Neville Thurlbeck

1. Our names are Bob and Sue.  Some years ago an attempt was made by Chief Undercover Reporter of the News of the World to uncover our brothel which in fact, never existed.  As there was no story to report, he made one up.  However, suspecting that this person who came in anonimity to our house was up to no good, we secretly videoed him, naked, lying on our massage couch, slagging off his wife.  Our story has been referred to many times on the web by various newspapers, bloggers etc.  Thurlbeck has now been arrested for corruption and phone hacking.  This blog will tell the story of what happened to us and how we were instrumental in making major changes in that tabloid, which as you know, has recently been closed down by News International.  Our story is indeed quite unique and highly intriguing.

      23rd. August 1998            CHAPTER 1

1. We lay in each others arms
2. 23rd. August 1998
3. , Sue and I, like a thousand other lovers that Sunday morning. Curling gently into the familiar curves of each other’s body, we drifted slowly awake.
4. A wedge of early morning sun broke through a chink in the heavy curtains, slicing its way diagonally across our bed, warming the carpet. The huge hexagonal room was pleasant and airy: a slight fragrance of lavender oil still lingered in the air from the previous day’s massage. Through the darkness, a shaft of soft morning light illuminated a panel on the ornate silk screens which hid a massage couch, a cabinet, and a small chair. The massage area occupied approximately a quarter of the room; it was from this cosy little corner that we operated a business offering Swedish massage. Neither of us was entirely happy with this arrangement, but until our studio was built, we had nowhere else to work from. But massage was only one aspect of our unusual business. For the last three months we had advertised bed and breakfast; but with a difference. Our guests were nudists!
5. To be absolutely correct, we actually advertised ourselves as ‘clothes optional’. Unlike nudist clubs, where people were expected to be naked at all times, our guests had no such restrictions. In fact, they were required to be clothed for breakfast, and in any other part of the house, except for the guest lounge or when in the garden.
6. Almost eight o’clock. We would have normally been preparing bacon and eggs for our guests by now; we had been very busy, but had decided to close for a few days, to give ourselves a break. We were enjoying a rare luxury; having our house to ourselves.
7. As I kissed the back of her neck, Sue snuggled against me, sighing softly as I slipped my arm around her and gently cupped her left breast. “I could spend all day like this.” I whispered in her ear.
8. “Why don’t we then?” Sue said, her voice tired and husky.
9. “I’d love to, but don’t you think we should get to the beach today?” I said, lazily. “While we’ve got some sun.”
10. We could lie like this for hours, and we had promised ourselves that one day, we would spend a whole day in bed, just cuddling each other. Now, I had a decision to make; should I get up and make our early morning tea, or should I stay in bed and listen to the news. Sue moulded her warm body to mine, until we fitted like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. My mind was made up. I would stay exactly as I was. Tea, and the news could wait.
11. As I dozed in and out of sleep, I reflected on how lucky we were to have such a perfect relationship. The seven years we had lived together had been crammed with fun and adventure; we often felt things were too good to last.
12. Sue stretched sleepily. She had fallen asleep with a ponytail in her hair. During the night it had loosened and as she sat up her mop of red hair fell in a lopsided tangle. She stood up, and I watched as she tipped her head forward to sort out her hair. I thought how right she was for me; neither too tall nor too short, with a shapely, girlie body, and slim waist. She caught me looking at her and smiled.
13. “Fat, aren’t I?” She said with a sigh of resignation. She opened the curtains at one of the three large windows. Warm sunlight flooded the room as she wandered over to a long mirror standing in the corner. Pulling a disapproving face, she took a critical look at her naked body.
14. “Well, I think you’ve got a lovely body.” I told her.
15. “What about my hair?” She asked.
16. “It’s a mess.” I said. “Looks like you’ve just been shagged.”
17. “Well I have. It was wonderful.”
18. Laughing, she disappeared into the adjoining bathroom, washed, and brushed her teeth. “Well are we getting up then?” she asked, returning to the bedroom, with a hairbrush in her hand.
19. “Come back to bed for a little while.” I said. Needing little encouragement she slipped under the covers beside me. We cuddled and kissed and indulged ourselves for another hour, until hunger forced us out of bed. “Hey, it will be nice to have breakfast without any interruptions for a change.”
20. It seemed like the beginning of a perfect day.
21. Sometime earlier, in the room below, the phone had rung three times, but had failed to intrude into our sanctuary. The study was still in darkness, but the winking red eye of the answer machine flashed silently and urgently……waiting to deliver the message which would change our lives so drastically over the coming months.
22. ……………………………
23. The nightmare, if you can call reality a nightmare, began on Thursday 20th August 1998 when I received a phone call, which at first seemed nothing out of the ordinary.
24. “Hello, is that Bob?”
25. “Yes. Who is this ?”
26. “ My name is Brian,” a voice said, “ I work for a company called T & R Promotions, and we have been requested by the English Tourist Board to take some photographs of your business on behalf a French travel company, who are promoting ‘Bed and Breakfast in England’.”
27. I felt there was nothing suspicious in this; we had already informed the Tourist Board when we applied to join, that we spoke some German and French, and that those nationalities would be made welcome at our guest-house, so it seemed logical that they might well want some promotional photographs. In truth I was quite excited about it.
28. “We have a photographer in your area at present.” He continued. “Would it be possible for him to come round in a couple of hours?”
29. I quickly checked our diary. It was clear for that time.
30. “Yes, that would be fine.” I gave him some brief directions and said goodbye. Sue was just finishing a massage. When she had shown her client out, I told her the good news. She was delighted.
31. “Oh my God, we’d better get out the Linguaphone!” she joked. “No, seriously, I think it will be good to get some foreign visitors.” Neither of us had any reason to suspect the photographer was not bona fide.
32. Sue and I spent some time tidying up the house. We were pleased that we were being promoted in France by the English Tourist Board, as it might bring some good business. As we catered for naturists, we thought that advertising in France would be a good idea. The French have less hang-ups about nudity than the British, having many nudist beaches and resorts of their own, so we thought we were looking at a good way of promoting our business, by advertising in France.
33. “We’ll have to get some croissants!” I joked.
34. Sue and I had worked hard to create an unusual and luxurious environment with a friendly, ‘no smoking’ ambience where people could recharge their batteries. We did not take families, so our guests could be assured of peace and quiet when they stayed with us.
35. It seemed quite natural for us to extend our naturist facilities, to providing massage for our guests, naturally with both guest and masseur/masseuse, naked; but it wasn’t long before we realised that most of Sue’s non-resident male clients preferred this too. Given the option of Sue being dressed or naked, when she gave a massage, most of them chose the latter! Of course this added an erotic element to the massage, especially in the warm, sensual atmosphere of the massage room. (How we dealt with this is covered in more detail later in the book.) However for the photographs we decided it would be prudent for both of us to keep our clothes on; Sue wearing her uniform, whilst I wore a shirt and shorts.
36. The photographer duly arrived that afternoon, and introduced himself only as Roy.
37. “Pleased to meet you Roy.” I smiled, shook his extended hand, and invited him in. If only I had known what he was really up to!
38. The eager photographer had turned up half an hour early, which was inconvenient as Sue still had a few minutes left with a massage client. I wanted her to be there when the photographs were being taken, but more importantly I was worried that unaware of Roy’s arrival, she might wander across the landing, naked, to get warm towels from the airing cupboard. This was something she did without thinking sometimes, while her client was taking a shower. I imagined Roy might be a bit shocked if he happened to be in the hallway below! I hurriedly ushered our guest out of the entrance hall and through the house, well away from where Sue was working. I would have to occupy him until Sue came to join us.
39. Roy was a pleasant-looking young man. I thought perhaps he was a college student; possibly this one was one of his first assignments. Attributing his obvious nervousness to his inexperience, I tried to put him at his ease, by assuring him jokingly, that he would not have to remove his clothes, but the joke was lost on him, and he continued to fumble anxiously with his bag of equipment, searching hurriedly for film and lenses. Looking back, one or two things did seem a little odd about him at the time, but with a busy schedule, and with other things on my mind, no alarm bells started ringing. With the benefit of hindsight it was strange that he asked for ‘Bob’ when he first introduced himself. I would have expected ‘Mr Firth’; and it was curious that he only gave his Christian name on meeting me for the first time. Also, his apparent competence at posing us for various shots, his efficiency at changing lenses and looking for the best angles, seemed at odds with his bumbling clumsy behaviour which was very unprofessional. Sue commented later that Roy seemed incapable of looking either of us in the eye, preferring to look down or around, even when talking to us. At the time we thought it was because he knew we were naturists and it made him feel uncomfortable.
40. “What I’d like to do,” he told me, “is to take some pictures of you both, and some of the various guest rooms and then some of the garden.”
41. I looked at my watch. Sue’s client would just about be starting to have his shower. He would be down in under ten minutes, so I had to time this right. Most clients came to us because of the relative seclusion of our house, in anonymity, because of the image that both naturism and massage might conjure up. (The ‘massage parlour’!). The last thing that they would want to see would be a photographer, camera at the ready, as they left. I would have to make sure that Roy and I were in the garden at the time that the client came down the stairs, so that they would avoid each other. I grinned to myself. ‘This could be the beginning of a ‘Carry On’ or ‘Inspector Clouseau’ farce”, I thought.
42. “Let me take you for a short tour of the downstairs rooms,” I said, guiding Roy through to the guest lounge. “Then we can look around the garden, and after that, I’ll show you upstairs and you can take some pictures of the bedrooms. Sue will be with us shortly, and if you want some photos of us together, you can take them then. Then we’ll leave you to go around the house and take whatever other shots you like”.
43. Helping to pick up his clutter of photographic paraphernalia, I directed the timid photographer through the guest lounge and into the garden, closing the door behind me, to clear the way for Sue’s client to leave unobserved.
44. I began the tour of the grounds. It still hadn’t occurred to me that Roy had not been commissioned to take photographs by the Tourist Board, but for someone else. But then, why should I have been suspicious?
45. As I showed Roy around our pretty garden, I heard the front door closing and the sound of a car departing, and shortly afterwards Sue joined us on the sunlit lawn. We posed for the photographer, smiling happily, on the patio, by the pond and by our well stocked rockery, convinced that the photographs were being taken to promote our business. We sat smiling by our front wall, posing beside the plaque with our house name inscribed on it; “MONA VALE”
46. Back inside the house we proudly showed Roy in and out of the guest rooms, well appointed and newly decorated, with views over farmland dotted with grazing sheep, low thatched cottages and fields of ripening corn. Roy commented on the wonderful views as he continued casually looking around for suitable shots.
47. “I understand that you offer massage too,” Roy ventured. Now this really should have alerted us that something was amiss. In our application to go in the English Tourist Guide, submitted several months earlier, we had not mentioned massage. We had only advertised massage in Health & Efficiency, (Britain’s largest selling naturist magazine), and our local newspaper. Massage would have been advertised in our own publicity material for the following year, but this was not yet printed. So, if we had stopped and thought about it, we would have realised that Roy could not have known that we offered massage if he was genuinely from the Tourist Board; but we were swept away with enthusiasm at the prospect of being included in a foreign guide, and these little incongruities never crossed our minds at the time.
48. Becoming a little more ambitious, the intrepid photographer suggested, “Perhaps you would like me to take a shot of you both in the massage room.”
49. ‘What a good idea,’ we thought. ‘What excellent publicity.’
50. Well, we were about to get more publicity than we had bargained for!
51. I unselfconsciously undressed and lay face-down on the massage table. Sue, fully dressed in her white uniform posed over me, pretending to massage my back. Roy took several pictures of us, insisting that I look up at the camera, even though I protested that I should be looking relaxed, with my head resting and my eyes closed. It didn’t seem like a very good advert for massage to me.
52. As Roy packed away his photographic equipment, Sue asked him for his telephone number and also requested that he send us some prints of the best photos, for our own publicity. Fumbling in his pockets, pretending to look for a non existent card, he made quite an impressive actor.
53. “Er, erm….I’m really sorry, I don’t seem to have one on me.” He said, feigning surprise. Of course he didn’t!
54. “Well, then please write your number on the pad,” Sue told him. He jotted down ‘Roy’, and a mobile number, quickly said “Goodbye,” and left. We relaxed over a pot of Earl Grey tea, and thought no more about the visit that day.
55. In bed that night, as often happens, I was turning various things over in my mind. I was not sure what it was, but there was something suspicious about Roy’s visit. I thought Sue was asleep, until, as though reading my mind, she said softly, “ You know I’m not happy about that guy Roy.” We began discussing the events of the previous day, and decided to check out his authenticity in the morning.
56. …………………………………………..
57. Friday 21st August:
58. We had hardly finished breakfast when Brian called again. “Sorry to trouble you, but the photographer we sent yesterday ruined all the films. What a wally! Do you think he could come round and take some more? I’ll come round with him to make sure that everything goes O.K. this time.” There was definitely something not quite right about all this and I needed time to think. Every instinct in my body told me that there was something very wrong indeed, but I didn’t know quite what. A professional photographer does not usually ruin his films.
59. “No,” I said, “I’m not sure if it will be convenient just now. I’ll speak to Sue about it first. I’ll call you back. Let me have your number.” Brian gave me his mobile number, but I insisted on a business number for T and R Promotions.
60. “I’m phoning from a friend’s house at present. I’m not at work,” he said awkwardly.
61. “Then let me have your friend’s number. I’ll phone you back in a few minutes. I don’t want to phone back on a mobile.” I was being awkward too.
62. With extreme reluctance he finally gave me a British Telecom number that I could phone back on, but he was clearly getting irritated by my insistence on it. But it seemed there was some urgency to his request, and he wanted the photographer to come round immediately. ‘Why all the hurry for a guide that wasn’t due for publication until the next year?’ I wondered. Looking back of course, he had a much more pressing deadline!
63. I called Sue into the room and briefly told her of my conversation with Brian. She looked worried and began idly to doodle on the pad on which Roy had written his mobile number. She frowned, then said. “What sort of number is this? I didn’t look at it properly yesterday, but it doesn’t look long enough to be a telephone number.”
64. Sure enough, the number was only eight digits. “Why don’t you dial it just to see if it is real?” she continued. I dialled. Twice. There was no connection. I looked at Sue in confusion. What on earth was going on? Getting ‘Yellow Pages’, we looked under ‘photographers’ and ‘promoters’ to see if we could track down T & R Promotions, and when there was no entry, we tried through directory enquiries. Nothing. No such company was listed.
65. “Phone them back on the number that they gave you,” urged Sue, “the Telecom one. Insist that they tell you who they are and what they want.” Again I dialled. The B.T. number was just an answering machine, which invited me to either leave a message, or, if I wanted to get hold of ‘Mike’ urgently, that I should try a mobile number. ‘Mike!’ Who in God’s name was Mike. I dialled.
66. “Hello, is that Mike?” I said when a voice answered at the third ring.
67. “Yes. Who’s that?” I didn’t answer his question.
68. “Brian said I could reach him at this number. I thought it was T & R Promotions.” I actually didn’t know what to think any more. There was a long pause.
69. “I don’t know any Brian or T & R Promotions,” he said curtly. I didn’t believe him.
70. “Well, it’s important that I reach him. It’s about some photos that he wants to take.”
71. Another long pause. I could almost hear his brain ticking over. “Oh yes. Brian. Now I know who he is. He’s not here at present, but I can give you his mobile number.” Almost too quickly, he gave the number. It was certainly not one that he had to look up. He knew this number by heart. As I put the phone down, I realised that the number that Mike had given me was the same as that originally given to me by Brian. I had gone round in a full circle and had got nowhere. This was not just confusing; it was bizarre.
72. “Brian will almost certainly answer the phone if I ring him on this number,” I said to Sue. “What am I going to say to him?”
73. “Well, neither he nor his photographer are setting a foot in our house unless they give us a proper explanation about what’s going on. This should have been a simple and pleasant photographic session. Why isn’t it? I don’t trust them one little bit.” She was not alone in that thought. Once again I dialled. British Telecom were making a lot of money out of me today.
74. “Brian, it’s Bob. What’s going on?” I saw no point in beating about the bush. “You’ve led us a right song and dance.”
75. “Look Bob, all we want is some decent photos for the French guide.”
76. “I spoke to Mike after being given his number from your answering machine. He didn’t seem to know who you were at first.”
77. “Yes. I spoke to him just now. He told me that you had contacted him.” Brian sounded rather cross. “Now, about those photos …”
78. “Brian, I don’t want to seem rude, but I’d like to see some proof as to who you are. In particular, I’d like to see the instructions that you had either from France, or from the English Tourist Board, to take photos. Is there any problem with that?”
79. “No, none at all,” he replied. “I have the instructions from France. But they’re in French.”
80. “That’s all right. We both speak French so we’ll have no problem with translating it. Please fax them through to me.”
81. “I’ll do that right away,” he said, but I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.
82. Intensely worried now about what had happened, and that to all intents and purpose, we had allowed impostors into our house, we wasted no more time and decided to inform the police.
83. …………………………………………
84. Saturday 22nd August
85. Blandford Forum is an ancient Roman market town, resting cosily in a crook of the river Stour. We made the familiar journey into town, over the old stone bridge, past the Crown Hotel, and The Red Lion public house. The busy street market, where, in normal circumstances we might have spent a pleasant Saturday morning shopping, passed almost unnoticed as we made our way through the town centre and up the hill to, aptly named, Peel Close.
86. The police station in Blandford is little more than an outpost, but nevertheless a CID officer was on duty. Maureen Hayward listened with interest to our strange encounter with the mysterious visitor, and the equally strange telephone conversations. There was little she could do as no threats had been made against us, but she took our fears seriously and advised us to take care to secure the house and just to be vigilant. She told us she would do what she could to check out the numbers we had given her, and would be in touch. Sue and I went back home feeling unnerved and wary, trying to put the events of the last two days at the back of our minds. Still, we didn’t go out to dinner as planned that evening, as we feared our house may be broken into.
87. ……………………………………….
88. Sunday 23rd August.
89. The winking red eye of the answer-phone flashed silently and insistently. Finally, after breakfast, we played back the message. “Hello, Bob and Sue. Russell here. You remember, I stayed with you a few weeks ago. Russell White, from ‘Russell Fabrications.’ Well done! You made it to the News of the World. Good Luck!” Click! That was the end of the message.
90. I stared at Sue disbelievingly. She looked back blankly for a few seconds, before we both collapsed in a fit of hysterical laughter. Our minds raced as we tried to imagine why anybody would be sufficiently interested in what happened in our little bed and breakfast business to write an article for the national press. And in the sleaziest of the tabloids too! We were curious more than anything, to know what they had said; what could they say about us? We are nudists, perhaps? We are masseurs? Hardly a story in that, or so we thought. What we hadn’t realised was that in the absence of a story, the News of the World would make one up. And they did!!
91. Our mysterious photographer was a mystery no longer.
92. “Go on…..go on.” Sue almost thrust me out of the door to buy a copy of the paper. I was reluctant to go, and hung around as long as possible, not wanting to see what had been said about us. I returned with my copy of the paper ten minutes later. At least we were not on the front page and I was spared the indignity of anyone I knew, seeing me buy it. Sue had made us a cup of coffee. We sat in the lounge cautiously turning the pages. We hesitated nervously as we slowly leafed through one page after another until finally, on pages eight and nine we saw IT. A double page spread.
93. A photo of me on our massage couch, with Sue leaning over me, and the headlines,
94. ‘THE GUEST HOUSE WHERE ALL ROOMS COME WITH EN-SUITE PERVERT.
95. OWNER HIDES IN THE WARDROBE TO WATCH WIFE BED MEN FOR CASH’

TO BE CONTINUED……………!