Sometimes You Just Kill The Wrong People and Other Stories

SOMETIMES YOU JUST KILL THE WRONG PEOPLE

AND OTHER STORIES

GILES EKINS

CONTENTS

Authors Note

Sometimes You Just Kill The Wrong People

A Dealer In Fine Art

Aunt Alice

That Summer, 1941

From Darkness And Horror Comes Light

Incident At Gretna Green

It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time

Footsteps

Jack The Ripper, Mystery Solved!

Danny Blackwood, Champion Of The World

Dear Mrs. Burton

The Chinese Hat Box

I See Dead People

Cabin C69

Angel

What I Did On My Summer Holidays

Not Much Of A Funeral

Death Pale Were They All

If Only It Hadn’t Been For The Fog

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Giles Ekins

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Fading Street Services

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

For Patricia, who told me for many years to get my short stories published as a book.

So, here is the first volume.

XXX

AUTHORS NOTE

Some of these stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies or in larger works but adapted here for the short story format. A few were written many years ago, and it shows.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST KILL THE WRONG PEOPLE

Sometimes you just kill the wrong people.

There are errors, mistakes, major errors, bad mistakes, and fatal errors and when Jason Jordan Smith murdered Angelina Lucia La Malfa he made a mistake of catastrophic proportions.

Now there is no denying that Jason Jordan Smith was an extreme psychopath compelled by the darkest of urges of torture and murder. He was a sadist, a twisted and tormented mass murderer who tortured his victims before slowly strangling them and by dint of good fortune he remained undetected for more than a dozen years as he toured the countryside with his mobile torture chamber but even so, he really should have been more careful about the choice of his last victim.

Jason was a loner who never knew his father. There was no father named on his birth certificate, and his mother, a consultant paediatrician at a local hospital, refused to answer any questions about his father or who had fathered him. He hated his mother for that. In fact, he hated his mother for just about everything. He also hated the remainder of the human race. At school Jason was an above average pupil, not outstanding but was good enough to pass his GCSEs in nine subjects, achieving his best marks in maths and chemistry. He was quiet in class, somewhat of a loner, and the other kids, especially the girls, thought him a bit creepy. Whilst other adolescent boys might fantasise about sex with a pin-up girl or the prettiest girl in class, Jason’s fantasies were far darker, fierier, and filled with flames and agony and screams.

Like most psychopaths, Jason Jordan Smith started early in life, when he was twelve years old, Lucy, the family cat produced a kindle of unwanted kittens However, instead of taking the kittens to a vet to be humanely put down as his mother instructed, he took the tiny beasts out into the woods behind his house and tortured them, holding them by the tail, head first over a lighted candle, revelling as the kittens squealed in agony as he roasted their heads, imitating the torture that Apache Indians and other Indian tribes inflicted on their captives, suspending them head first over a slow fire so that their blackened roasting skulls finally cracked and split after hours of agony.

The last of the kittens he impaled on a stick and then left it to die in agony. The other bodies he tossed deep into the woodland where the foxes and crows would soon find them and so destroy the evidence. The feeling of sublime ecstasy, of exhilaration that Jason felt as he inflicted the torments was so overwhelmingly powerful, he knew, from that point in time, the road that he would be travelling. He was destined to be a sadist, a torture-inflicting murderer, he knew this with such clarity it was a blinding light of revelation. Some people feel a calling to the church, Jason felt a calling to torture and murder.

Following the torture of the kittens, his next formative atrocity, apart from pulling the wings of flies and crisping butterflies over candles, saw Jason capturing the toy poodle belonging to a neighbour, taping its jaws together to stop it barking. He then took the struggling dog deep into the woods where he spitted the beast and roasted it alive over a fire, ejaculating in ecstasy as the tortured beast screamed out its torment in muffled squeals and agonised yelps. He was fourteen years old.

At other times he bought white mice, rats, guinea pigs, or hamsters from local pet shops and also tortured them to death by fire, always by fire. He loved fire, worshipped the flames, loved the pain of fire, loved the pain it inflicted, and all his tortures involved the agony of fire. Often, he would simply burn himself. Simply for the agony and the ecstasy of fire.

He was fascinated with torture by fire. His favourite readings were accounts of Comanche and Apache tortures, his favourite picture an engraving of the death of Col. William Crawford, tortured to death by Shawnee Indians during the Indian wars following American Independence. Crawford was staked to the ground and a fire laid across his stomach, his agonies so clearly etched you could almost hear his screams whilst another captive looks on in horror, aghast at the fate which awaited him also. Crawford was then burned alive at the stake in a slow fire. Every time Jason looked at this picture, in an illustrated book about the Indian wars, he felt a frisson of excitement surge through his groin. One day, he avowed to himself, he would do the same.

When he was eighteen, his hated mother Alison died in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. There was a house fire in which she died from smoke inhalation and although the police and fire brigade suspected arson nothing could be proven, no trace of accelerants were found, no signs of petrol or paraffin or any other inflammables and consequently the cause of the fire was given as an overloaded extension lead with fourteen appliances attached to it, but DI Stanley Morgan was never satisfied with this explanation but could find nothing to indicate Jason’s involvement in the fire, but his copper’s instinct told him otherwise. He was convinced that Jason Jordan Smith had somehow caused the fire which killed his mother.

‘It just does not smell right, I’ve got this prickling at the back of my neck that tells me that somehow, that boy had something to do with that fire, don’t ask me how. Or why. I just know it.’

But the only suspicious circumstance that the autopsy revealed was that Alison Smith had ingested enough sleeping tablets to render her unconscious for hours and so would not have been aware of the fire which killed her. Sleeping tablets which she had purloined from the hospital dispensary.

After her funeral, Jason duly claimed on his mother’s life insurances. She had two policies, one of which only recently taken out, then there were the house and contents insurances and although the insurers shared the same disquiet about the cause of the fire, they had no option but to settle and in addition Jason discovered that his unknown, unnamed father had been paying a substantial maintenance allowance for Jason, most of which his mother had put aside for his university fees and with other extensive savings she had made from her job as a paediatric consultant, Jason Jordan Smith suddenly found himself to be a very wealthy young man.

He soon came to realise that he now had the means to fulfil all his darkest fantasies, the means to buy a secluded house with deep cellars far away from prying eyes, far enough away so that screams could not be heard, and not wishing to draw too much attention to himself, he bought a second-hand Ford Transit van and fitted it out as a mobile torture chamber, soundproofing the walls and fitting shackles and handcuffs to suspend his victims from the van roof. However, he was careful to only ever take his torture-mobile out at night and only on those nights when he was actively hunting for his prey. The rest of the time he drove a nondescript six-year-old Volkswagen Passat.

He enrolled at university in Sheffield, the city where he lived, to study to be a maths teacher, so that he could disappear behind a cloak of respectability, but he soon dropped out as other, more urgent issues began to press down upon him – the need to kill. The burning need to kill and torture.

Apart from his first victims, Jason Jordan Smith never took victims from his hometown, he was far too cautious for that. He picked up what was possibly his second victim (if indeed he did start the fire that killed his mother) from outside a gay club in Sheffield. Not that Jordan was gay, there again he was not heterosexual either, if anything at all he was asexual with absolutely no interest in sex. He got his thrills in other ways and his female victims were never raped or sexually assaulted in any way. And neither were the males (except in cases where their genitals were burned off).

It was raining heavily as Anthony Swallowfield, a nineteen-year-old Philosophy student left the Pink Rabbit club. It was after midnight, the buses had stopped running, and he had no money left to pay for a taxi, having spent far more than he should have at the club—the drinks were so expensive and a snort or two of cocaine he bought in the toilets from a dealer also drained his money and although his allowance from his father was generous, he could not afford to squander his money like this. He was not actually sure if he was gay. He was still exploring his sexuality and although he had received two offers from older men to spend the night with them, he had declined, not quite ready to take that step although now soaking wet in the rain he wished that he had taken up at least one offer. It was going to be a long, cold, and wet walk back to his digs.

A blue Volkswagen Passat drew up alongside him. ‘Hi mate, you look a bit wet, you want a lift somewhere?’ Jason Jordan Smith called to him as he wound down the window, giving Anthony a disarming smile. The coke and booze had deadened Anthony’s sense of caution and he accepted with alacrity. ‘Yeah, thanks, I’m a bit wet though, on your seats I mean.’

‘No worries.’

‘Great!’ Anthony got into the car. After some mundane chat about the weather and university life and some detail about Anthony and his life, Jason asked him if he wanted to go back to his house and ‘dry out.’ Anthony accepted and lay back in his seat as the booze and coke buzzed around his head.

Jason ushered Anthony into his house—the first guest he ever had—gave him a towel to dry off and made him a cup of coffee, after which Anthony fell asleep, drugged by Alison Smith’s purloined sleeping tablets. He awoke to find himself spreadeagled on the floor of the cellar. He was naked and shackled by the wrist and ankles. A wood fire blazed nearby, casting lurid shadows on the whitewashed walls as Jason walked around him, savouring the moment when his wildest fantasy would come to fulfilment.

‘Hey, man,’ Anthony shouted, suddenly very afraid, ‘I don’t do bondage, not into that BDSM shit. No way. Let me up, let me go. Please. Please.’

With responding or saying a word, Jason picked up a glowing orange red ember with a pair of barbecue tongs and carefully laid it on Anthony’s stomach. The screams echoed and echoed and echoed around the cellar. It was a long time before he finally expired. Jason’s exhilaration was intense, during the torture session he had ejaculated, and he was on the highest of highs, far higher than any of Anthony’s cocaine induced highs.

Anthony Swallowfield’s body was never recovered. In the dark of the following night, Jason loaded it into back of the Transit and buried it in an isolated wooded copse somewhere several miles away on the moors of the Peak District. It is