Kindle Edition
markcsuttonauthor
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Mark C Sutton
Type: Fiction
Pages: 197
Copyright: dec 13, 2014
Price: $3.05 (eBook)
They say that Stephen Hartley is one of the United Kingdom's worst serial killers... perhaps... but he's definitely the most nerdy.
When the body of a woman is found buried in a peat-bog near Scarr Mountain, a police investigation quickly unearths many more grim discoveries in the surrounding area. Soon, their number one suspect is in custody... a geeky, squeamish, anxiety-ridden cry-baby with a passion for model trains, golf, bad sci-fi movies, nerdy pod-casts, soft rock ballads, Albanian underground techno, and hideous home-made pizza's.
Welcome to the world of Stephen Morris Hartley, AKA 'The Slayer of Scarr Mountain'.
Excerpt
“I was driving back through Langley, close to the railway station… I decided that I’d stop, have a look around on one of the platforms… platform three, to be precise… it was a saturday afternoon, and usually on a saturday, a cargo train, a rare type called a ‘Mark Three Tyrant’ , manufactured by Thornsbury and Booth Industries, would pass through the station, always on platform three. I don’t know why it only ran through Langley on a saturday afternoon… I’d discovered the train by accident on a couple of earlier visits to the station. I digress… apologies… I decided that it might cheer me up a little to go and watch the cargo train pass by. So I went into the station, and, sure enough, at half past four, the ‘Tyrant’ thundered past platform three. It made me smile, but much to my dismay, the foul mood that I was in persisted.
I left the railway station and walked back across to my car, which I’d left on Baybrook Lane car park. You probably know it, Edwina… it’s free parking there at weekends. It had started to rain, heavily, and there was a biting easterly wind, despite it being the middle of summer, which only made everything seem even more dank and miserable. I got to my car, and I was just about to get in it when I noticed a woman walking towards me, holding an umbrella above her head to protect herself from the rain, which was, by that point, absolutely hammering it down. She was quite pretty, in an unconventional way, with long dark hair and olive coloured skin. I could tell straight away that she wasn’t from this country, and I thought, at first, that she might have been Greek. There was something about her that I found quite mesmerising… I tried not to stare at her, but I couldn’t help it. The woman walked past me, noticed that I was staring, and gave me a filthy, dirty look, like I was a ruddy… smelly lump of doggy-doings on the pavement. At the same time, the wind was driving the heavy rain sidewards into my face, really irritating me, making me lose my temper… something just exploded inside me. I walked up behind the woman, tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around, I punched her one in the chops, as hard as I jolly well could.
The woman went down to the floor like a ton of bricks. I looked around the car park, to check that there was nobody else around; there wasn’t, it was empty. Well, what I mean is, there were plenty of cars parked there - after all, it was free parking at the weekend - but there weren’t any people about. If there had been, then who knows what might have happened. I knelt down and grabbed the woman by her feet, and then I dragged her across the soaking wet floor until she was lying next to my car. I opened up the back door, hoisted the lady up by putting my arms under her arm-pits, and then I threw the woman onto the back seat of the car. I went back across to where the woman had dropped her brolly. I picked the umbrella up from off the floor, and then I chucked it, as far as I could, across the car park. It went over a fence, probably into somebody’s back garden… not long after, when I was watching news reports about the missing woman, I was always surprised that they never found that brolly… I wonder what happened to it…? Anyway, I’m waffling on now… I got into my car, and then I headed back to ‘The Elms’, not quite sure what I was actually doing any more, but still feeling consumed with rage against the whole wide ruddy world.
I pulled up outside ‘The Elms’, and I got the woman from out of the car and into the house. She was still out like a light from where I’d thumped her one. By this time, I knew that I was going to kill her… it was something that I just felt compelled to do, and I realised that it was the only way that I was going to make myself feel better… not so angry… don’t ask me why, Edwina, because I don’t know. I carried the woman down to the cellar, and placed her on the floor. At first, I was just going to leave her right there, go back upstairs, read a few comics, have some supper, and then come back down and kill her. But then I thought that she might cause trouble when she woke up… she needed restraining. So I pulled one of the wooden chairs, that I kept in the cellar, out from under the large table in the middle of the room, dug out some old rope that my daddy used to use for tree-felling when he was maintaining the garden, and bound the Greek-looking woman to it. Then, just as I had originally planned, I went upstairs for a bit, to have a read and a bite to eat. I had scrambled egg on toast, if my memory serves me correctly. With black pepper sprinked on top. No salt.
I returned back down to the cellar at about a quarter to eight that evening. To my surprise, the woman was still unconscious. I began to wonder if I’d done her more damage than I’d originally thought, you know, what with punching her like I did. I went over to her, and gently tapped at the woman’s face, to see if that would wake her up. It did. She started to scream, so, in a panic, I had to go back upstairs, grab one of my scarves - the purple, hand-knitted one, with the pictures of ducks on it - from off the coat-hanger in the hallway, and gag the woman with it in order to make her shut up. It was quite ironic really; I was trying to placate her, calm her down, because let’s face it, it’s not nice to have to gag somebody… it’s actually quite a beastly thing to have to do… whilst at the same time worrying about how, exactly, I was going to bump the woman off. Because I genuinely didn’t know quite how I was going to murder her, I hadn’t given it much thought up until that point in time. I didn’t fancy strangling her, because she’d got quite a hairy mole on her neck, and I would have had to touch it, so that ruled that particular idea out. Knifing her wasn’t a very welcoming prospect either, because I’m not good around blood, it can make me faint, or vomit… its effect on me is very unpredictable, but it’s never good, Edwina… it’s never good at all. I pondered my dilemma, but managed to calm the woman down enough so that I could take the makeshift gag from around her mouth without her trying to scream the place down again. I pretended to be nice, which I can be… made the lady a cup of tea, untied her from the chair, and then promised, falsely, that I wasn’t going to hurt her. I’m a terrible cad, aren’t I, Edwina…? Very Machiavellian, I know. Not that I’m proud of that, you understand?
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