need to hastily erase it. All he had to do now was go over to his desk, sit down, type these in – and he was there again. But it was a horrible prospect: seeking a meeting with them, trying to explain himself, all the time wondering what they might do to him. And just suppose they hadn’t been following him last night? Suppose that man in Mad Jack’s had been no one of consequence? If that was the case, yet now he emailed them and blabbed that he’d been drunk and depressed and hadn’t deliberately been endangering their operation – wouldn’t that have the very opposite effect of the one desired? Wouldn’t he himself be alerting them? And yet, if he did nothing, would he spend the rest of his life glancing over his shoulder?

He slumped into a chair. If only he’d never gone onto that beta site.

The Nice Guys Club.

At first there’d been nothing on screen except a poorly shot movie of a young woman with a shoulder-bag walking up and down a railway platform. By the looks of it, it had been filmed with a hand-held camera, possibly from a car parked on the other side of the tracks. She’d been a nice-looking woman, wearing a pink sweater, a short denim skirt and high heels. Then words had appeared, streaming across the bottom of the screen like the end-credits to a TV show.

They’d read: ‘Ever wondered what it would be like to do it even if she says “no”?’

Blenkinsop had sat up, his attention caught.

The image had then switched; it was another crude, home-made movie, but this time the subject was a slightly older lady clad in an indecently small bikini and splayed out on a lounger in the privacy of her back garden. This one appeared to have been shot via a zoom lens from a vantage point some distance away.

‘Who is it, we wonder?’ the words had continued. ‘Your co-worker, your neighbour, that bitch in the corner shop who always taunts you by showing her stocking tops when she climbs the step-ladder to the high shelf? Why waste time dreaming when you could be sampling the real thing?’

By this time, Blenkinsop had been captivated. What appeared to be on sale here were simulated rape films. Of course, if he’d been less engrossed it might have struck him as odd that there’d been no warnings on the website about legalities, age restrictions, or any other items that would indicate this was mainstream entertainment.

‘Join the Nice Guys now,’ it had said, the ‘now’ highlighted as a link.

So he’d done it. Not joined up as such – not there and then. But, with inhibitions blunted by excitement, he’d hit the button and entered the site properly.

More movies had followed: an attractive woman crossing a dual carriageway bridge carrying shopping bags; an Asian schoolgirl waiting at a bus stop; a lady vicar, for heaven’s sake, saying goodbye to parishioners at the church gate. One after another, they’d followed, each one occupying the screen alone but then retracting into a small thumbnail and finding its place in a vast electronic mosaic. And now, only slowly, had it begun to occur to Blenkinsop that what he was looking at here were not teasers for movies that someone had scripted, directed and performed, but fragments of reality. These were actual shots of real women going about their everyday business, in each case completely unaware they were being observed.

Another stream of words had then appeared: ‘We can arrange it for you to rape any woman, anywhere, any time.’

His hair had actually prickled at that point; his flesh had goose-bumped.

‘Age, race, creed – they’re no concern to us. It’s your choice. We only have two stipulations: a) Women only – we don’t do guys or transsexuals (though if that’s your bag, we know someone who does); b) UK only – you aren’t going to pay our travel exes, so we aren’t going abroad.’

An email address had followed, something embedded in a bogus website somewhere – Blenkinsop knew that much about the internet. So he’d mailed to it. Why not? He’d been left alone here while everyone else was on holiday; why couldn’t he have some fun? Damn his fucking rule about never doing this kind of thing at home. Why not, if it was all safe and secure? He’d felt no guilt as he’d made contact, only keen anticipation. And, almost immediately, they’d replied with answers to his questions, and strong reassurances about his privacy should he decide to do business with them.

Looking back on it, how ridiculously easy it had been for something so heinous.

But he mustn’t email them again, they’d told him. They would email him, but only after checking him out. After that, it had been plain sailing. The following day they’d contacted him from a different email address – and this time had given him the works, the whole picture. All he had to do was name the woman he wanted and state where she was to be found. It was that easy. They would do all the hard work and take all the risks. The only pain for him would be coughing up seventy-five grand, payable to a certain Swiss bank account, the details of which he’d receive in due course. But was that a problem when such a prize was in the offing?

Blenkinsop had been hooked, dazzled by the ease with which something so desirable could so quickly be his. The mere recollection of it, and its ultimate terrible outcome, made him sick with self-repugnance – and of course with terror as well. How was it possible for such an organisation to exist online? Yet it happened all the time. Terrorists used the internet to recruit, poisoners to advertise their wares and services, and then there was the kiddie porn network – he hadn’t thought there could be anything worse than that. But this took his breath away.

Any woman he’d wanted. All he’d had to do was name her and pay the cash.

Any woman – no matter who she was. Imagine that!

Once the ball was rolling, he’d never gone back to the Nice Guys website, as per their strict instructions. All further information, very carefully worded so as to be non-incriminating – would be delivered to him from email addresses that would immediately be negated afterwards, or via snail-mail. But whatever happened, he should stay away from the website. That was their explicit command. He wasn’t sure why or how this might affect their security. Presumably the site existed on a machine located in a banana republic somewhere, or was being run from some completely innocent person’s computer, which had been hacked and, unbeknown to its owner, was now being used as the host – again he had no technical know-how where this was concerned, but even a layman like him had sufficient understanding of how it might be done and how it could therefore be protected.

He walked across the office and stared at his laptop screen.

Under no circumstances, they’d said. The website was for first contact only (in other words the bait, he thought bitterly). From that point on, they’d be in charge of communications. Of course, the situation had radically altered now, and as he hadn’t been given a customer-care number – he laughed at the very thought – this was the only way he knew to contact them.

He sat at his desk. The muscles tightened in his neck and down the middle of his back. There was a slow pounding in the base of his skull that he knew would soon become a full-blown headache.

He assessed the stream of pencil-drawn gobbledygook in his diary. Then he reached out, typed it in – and hit ‘send’.

Nothing happened.

The address was not found.

He tried again, to make sure that he hadn’t mis-keyed.

It was the same result, nothing. Frantic, he tried to Google it. Immediately, hundreds of other beta sites were listed for him, and below many there were all kinds of disgusting hints about what they might contain: ‘Scat, farm sex, amputee fun day, teen smokes donkey dick …’ But none of them struck a bell of familiarity.

The back of Blenkinsop’s throat had gone so dry that it was hurting him. The tension in his neck intensified to the point of no return, detonating inside his skull in a fiery migraine, but even this was of no immediate concern. Lines of irrational thought began to scramble in his mind.

Had they disbanded, ceased to exist? For a few seconds he was ludicrously hopeful.

But then he realised that they’d simply changed the address, as they no doubt did every time they snared a new customer. It was a simple but foolproof way to prevent him causing trouble for them in the future. Whereas they, of course, from their position of complete anonymity, could cause an awful lot of trouble for him.