'DEATH BY ASSOCIATION'
'Death By Association'
...is my first novel. It's taken a while.
Here's the prologue (and it's work in progress).
Prologue
Susan Hammond wiped the beginning of tears from her eyes and tried in vain to calm down. She could not remember ever feeling more scared.
She had begun to curse herself for picking such an isolated spot for the meeting almost as soon as she had reached the corridor. That had been a long ten minutes ago. The ugly passageway seemed endless, stretching on into the far distance, and she knew now that what she needed, what she ought to have sought, was the safety of a crowd, the reassuring proximity of the uninvolved, of people who wished her no harm.
The rendezvous Susan had chosen led to the hotel's boiler rooms, a utilitarian area, usually hidden from paying guests, with a mass of enigmatically numbered and colour-coded insulated pipe work snaking along its walls and up across the ceiling, power for machines she could hear but not see. The rhythmical clanking of elderly machinery helped to take her mind off terror that she was failing to suppress. What was she going to do if he didn't show up? Well, there was no plan B – he just had to. So much rested on the cryptic note she had sent him being enough to trigger his interest, but next time she arranged a clandestine rendezvous with anyone, it would be a bloody five star restaurant, with the other party footing the bill. No, there would not be a next time – after all that had happened to her, she was going to seek out a quiet life.
She was beginning to feel the cold as much as fear. Her thin clothes afforded her no warmth and Susan almost wished that she had arranged to meet him in the boiler room itself. It had been a crazy summer, the weather really all over the place - stupidly hot then unsettled and cold with day after day of rain. It looked like the decade was going to end as a bit of a washout and perhaps that was as it ought to be. But the last few days had been a wonderful late-autumn mix of blue skies untroubled by clouds and as her lovely mum would say 'just warm enough'. Across the country apparently, just not here.
In the gloom she struggled to see the small face of her watch, the simple dedication on its underside testament to her mum’s pride in her graduation a year before and what seemed a lifetime ago. What a different life she had been living then. Susan would have given almost anything to go back to it.
He was more than a quarter of an hour late, long enough to freeze in this dump. Why had she bothered waiting so long? She would give him a couple more minutes and then give up - the thought of going back to her room and running herself a deep, bubbly bath seemed more and more appealing. She deserved it after this failed meeting and all of the anxiety that had preceded it.
"You have something to tell me?" He had appeared suddenly about a hundred yards away. Pools of shadow from the irregularly spaced overhead lighting in the long corridor made it difficult to see him, but now he strode forward, obviously anxious to make up for arriving so late.
"What possible information could you have that would interest me, or anyone else, Susan?"
She had deliberately left the note unsigned, another indication of the cautiousness that had become second nature to her in recent weeks. So how could he possibly know her name? It took no time at all for her to realise that he couldn't know it. Now the fear that had been her companion for too many months rose up, consuming her, almost paralysing her. Some reserve, a vein of resilience lent her the strength to turn away from the man moving purposefully down the corridor towards her, then ran, as hard as she could.
The door at the far end was chained shut. Susan tore at the chains looped through the stout metal handles and padlocked in place. The door itself was wood, reinforced with metal panels. It offered no escape. Her instinct for self-preservation took over. She crouched down, facing her opponent and lashed out with a vicious kick taught to her by Pete, her almost entirely useless ex-boyfriend.
Susan’s attack was expertly countered, blocked by a movement that had seemed no more aggressive than a shrug but which sent her sprawling. Now she was truly on the defensive as she saw a knife in her assailant's hand. She tried to edge back towards the wall, but there was nowhere to retreat to. A deft movement and the knife suddenly disappeared from the figure's left hand, only to reappear in the right. The figure danced in, a series of graceful movements accentuating the deadly shuttling movements of the thin blade.
It was over in seconds. Susan made a feint to the left, anticipated by the knifeman who moved in closer, in a macabre parody of a lovers hug. She felt a sharp burning pain in her side, but then concentration became too difficult and her vision blurred. Susan Hammond died very quickly, perhaps too quickly to appreciate what was happening, certainly without any of the outrage with which she had always thought she would greet her own death.
