The Word Cloud

I have also put this in the thriller section This is something of a new departure for me. 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.

A caution, this does contain what would be termed adult language and themes.

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.

I read this all the way through ...and now want to find out what happens next ......

Some of the descriptions were very detached - an 18 year old gets raped but is remarkably calm about it - but this seemed the right voice for someone whose response is to kill the guy and then become an assassin.

You asked whether or not it is 'clumsy', but I think the main issue is that there is too much tell and not enough show - especially in the first paragraph and later, when talking about Henry's will etc. You could maybe strip out some of the detail especially if not all of it is strictly relevant eg the age of her brother, the type of course she's doing , the fact that the A levels were what she needed ....then it would be even more sparse and in keeping with the voice.


Couple of specific things which jarred a bit:
The tenses switch back and for between the pluperfect and the perfect.

How much of the start of term did she miss ? Must have been a lot if five months later she is still catching up. Again, if this is a prologue, is that amount of detail needed ?

Discrete should be discreet - both times !

He 'couldn't get it up' - this didn't ring true. He's got a reputation as a womaniser, so if he wasn't able to perform why would he repeatedly put himself in this situation - surely he would have been safer sticking with the wife? And how old is he ? Greta can only be in her forties/early fifies ?

Should champagne be lower-case ?

Edinbugh hotels: If appearances are that important to him (given that he wouldn't visit Suzanne because the family weren't important) wouldn't it be the Balmoral ? Then she can stay at Juries near the station.

Last para - she hasn't got a career at all yet, so it might be better as 'A career was born' ?

Anyway, use or ignore as you will. But do please post more !

Cheers
Bex

Too many 'hads' in the first sentence - it's off-putting.

TWD

Further to the above I counted 9 'hads' and a 'hadn't' in the first 150 word paragraph - to me this makes it almost unreadable. You know when your hear a footballer interviewed and he says 'like' at the end of every sentence and before long you stop listening to what he's saying and get preoccupied with the next time he's going to say 'like'? I got a similar feeling here, I was preoccupied with the 'hads'.

This isn't meant to be nasty, I'm just telling you how I feel.

TWD

Thanks for these two quick responses, I'm just sneaking 5 minutes break to see if there was anything.

TWD, thanks; not offended at all. Now you've made me look it's an overused word. In many cases it could just be deleted without any change of sense - like. Pity it made it unreadable for you, I'd have been interested in what you thought otherwise. When I get chance and a bit more feedback I'll probably produce another version.

Bex, thank you too. It could probably be tightened along the lines you suggest, a bit of extraneous detail here and there could certainly come out. However, I think that the French have fought legal battles over the name Champagne. Perhaps that means it should be capitalised. Also thanks for the suggestions re Edinburgh. I chose it because it's a long way from London, not because I know the city and its hotels intimately. Such adventures as are described here entirely imagined on my part.

Oh yes, "he could hardly get it up" was necessary simply because I need him to collapse in exhaustion.

I'm just off to look up the difference between perfect and pluperfect :-)

Al,

I suggest you open with -

'Suzanne was eighteen and had just heard she'd gained the A levels needed to start an accountancy course at the local college. Sebastian, her date that night, had taken her out three or four times before; she hadn’t told anyone about him yet. He was four years older than her, and suggested a special dinner to celebrate Suzanne's success. At the time her parents and her fourteen year old brother were away on their summer holiday, but she'd stayed behind for the results of her As to come through. She was alone in the house.'

If it is of any use?

Cheers, Beep

Do you really need a prologue? When a prologue holds as much info as this then it seem sas if the work needs explaining in order to be understood by the reader. Why not just tell the story - or rather, 'show' the story?

I agree with Nashelle. Putting this in the past tense and delivering it all largely as a narrative makes it rather detached reading. It doesnt pull you in. I think you would do better to make this chapter 1 and tell the story as if it is current. Even if you leave it as a prologue tell it from Suzzanne's POV.

It needs a good editing pass as it stands too.

Interesting story in there though

I agree with Nashelle also (Nashelle you're a true 'thought leader').

By all means start with a prologue initially, just so you know where you are and give yourself focus, but you should find that as the story progresses you can write it in such a way to make the prologue redundant. Finally, before your final version is ready you'll be able to cut the prologue away altogther, thus making the start of the piece more urgent, instantly gripping the reader.

TWD

Thanks once again all. It's always nice when folks take time and trouble.

I have had this project in mind for a while and I wrote this bit of back story as much to get my head into the character before I thought to use it as a prologue. The outline here has nothing to do with the main plot except to introduce the main character sympathetically. The main action takes place ten years on. I initially wrote it to get her right in my head, but thought it should go in as it shows her to be a victim, not simply a cold blooded killer. As my main character I think I need the reader to have some sympathy for her. It's a bit untidy because last month I was in a comfortable position of having enough business to cover my needs and enough time to start a project. That is no longer the case and my free time has gone. I put it here to see if the concept was a "grabber". I think you have shown me three things:

1 It is a workable concept
2 My off the cuff writing style needs more than one pass to render it readable (I think I knew that deep down)
3 The prologue may be superfluous I could introduce this information gradually. Thing is I like them, personally. I may be a minority in that though.

So thanks again guys. Any more thoughts are always welcome. I'll be back to it as soon as one or more of my contracts completes.

For a good prologue see Lost Girls by Andrew Piper which shows an incident that happened earlier in the protagonsts life which has relevance on the whole story. It's written as an active scene. I think many people misunderstand the use of prologues and use them as way of exlaining all the things they think readers won't get from their telling of the story. Perhaps these writers aren't confident enough to think they can get all this info across any other way.


I found this article on prologues:
http://foremostpress.com/authors/articles/prologue.html

I love Prologues, but ones that actually have reference to what happened before the story. Stephanie Meyers I don't think ever got the hang of what a prologue is meant for as she just copied and pasted a scene later on in the book. which makes no sense until you read it after you've read the book, as it's long forgotten before you get to that part.
Dan Brown usues his prologues to kill off a character which is essential to the story, but the story starts on chapter 1. The only information you gain is the death of a charater which you later find out is important.