Humphrey [Note: a 4,000+ word, 10-page story, so not for those with a short attention span]

NOTE: DON'T BE PUT OFF BY THE 1ST FEW PARAGRAPHS! THEY PROVIDE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE PERIOD.

SOME PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS GOOD: MY THANKS TO "NIGHT-SERPENS" & "RINDOMAI" FOR AWARDING THIS GOLD PRIZES.


Humphrey Moore was a pederast. By that I mean he enjoyed having consensual (and loving, in his eyes at least) sex with boys. I don't mean abusing or harming young children here. Humphrey would have no more ever contemplated attacking and raping a five year old or even a ten year old than he would have robbed and murdered a sweet little old lady for the contents of her handbag. Nowadays, we have the word paedophile which, in spite of its etymological derivation from the Greek for "boy+love", means an adult who preys on children of either sex, and who may well even kill them in order to cover up his crimes. Humphrey was not a paedophile; he would not have even recognised the word as it hadn't been invented at the time of this story.

  No, what Humphrey enjoyed was having a sexual relationship with a good-looking, sexually mature boy, ideally between thirteen and sixteen years of age. Occasionally, Humphrey slept with boys a little older than that, especially if the young men concerned were physically immature for their age. Absolute maximum eighteen or nineteen as long as they were pretty, slim and smooth skinned. Humphrey was repelled at the thought of having sex with a hairy-chested man of his own age (a few months short of thirty-two). Humphrey regarded that as being queer and he certainly did not see himself as a queer. On the few occasions when he dispassionately considered his own sexuality, Humphrey defined himself as a bisexual who currently preferred boys to girls, but who accepted that a time would come when he would be too old to attract the sort of boys he liked and who would then have to turn his attention to women, possibly marriage, as he did not relish the prospect of being a lonely old queen, hanging round public lavatories and scruffy gay pubs.

  Before you can understand what happened to Humphrey Moore, you need to appreciate the position. You must step back very nearly forty years to the England of the mid sixties. In 1885, the so-called Labouchere Amendment had outlawed all homosexual acts between men and, as a result, many thousands of gay men had been persecuted, imprisoned, blackmailed, even hounded to suicide. In 1957 a parliamentary committee had recommended the decriminalisation of sex between men aged over 21. This was not implemented until 1968 and even then the reform did not apply to either Scotland or Northern Ireland. It was only in 1994 that the age of homosexual consent in Britain was reduced to 18 and in 2001 finally to 16, in line with heterosexuality. Thus, at the time of this story, Humphrey's predilection for sodomy with teenage boys was only marginally more illegal or criminal than was consensual sex between two adult men.

  In most major towns there was a gay underworld: a few pubs where homosexuals could meet in relative security. In major cities (and especially in London) there was a more open and tolerant situation with private members' drinking clubs and even gay discotheques for the younger set.  In smaller towns, the only meeting place was often the public lavatory in the park, accompanied by the ever-constant fear of being arrested by a policeman acting as a decoy.

  Humphrey was in a privileged position. He was a schoolmaster in an all-male grammar school. He taught English Literature to boys aged between eleven and eighteen. His school was set in a nice, comfortable, middle-class suburb of a prosperous, provincial English city. No disruptive, urban yob pupils; only boys eager to learn about Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Spenser and all the other classical writers Humphrey loved. And Humphrey was very careful: he identified the quiet boys who kept out of trouble, the ones who were uninterested in rugby and football, the ones who never made vulgar boasts about girl friends, the ones who responded to his very guarded references to the secret meanings in Shakespearean sonnets and who relished the camp cleverness of Oscar Wilde's epithets. In short, Humphrey was very astute in recognising young homosexuals in the making. He needed to be careful, for a wrong move on the wrong boy would have very serious consequences: the loss of his career at the very best; social ostracism, public humiliation and a long term of imprisonment at the worst.

  It was a fine, warm Autumn evening that Sunday in 1967, and Humphrey was driving home after a rather boring weekend visit to his parents in Devon. His mother had been particularly irritating, incessantly singing the praises of the daughter of some new friends they had made through their local church. Such a pretty and intelligent girl, only just graduated from Cambridge with a very good degree in history, his mother knew they would get on like a house on fire, such a pity that she'd not been able to engineer a meeting on this visit, but she would invite the parents and the daughter for dinner on his next trip down to see them. His father had only been marginally less annoying; his father felt it was about time Humphrey settled down as well, more to life than just teaching lads; why not marry a nice girl and give them the joy of grandchildren? They weren't as young as they used to be.

 The road, although one of the two main routes from the West Country to London, was not very busy and Humphrey cruised along at about fifty miles an hour, occasionally passing a slow-moving lorry. Humphrey switched on his headlights; it was that strange dusky period between the end of day and the onset of night when a driver thought he could see much better than he really could, and when it was important that other, less careful and less skilful drivers than Humphrey, should know he was there.

  Humphrey passed a transport café on his left, its uncurtained windows neon-lit to reveal its stark, unappealing interior. Humphrey grimaced at the thought of the greasy, stodgy, stolid fare which would be served up in such a place. Humphrey had quite refined and adventurous tastes in food and had been as unimpressed as always with his mother's meticulously conservative offerings at the weekend. He was looking forward to treating himself to a really good Chinese meal in the new Pekinese restaurant he had been recommended to try by the Headmaster, a fellow gourmet.

  And then Humphrey saw him, about three hundred yards ahead: a slight figure in blue jeans and a black polo neck, wearing a bright red woollen hat, hitching a lift. Humphrey hesitated for a moment, he didn't normally pick up hitch-hikers as they tended to be uninteresting and often even rude, but there was something about this boy which appealed. He knew the chances of sex were very slim indeed, but you never knew. In any event, if the boy was a common little bore, he could always say he was turning off after ten or twenty miles and get rid of an unwelcome guest.

  He pulled up about twenty yards beyond the boy and wound down the passenger door window. The boy ran up to him and put his head through the window. Humphrey saw he was very, very pretty indeed. In fact, he was beautiful. A small, oval face, high cheekbones, deep-set dark eyes with long dark eyelashes under very pronounced eyebrows and some charming wisps of brown hair hanging from underneath the red wool cap.

  'Hop in,' said Humphrey. 'Where are you heading for?'
  'Oh just straight up the road, towards London. Thanks so much for stopping, I thought no one ever would,' said a well-spoken, educated voice. It was a girl's voice, Humphrey realised with a shock. The girl opened the door, climbed in gracefully and Humphrey glanced down to see the outline of his passenger's very small breasts under her pullover for confirmation. He smiled to himself in contemplation of the fact that the beautiful pubescent waif he thought Lady Luck had given him was, in fact, a young female of the species.

  'I'm Sue,' said the girl with what Humphrey could see in the lights from the dashboard was a disconcertingly boyish smile. She pulled off her woollen cap and her auburn hair fell down to her shoulders.
  'My name's Humphrey,' he said.
  'I've never met a Humphrey before; I've only ever even heard of one: Humphrey Lyttleton.'
  'The jazzman you mean? Do you like jazz?', Humphrey enquired.
  'It's all right, I'm not especially mad on it. I like all sorts of music, you know, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Hollies, Bob Dylan, Donovan. And I like some classical music too, romantic things, stuff like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. How about you?'

  And so they chatted inconsequentially for a few moments. Humphrey felt himself warming to Sue: she was intelligent and quite amusing, she seemed to be interested in what he said and she responded well to his little jokes.

  'So how far are you actually going then, Sue, he asked, when they came to a lull in the conversation, 'as I'm not going all the way to London, I turn off near Basingstoke to go up to Oxford.'
  'Do you live in Oxford, then?'
  'Yes.'
  'Lucky sod. I wish I lived somewhere nice. I live in the middle of nowhere.'
  'Where's that?'
  'Nowhere you've ever heard of. Nowhere you'd ever want to hear of either!' She looked out of the window. 'It's about twenty miles ahead. A boring village about half a mile off the road. It's like being buried alive. It’s such shit. That's why I go hitch-hiking.'
  'What do you mean, it's why you go hitch-hiking?, Humphrey asked in a slight puzzled voice.
  'Oh I get so bored, I just go to the main road and stick my thumb out and see what happens. Today I got a lift in a lorry down to that transport caff where you picked me up. The guy was OK, perfectly friendly but not very interesting, so I left him at the caff when he went in for a cup of tea. And then I decided to head back. And then I met you.'

  Humphrey could feel the girl was looking at him and he glanced over at her. It was now quite dark but the headlights of an oncoming car shone brightly in her face. She had what he decided was a slightly teasing smile on her face.

  'You mean you just come out and hitch around, just for something to do?'
  'Mmmmm. More or less.'
  'Aren't you a bit nervous about who you might meet? I mean, your lorry driver was obviously OK, and I'm perfectly OK, but, don't you think it's a bit dangerous for a girl by herself? I mean, how old are you, Sue?'
  'I'm quite careful. I check people out before I get into their cars. I'm not stupid. I wouldn't get into a car with two or three guys in it! And in any case I can protect myself. And I'm seventeen, nearly eighteen.'

  'Protect yourself?', queried Humphrey, feeling slightly uncomfortable at the turn of the conversation he had initiated.

  Sue stretched and reached into her left-hand jeans pocket. Humphrey heard a loud metallic click and glanced sideways to see the flash of a blade as Sue's switchknife opened.
  'See? I always carry that with me. Just in case.' She laughed. 'Oh I'm really sorry, that was awful of me, flaunting that at you, you must have been alarmed. I'll put it away.' And she folded the knife shut one-handed and slipped it back into her pocket.
  'But,' she added, 'You did ask! Anyway, you're the most interesting guy I've met in weeks, so you needn't worry about whether you've given a lift to a loony.' And Humphrey felt Sue's hand pat him gently just above his left knee. She let her hand rest there after a couple of pats, gently pressing, and then, to Humphrey's surprise, moved it up a little to his thigh.
  'You don't mind my putting my hand on your leg do you? I mean, if you don't like it, I can take it away.'

  Humphrey felt himself blushing in the darkness. His heart was pounding slightly. 'No, no, it's fine. It's OK. It's nice.'

  'Can I ask you a personal question, Humphrey?', Sue asked as she began gently caressing his thigh.
  'Yes, why not?'
  'Are you married?'
  'No.'
  'Engaged?'
  'No.'
  'Girl friend?'
  'Not at the moment, not really what you'd call a regular girl friend,' Humphrey explained euphemistically.

  Sue's hand now moved up to his crutch and she started gently massaging him. She unzipped him and slipped her hand inside his trousers. To his surprise Humphrey felt himself getting an erection. Sue leant over and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips found their way to his ear and she delicately pushed her tongue inside it. Humphrey shivered slightly and gripped the steering wheel a little harder. He was getting quite excited in spite of the fact that the tongue was a female one.

  'I really like you Humphrey. You feel very hard. And quite big. I think you fancy me a lot, don't you?'

  Humphrey was taken aback. 'You're a very attractive girl, Sue; most men would fancy you a lot,' he mumbled, hoping this was an appropriate response. He could sense the girl’s eyes burning into him as she fondled him. She kissed his cheek again.

  'About three or four miles ahead, there's a disused filling station,' Sue murmured into his ear. 'It’s got a big car park behind it. No one ever uses it. Why don't we drive in there, park the car and then you can do what you want with me. I mean absolutely anything.'

  Humphrey felt his heart pounding hard. Never in his weirdest, wildest dreams had he ever imagined being propositioned like this by a nymphomaniac teenage girl. And one who looked disturbingly like a boy. Like the sort of boy Humphrey loved.
  'All right,' he agreed quietly. What had he to lose?

  Sue managed to slip her right hand inside Humphrey's underwear and she squeezed his erect, leaking penis. She then withdrew her hand and licked it. She next unzipped her jeans, slid her hand inside her knickers and then extended her wet finger to Humphrey's nose and lips. Humphrey sniffed the unfamiliar odour and nervously licked at the musky moisture.  Sue returned her hand to his swollen crutch.
  'Slow down. We're nearly there.  It's on the other side.'

  Humphrey saw the old garage in the beam of his headlights and turned off the road onto the cracked concrete of the forecourt. Sue directed him to a large gravel car park to the rear of the derelict buildings. The car park was empty except for a burned out van near the bushes at the far end and a small rather dirty dark blue sports car parked next to it, partly-covered by a tarpaulin.

  'Park over there, near to those old cars, it's furthest away from the road,' Sue said gently, still caressing Humphrey's stiff cock through the now quite damp crutch of his trousers.

  The car came to a stop and Humphrey switched the engine off. The moon was up by now, and he watched Sue as she removed her polo neck to reveal her small, pert, naked breasts. She opened her door, stepped outside, slipped off her shoes, jeans and panties and put them on the front seat, then closed the front door and got into the back of the car.
  'Don't keep me waiting,' she said calmly.

  Humphrey got undressed clumsily and self-consciously and clambered into the back of the car. He sat next to Sue and tentatively reached out for her. He felt strangely innocent and childlike. He had not been naked with a girl since his University days when there had been several, largely unsuccessful and unfulfilling attempts at heterosexuality before he came to terms with his basic preference for sex with boys.

  Sue put her hands round his neck, drew his face down to her and kissed him silently but very expertly, forcing her tongue between his lips and probing deeply into his mouth. Sue's tongue seemed to wrap itself around his. Her hand went down to his penis and he was soon fully erect again. He caressed her small hard nipples inexpertly. He was uncertain as to what move he should make next.

  'I want you in me,' Sue said bluntly and she immediately straddled him, one knee on each side of his thighs. She guided his erect penis into her and sat on him very firmly, forcing herself down on his entire length. He gasped in pleasure as the tender skin of his circumcised cock slid sensually into her soft, yielding, clinging wetness. 'Fuck me hard. Fuck me as hard as you can. Shove it into me,' she commanded in a matter-of-fact voice.

  Humphrey was quite shocked at this kind of language from someone he had seen as a sweet, gentle child of nature. The girls he had tentatively shared exploratory experiences with at college had always talked about "making love". Even the boys he regularly sodomised were seldom quite as explicit as this. But he responded with mounting excitement and thrust up into Sue, his hands on her firm (and pleasantly boyish) buttocks as she rode him feverishly on the leather-covered back seat of the car.

  'Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,' chanted Sue, reaching up to the roof of the car, placing her palms on the unlined cloth covering the metal panelling and pushing herself down on him. 'Touch me, make me come, go on, do it, do it.' She grabbed his right hand and showed him what she wanted him to do, how she wanted him to touch her. 'Yes, yes, that's it, keep going, fuck me harder, yes, yes, yes. Come on, come in me, pump your spunk in me, come on, come on, keep fucking.'

  They rocked up and down energetically for some minutes, the girl getting more vocal and vulgar as she got more excited. It was all a totally new experience for Humphrey and he found it exhilarating and, yes, thrilling. He felt himself getting nearer to orgasm; he couldn't hold off. Sue began howling like a dervish. 'I'm coming! I'm coming! Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh yes!' she screamed, clutching his shoulders and digging her nails into his flesh, making him flinch with pain. 'Jesus Christ, that's good! Ram it up me! Rape me! Rape me!'

  Humphrey grimaced in ecstasy as he climaxed hugely into the bucking she-devil who was still riding him in abandon. Great waves of pleasure swept through him as he emptied himself into her body, whilst she told him how she loved to feel his hot throbbing cock in her cunt. Then Sue gradually calmed down and sat still on him, dripping sweat. He lay back, eyes closed, exhausted and uncertain what to do next in these, for him, unique circumstances. He felt strangely peaceful, although slightly confused at how excited this strange girl had made him. Maybe, just maybe, he was more bisexual than he had thought. He felt quite affectionate towards the girl.

  Sue removed one of her hands from his shoulder and he felt her shift her weight slightly as she reached behind her. He realised his penis was starting to slip out of her.

  And then Sue tensed and pressed down on him suddenly and he felt the most incredible pain he had ever known in his life. The pain was indescribable, unbearable, overwhelming. The pain was red, it was black, it was white, it was fire, it was ice. The pain coursed through every single atom of his body. It was in his heart, a white-hot, ice-cold, numbing, exploding agony which prevented him from speaking, breathing, thinking, even from screaming. It was as though a thousand blazing pokers had been thrust into every orifice of his body and into the deepest recesses of his mind.

  He opened his eyes and saw Sue still sitting astride him, a wild look of joy in her eyes. He looked down at her moving and thrusting right hand and he could see the handle of the flick knife sticking out of his chest. He realised with utter horror that the blade had been inserted underneath his ribs and must now be deep in his heart. She was moving the knife in and out methodically, sending wave after wave of unspeakable, breath-taking pain coursing through him. With surprise he realised that her surprisingly strong left hand was still holding him down.

  'You forgot about the knife, didn't you, you bastard,' Sue snarled. And then she spat in his face.

  Humphrey gargled in torment for what seemed like hours to him as the girl worked the knife back and forth in his dying heart. In reality, his suffering was over in less than a minute and then he lay still, a trickle of blood oozing out of his mouth from where he had bitten through his own tongue. The girl smiled as she realised that, in death, Humphrey has regained his erection.

  She opened the rear door and climbed off the body. She looked down at her slim, boyish legs and was pleased to see there was very little blood on them, although her belly and breasts were liberally spattered with Humphrey’s gore.

  Sue opened the left-hand front door and took the set of keys from her jeans pocket. She returned to the back of the car and pulled the knife out of Humphrey's chest. It took a surprising amount of strength to get the blade out, as though Humphrey were reluctant to relinquish his hold on the precious instrument of his death. Sue padded over, still naked and bloody, to the parked sports car and opened the boot. In the pale moonlight, she used the waiting sponge and bucket of water to wash herself down. She wiped the knife clean. She then dried herself carefully on the bath towel she had left ready for use in the boot. She poured the blood-stained water carefully into a ditch and replaced the bucket and the sponge in the sports car's boot, before closing it.

  She returned to the other car, dressed herself quickly and took a final glance at Humphrey in the moonlight. He was actually quite good-looking, she decided. He had a nice, tanned, muscular chest, not too much hair; no flabby belly either. Someone who kept himself in good shape, probably quite proud of his body. Under different circumstances, she might have considered him as a boy friend. He had been a strange fuck, almost like a virgin, unsure of how to pleasure a woman. He was probably a bit queer, she decided.

  Although she hadn't killed the man for his money, it seemed silly not to check his wallet and she was quite pleased to find £40 there. She always felt that the theft of the money somehow diminished the purity of the killing, but it was illogical to ignore cash which was there for the taking. And it gave the police an extra motive to ponder. The wallet was made of suede and would hold no finger prints and she dropped it on the pile of clothes on the driver's front seat.

  Using her handkerchief, she carefully wiped any surfaces she had touched in the car: the door knobs, the handle she had used to open her window, the dashboard, the panel she had perhaps fingered as she had leant in after Humphrey had first stopped for her. She kicked the doors shut. The front window of her seat was still open and she shrugged. Humphrey would never notice the cold. She returned to her own car, dragged the tarpaulin off the bonnet, folding it up carefully onto the passenger seat. She was always nervous that the car wouldn’t start but there was no problem. She drove off and turned back onto the main road in the direction of London.

  The wallet in the back pocket of her jeans was a little uncomfortable, stuffed as it was with Humphrey's eight £5 notes on top of its normal contents. She took it out and placed in on the passenger seat, on top of the tarpaulin. Inside her wallet, her driving licence lay next to Humphrey's money. The name on the licence was not Sue, nor was it even Susan and the address was not of the imaginary village from whose boredom she had told Humphrey she had been escaping. The name read Lucy Beatrice Latimer and the address was in a leafy London suburb. The licence indicated her to be 29 years of age. She knew she looked much younger.

  Forty years ago, Britain's police forces were not computerised in the way they are today. They operated largely autonomously with little exchange of information. Therefore Lucy knew it was quite likely that Humphrey's killing might never be linked with her other little adventures over the years. But even if the police did realise what Humphrey near Salisbury, Gerald in Yorkshire and David in South Wales and the four others had in common, there was nothing to link them to a respectable young lady GP in West London, was there?

  Lucy settled back for her drive home. It had been an exciting day. She wondered what Deidre, her younger sister, would have thought of Lucy and her adventures. But Deidre, the sister whom Lucy had loved so much, Deidre the happy hitch-hiking girl who had been raped and killed shortly before her eighteenth birthday by someone who gave her a lift in a car, hadn't been around for seven years now. Lucy felt a tear began to form in her left eye, but she brushed it away and sniffed. She tucked her hair back under her red woollen cap. It was the same cap Deidre had been wearing that night. Deidre's lucky hitch-hiking hat.