Back to front - strange and alien progress

Two characters - Luke and Baz - from what I thought was a completed trilogy, insisted their story had not yet been fully told. Told me things that happened in a tale written three years ago had something to do with them. Connections enough to hang another novel on.
They gave me a title - Drink with a dead man - to which I assigned an ISBN in early June. Sent me, care of Baz, a cryptic email, indicating the existence of new characters A and D. Allowed me to read a novel which suggested a way of incorporating A. Since then I've got to know A, a bit. D, despite my holding him up to several mirrors, is still distorted.

I've half-designed a cover and bought a dedicated notebook (not done that before) and have a rag bag into which I  throw patchwork ideas as and when they arrive (even though I know some will never be put to use). I wake each morning, mentally select and tack together, a nine-patch square. But when I rise, ready to make permanent, they fade or clash or fail to fit, too disparate in weight, too contrasting in behaviour, too out of character and hence too unbelievable. I unpick and put them back.

The other thing - the most alien of all - is that no-one's talking. Usually, I listen in to conversations, hearing them loud and clear, Clear enough to jot them down verbatim. But this time there's a lot of muttering, eyes sliding sideways, alert for eavesdroppers. I need to change my disguise. Improve my stalking tactics. Bug their phones.

But the good thing is, I've been here before. Have learnt that eventually all will come good.
And I've learnt to savour even the frustration of this beginning stage.

Striations, suffocation and dried flowers

Suffocation the cause of death. The official cause. Ask me, there’d been damage done before that. Subtle, like. Little at a time. Sly, like she ever was.

Not that I’m saying she deserved it. There’s a difference between administering physical  pain to someone too feeble to resist and the sort of mental torture she used to dish out on a regular basis ...

Well, perhaps the difference isn’t that great. Not when you don’t have the ... I was going to say wits, but it was experience he lacked. Experience and a sense of self-preservation. Though you had to say he preserved himself well enough in the end. After all, she housed and fed him, however unwillingly, and he – coming up to thirty-nine now – never had to worry whether there’d be food enough on the table. Never had to strive to better himself beyond the meniality of a mechanic.

But, from the striations on her back, the mottled blackberry-stain bruises on her legs (they fade so slowly in old age) and the marks across her chest, resembling, at a glance, a scattering  of sun-faded, long-dried flowers (I couldn’t allow my mind to think about what had been used to make them) I’d say he used his work experience – and the tools of his job – to extract his revenge.

And got away with it.

[written in response to House of Writers word prompt 104]