The Word Cloud

I have also put this in general critiques. This is something of a new departure for me and I hope I will be forgiven for just joining this group and putting this up. I normally write fairly lighthearted stuff and I would much appreciate advice as to whether or not this is clumsy. It's a scene setting prologue to a thriller where my character, who is a professional assassin, become the hunted having been given a dangerous target.

Anyway, for what it's worth.

Suzanne had been eighteen years old and had just heard that she had the A level results she needed to start her accountancy course at the local college. Sebastian had taken her out three or four times before that evening. She hadn’t told anyone about him yet. He had proposed dinner to celebrate her success. He was four years older than her. Her parents were away on their summer holiday. She had stayed behind to learn her results and was alone in the house. Her fourteen year old brother had gone on the holiday with their parents.

It had been a good dinner. Being a warm summer evening she was wearing a light cotton dress that made the most of her figure which had developed spectacularly over the last couple of years. Sebastian had taken her to “L’Escargot de Toulouse”, one of the smartest and most expensive restaurants in town. He insisted that she have whatever she wished and had ordered Champagne, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with dinner and double brandies afterwards.

It had been a lovely evening and she didn’t think twice about asking him in for coffee. He made his pass on the sofa. They had kissed and fondled a little on their previous dates and she didn’t become concerned when his hands found her breasts. When he moved his hand to her thigh and started to slide it up towards her knickers she still wasn’t worried, but asked him to stop saying:

“Stop please. Not yet Seb.”

He said “When then?” and she said “I don’t know. Maybe one day. Maybe never” with a toss of her head to throw her long blonde hair back out of her eyes.

He had laughed and said “Why not now. It was perfect. Empty house available.”

She said she didn’t know if she loved him and he had replied that that didn’t matter. It would be fun. She said “No.”

He sat for a moment, then drank some of his coffee and seemed to calm down. He started to kiss her gently again. She relaxed again thinking things were back under control and started to kiss him back until he quickly slid his hand up to her crotch and tried to get inside her knickers.She had shouted “I said no” and pushed him away.

He shouted that he’d paid for it and he was fucking well going to have it. She had told him to get out of the house and he hit her in the face.

She was too shocked to immediately realise what was happening. He slapped her again and started to drag her towards the stairs. She started to scream but he grabbed her throat and told her to shut the fuck up. She couldn’t breath and thought he was going to strangle her, but he hadn’t. He took her to her own room. She stopped fighting him, he was too big and strong. He had watched as she undressed. Then he took off his own clothes and raped her on her own bed. It had been her bedroom all of her life. As he raped her she focused on her teddy bear in the corner of the room. After a while he did it again.

About a half hour later he got up and said that she had been a silly girl and she had no right to be so gorgeous. That he was sorry if he had been a bit rough but it was her own fault. He left saying that he would call her in a day or two.

She had cried for a long time hugging her teddy bear until, eventually, in the small hours she fell asleep.

****

She had woken the next day, after the rape, and tried to wash it all away in the shower, but it wouldn’t go. She didn’t go to the police. Even if they believed her, he hadn’t left anything other than minor bruising. Rape couldn’t be proved. So she sat around the house and didn’t eat much. She kept crying.

It was three days later that she decided what she would do. She would surprise him.

She put on her new tight jeans and a white clinging T shirt with no bra. She took care with her make up, just a touch here and there. Slinging her big shoulder bag in which she carried her world onto her shoulder she went to see Sebastian. She had never been to his flat before, he had always taken her home after their dates. But she knew the address and that he lived alone.

Sebastian was in, and alone, when she rang his doorbell. He opened the door and looked surprised, but she gave him a shy smile:

“You said you would call, Sebastian. I’ve been waiting. I wanted to see you again,” she looked down at her feet and then up again, ingeniously.

He stepped back and opened the door wide. “Come in, love”.

She entered and slipped her light coat off letting him see the tight jeans and T shirt hugging her figure. She brushed past behind him, letting her breasts stroke his back, suggesting that she should fix them both a drink.

“Sure, whiskey please. Over there in the cupboard” he had said, turning. She got the drinks and settled on the sofa, fixed him with her eyes. He sat next to her and swallowed some of his whiskey. She had put down her drink, untouched, leaned across and kissed his cheek very gently. She let her hand trace a little circle on his thigh and moved it gently up until it was resting lightly in his groin. Through the denim of his jeans she felt his prick growing with rapid pulsing surges. He was breathing very quickly. She had said “Well, that’s encouraging.”

He made a grab for her but she was too quick and slipped out of his grasp and stood before him. She peeled off her T shirt and he had gasped at the sight of her erect nipples. Again he reached and again she stepped back. She picked up her bag and swinging it nonchalantly from one hand she made her way towards his bedroom.

She even managed to say “Come on big boy, let’s go for a new record,” and swinging her hips she went into the room. She dropped her bag by the side of the bed. He was right behind her and coming up close he reached round to put his hands on her breasts and started to nuzzle her neck.

She had turned in his arms and unzipped his fly freeing his prick. His erection was enormous, much bigger than she remembered it but she stuck to her task and stroked it gently like it had said in the magazine she had been studying. He made small inarticulate sounds as she undressed him and laid him back on the bed. She stood by the bed, looking down at him, undid her jeans and stepped out of them. As she stepped out of her panties he groaned. She slid over him murmuring “My turn on top,” and pushed herself at his mouth. He was only used to his own gratification and hesitated, lacking confidence. This was new to him. But he responded when she gently mocked him, saying “Come on lover, you want a really good time don’t you”. He had never been with an assertive woman that told him what to do. It exited him in a way he didn’t understand.

After a while she slid back along his stomach and bent her head over his penis. She gently kissed the end. She felt it tremble and realised that she could go no further with that. If he came now it would spoil things. She sat up and moved forward, slipped him inside her. It didn’t hurt this time and she rode him up and down until he was close, back arching, eyes shut with his face reddening, muscles tensed and calling out. She swung her hips once more as she reached to her bag by the bedside. She felt him starting to come as she stabbed him in the throat with her mother’s best Sabatier carving knife.

She cut it sharply to the side, pulled it out and stuck it in the other way, cut again. His windpipe was severed and he made a hissing sound for a second or two, then collapsed back, twitched for a while then stopped, dead. Only then did she realise that his erection had become huge as he came and then collapsed inside her with the first stab. Well, he got something out of it then, she thought to herself.

She felt no remorse at that time. She went meticulously through her plan. There was blood everywhere but being naked she simply showered it off. She gave him a wash over with bleach and whipped out the bedsheet, stuffing it into the bin liner she had in her bag. She planned to drop it in someone’s bin left out for nest morning’s collection. Then she washed the knife carefully in his sink before dressing, all traces gone. She washed the whiskey glasses and the bottle. She had touched nothing else that would hold a fingerprint and she had never been there before. Hopefully all traces of her and her DNA had gone. She dressed, gathered up her things, opened the door with her hand swathed in a handkerchief and left quietly. It was nine thirty. A quiet time with everyone that was going out, out and everyone that was staying in, in. She walked the five miles home with her long hair inside her coat with the collar turned up. Elementary disguise, but the best things are simple, she had thought.

She had stopped worrying that she would be found out after a week. The police never even connected her with Sebastian, let alone with his murder. She had never met any of his friends, or he hers. The staff at the restaurant might have remembered something, but they didn’t. He was unremarkable, after all. No-one had connected the young woman walking out that evening with the man lying with his throat cut open in his flat. She had got away with it.

Her parents and brother returned from holiday and found her subdued and moody. But she perked up a little when she found she wasn’t pregnant. That would have been awkward. The remorse came later. There was no-one she could talk to about it, or any part of it. Her school friends would never keep a secret and any clue the police got would be one more than they had, or needed as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t tell her mother or father about the rape because they would want to tell the police and that would bring her under suspicion. She couldn’t tell her parents that she had killed a man. They would never understand. As the jubilation left her, to be replaced by remorse, she sank into a darker mood than when she was worried about being pregnant.

She had to talk to someone about it. She even thought about telling a priest, but who could know how a priest would react with such information. She wasn’t a Catholic anyway, not really.

She missed the start of term.

In the end she told Aunt Greta. At first she only meant to tell her about the rape, but Greta could see there was more and gently got it all. She wasn’t a real aunt. Greta was an old school friend of her mother’s. Greta had married a merchant banker or some such. He never visited though, Suzanne’s family weren’t rich or important enough. There was a lot of money anyway. Greta had asked a few detailed questions about fingerprints etc. In the end she made approving sounds.

“Some men can be such bastards darling. All you did was clean up the planet a little. You did the right thing. No doubt. He’ll never do it again now, will he? Now you stop worrying. The bastard deserved it. Don’t ruin your life over him!”

Suzanne felt better after this. She started attending the college and was recovering the lost ground when, about five months after their conversation, Greta came to stay for a few days. Suzanne heard her mother and Greta talking in the garden at the weekend.

“He’s always seen other girls darling. You knew that all along,” her mother was saying.

“I know, I know. But he wants to divorce me now. His lawyers will have it all tied up. I won’t get anything,” said Greta.
“I did everything for him when I was young, but he doesn’t want me now. The bastard just wants to be rid of me.”

Later Suzanne talked to Greta alone and asked if she could help. After all Greta had helped her. They had talked and it came down to this. She was young, good looking, beautiful really. Henry would not be able to resist that long blonde hair and her young girl’s body.

Henry hadn’t changed his will yet and there was a half million pound insurance policy as well. If Suzanne would dispose of him Greta would pay her fifty thousand pounds. It would be so easy. Henry would walk into it like a lamb to slaughter, literally. As he was planning a divorce he would be very, very careful. False names, somewhere discrete. All Greta needed to know was the when so that she could establish an unshakeable alibi.

Suzanne thought about it for a while and then said, “Why not? Why the hell not!”

It had been remarkably easy. Suzanne, dressed for the part in a clinging short black dress, had sat next to Henry at his favourite city wine bar and spilt his wine. She had insisted on paying him back. Henry had countered that the only recompense he would accept was her company at dinner, the very next evening, or failing that, the one after.

The restaurant he took her to was very nice, but discrete and obscurely placed at the wrong end of Conduit Street. They ate in a private booth at the rear and he suggested she go away with him for the weekend, over the brandy. She pretended to hesitate and he slid a little box across the table. “Just a little token of my respect” he said. The box contained a Rolex watch.

“Oh Henry,” she managed to look misty eyed. “I’d love to go away with you for a weekend. But I can’t manage this weekend.”

“Next week?” he asked eagerly. She nodded thoughtfully. Yes, that should be OK. Enough time for Greta to organise a trip to the USA, one of the few places left in the world to reliably record both entry and exit. She agreed to the next weekend.

Out of interest Suzanne had shown the watch to a jeweller, she said for valuation. The jeweller had told her it was a fake, probably cost a fiver.

Henry proposed Edinburgh. He was so careful that he made her book a room herself, under a false name in another nearby hotel while he booked into the Hilton again under a false name. He gave her cash to pay for her room. She was to slip round in the evening and try not to be seen.

“Damn right” she thought. She actually entered the hotel through a back entrance by the dustbins. It was propped open for the convenience of the kitchen staff. The red sign saying, “No exit, this door is alarmed” bothered her not at all. She simply waited until a load of scraps had been thrown out and had slipped in. It would be at least five minutes before the next load. No-one saw.

She knocked on his door and he opened it instantly. He was wearing a silk dressing gown and had recently shaved. He looked like some ageing lothario which, she reflected, was what he was. There was Champagne but she didn’t manage to finish one glass before he was pawing her.

The poor old bugger could barely get it up. The effort exhausted him. As he lay sleeping it off, flat on his back, she very gently rested the tip of the knife just under the point of his jawbone, just behind the ear. In one swift continuous movement she clamped a pillow over his face, rammed the knife upwards into his brain, twisted it and pulled it out. Barely a sound escaped as he squirmed, stiffened and then relaxed, dead. She had no blood on her, the pillow had seen to that as well as any sound. The knife had been brought in Birmingham for cash and was a mass production model sold by the thousand. She left it by his head. She had never touched it with her bare hand from the time she had bought it. She wore thin cotton gloves now.

She knew that they could possibly match her pubic hair or something, to get her DNA. Gently she shaved his groin and gave him a flourishing wipe with an antiseptic wet one. Then flushed the cream and hair away. The undersheet was pulled out to be anonymously disposed of and she tucked him up in bed. A hotel room would be full of interesting fingerprints but hers were only on the glass of unfinished Champagne which she emptied down the washbasin and carefully cleaned. He had poured. Anonymity was her complete protection.

She had waited for another half an hour but there was no sound outside the room. She left anonymously, as she had arrived, by the back way, leaving the red “Do Not Disturb” sign on the bedroom door. She arrived at her own, more modest hotel at ten fifteen, early enough to cause no interest. She left the next morning having settled her bill in cash and walked to the railway station. It wasn’t far.

By the time the maid had finally lost her patience and opened the door to discover Henry still in bed, as it were, Suzanne’s train was just pulling into Kings Cross Station.

Greta’s alibi was unshakeable.

The police learned from Greta that Henry had been given to chasing young girls and even prostitutes sometimes. It was
eventually, reluctantly, confirmed by his work colleagues. The police surmised that some of these prostitutes were unstable, on drugs. They asked a lot of questions of the Edinburgh prostitute community and also the drug dealers. They got nowhere. Their investigations did not lead them to a quiet house in Sevenoaks or to a young girl suddenly and inexplicably fifty thousand pounds richer. It had been paid in cash and now resided offshore, untraceable.

Eight months later Greta had introduced her friend Amanda, who also had a husband problem and a need for a simple solution. A new career was born.