The Role Model: A shocking psychological thriller with several twists

by Daniel Hurst

  I do as I’m told and lower myself down onto the bed, feeling the thudding of my heart in my chest but doing everything I can to not let him see how nervous I am. Jimmy happily takes a seat beside me, and I assume he isn’t going to waste much more time before he makes his move. Unlike the guys I’m used to at college, he probably knows what he is doing.

  Sure enough, Jimmy moves his head towards mine, his lips puckered, and his eyes closed, ready for what he hopes will be the first kiss of many in this exchange. But I quickly pull back and deny him, instead pushing myself further back onto the bed until I’m lying on my back with my head resting on my pillow.

  Any initial signs of annoyance on Jimmy’s behalf are quickly dispelled as he looks at me lying before him, my eyes inviting him to join me in this much more comfortable position.

  It doesn’t take him long to get horizontal too, and as he leans in again for another kiss, I know it’s not long now until this is all over.

  ‘Get on top of me,’ I say, just before his lips can reach mine, and he seems surprised by my command, so I quickly add to it. ‘Mum thinks this is my first time. But it isn’t.’

  My words are meant to make Jimmy think that I am much more game than he would have anticipated, and they seem to do the trick because he gives me a wide smile.

  ‘You two continue to surprise me,’ he says with a chuckle, running his eyes all down my body one more time before moving to get on top.

  I think about how the biggest surprise is yet to come, but say nothing until his body weight begins to press down on me, making me feel for a second like I am trapped and powerless though really I know that will change in just a second.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ I say as he looks down at my lips.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks, slowly bringing his eyes up to meet mine.

  ‘My mum is going to come through the bedroom door with a knife in ten seconds and stab you to death.’

  Jimmy frowns as he processes what I just told him, but I nod my head to let him know that I am serious.

  ‘I mean it. This is her plan. She wants me to distract you so she can kill you,’ I say, enjoying the confusion I am creating in the mind of my tormentor.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks, but the creak of the floorboard in the hallway outside the door lets him know that there is no time for conversation.

  ‘Here she comes,’ I say, raising my eyebrows as if to ask him what he is going to do about it.

  Pushing himself up off the bed, Jimmy turns to face the door and is obviously intent on surprising my mum when she comes in here. But that is exactly what I expected him to do, and as he has his back to me, I reach across to my bedside table and pull open the top drawer.

  As the door handle to my room is turned and Jimmy advances towards the space where Mum will appear in a second’s time, I take the large kitchen knife out from my drawer and grip the handle tightly before getting up off the bed and rushing towards him.

  The door opens, and I see Mum rushing in, the knife raised and her eyes wide, as well as Jimmy in front of me, who puts his arms up to protect himself as he tries to close the gap between them. But he has no protection against me approaching him from the rear, and it takes little effort on my part to stick the knife into the side of his neck and cause a large splatter of blood to erupt from within him.

  Jimmy’s hands instantly rush to cover the large puncture wound in his neck, but I jab the knife into his back once, twice, three times before he stumbles away from me and falls to the floor, spilling out even more blood onto my once pristine carpet as he goes.

  ‘Chloe!’ Mum calls to me, no doubt in shock as she stands in the doorway with her much smaller knife in hand, but I ignore her as I advance again on the stricken man and drive my weapon into his chest before putting my bodyweight onto his like he just did to me.

  Jimmy’s frightened eyes go wide with fear as I stare into them and watch the white colour quickly leaving, soon replaced by a dark, red hue that tells me that he doesn’t have long left on this planet.

  ‘Chloe, stop it!’ I hear Mum call to me again, and now she is trying to pull me off him, but I insist on staying in my position until I have witnessed the exact moment that Jimmy departs this life and enters whatever waits for him beyond.

  It doesn’t take long.

  The man in my bedroom is dead.

  I allow Mum to pull me off his body, although the knife stays in place, protruding out from his chest like a proud flag signifying that I have occupied him.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking? He could have killed you!’ Mum cries as she looks at the blood splattered down the front of my nightdress as well as the wild look that is surely emanating from my eyes right now.

  Her comment is almost laughable as I look down on Jimmy’s still body and see how easily I dispatched him in the end, but I say nothing, instead just enjoying the feeling of adrenaline that is surging through my shaking body.

  ‘Chloe!’ Mum cries again, and I notice she is checking to make sure I haven’t suffered any stab wounds in the melee, but of course I haven’t.

  Jimmy barely knew what hit him before he was dead.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say when I grow tired of her fussing over me and pull her in tightly for a hug, although it’s more to stop her from staring at all the blood on my nightie rather than because I need the comfort of her touch. ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘But what happened?’ Mum asks, breaking away from the hug and staring me down. ‘Where did that knife come from? And how did he know I was coming through the door.’

  I think about answering both of those questions honestly, which involve me saying that I put the knife in my bedside drawer earlier today in preparation for killing him myself, as well as about the fact that I warned Jimmy that she was on her way in here. But I imagine that won’t go down too well with her, so I instead decide to go with the false answers I had already prepared for this very moment.

  ‘I put the knife in my drawer as a back up in case anything went wrong,’ I say, glancing again at the edge of the deadly weapon sticking out of Jimmy’s chest. ‘And it’s a good job I did because he heard you creeping across the floorboards out there and went to the door to check. He would have got that knife off you if I hadn’t stabbed him myself.’

  I look down at the piddly knife in my mum’s hand and wonder if Jimmy really would have been able to stop her from sticking it into him, but I guess we’ll never know now.

  ‘The important thing is that he’s dead,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘It’s over. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.’

  I can see that Mum has heard what I have just said, but I have a feeling that she doesn’t agree with it somehow. Judging by the look on her face, she still seems to have plenty to worry about.

  If that is the case, then she wouldn’t be wrong.

  37

  HEATHER

  The order in which things must be done has become familiar, almost like packing for a holiday or cleaning a house.

  Move the body. Dig the hole. Bury the body. Clean up the evidence. Go to bed.

  Wake up and carry on as normal.

  I’ve done it before, and I’ve just done it again. But this time is different. After tonight, I’m done with breaking the law and burying my secrets, both literally and spiritually. This isn’t who I am. I get no pleasure from taking a life and getting away with it.

  The question is, does Chloe?

  It was clear from the second I opened her bedroom door to kill Jimmy that she had deviated from the plan. For a start, Jimmy was already waiting for me, almost as if he knew to expect me. Chloe blamed it on a couple of creaky floorboards in the hallway giving me away, and while I wasn’t so sure, I might have believed her if what happened next hadn’t occurred. As Jimmy and I stood face to face in the doorway, the knife in my hand and a look of determination on his, Chloe sprang into action behind him, revealing her own knife before plunging it into the victim, not once, not twice, but s
everal times, even when it was clear that he was already well past the point of survival.

  I saw every flash of that blade in the bedroom light as my daughter drove it in and out of him, but it wasn’t the brutal act of violence that caught me by surprise.

  It was the way Chloe looked while she was committing it.

  She looked like she was enjoying it.

  The way she moved, as if she was gaining energy from every thrust. The way her eyes lit up at the sight of the blood as it spurted out onto her carpet. The way she didn’t seem to want to stop and would most likely have kept going driving the knife into the body if I hadn’t distracted her by calling her name. She says she was simply enacting Plan B, the backup plan she had constructed and kept to herself just in case my plan didn’t work. But I felt uncomfortable about that being true when she said it to me at the time, and my feelings on that haven’t changed several hours on.

  I don’t think Chloe was merely acting out her Plan B.

  I think it was her Plan A.

  I wanted to express that opinion to her just after Jimmy had died, as we stood over his body in her bedroom and looked around at the mess that had been made. But of course, that wasn’t the time for conversation. We had to clean up, so that’s what we did.

  We worked in silence as we put Jimmy onto a plastic sheet before carrying him downstairs and putting him in the back of the car. Neither of us spoke as we drove out of town and onto the Lancashire moors before eventually finding a spot so isolated from civilisation that there was no chance of anybody else witnessing what we were up to. And then we took turns in digging with the spade, an act that I had planned to do by myself until Chloe had taken on the act of murder herself.

  We drove back once Jimmy was in the ground, but there was still no conversation. I could have pretended that was because it was late, or because we had just been through an ordeal, or even that there simply wasn’t anything further to be said on the matter. But none of those reasons were true.

  I chose not to speak because I was afraid of my daughter.

  And I think she chose not to speak because she knew it.

  The first words out of Chloe’s mouth came as we were walking back into our house in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘I’ll start cleaning,’ she had said as she made her way into the kitchen, where she was no doubt going to locate the various bottles and wipes that were kept underneath the sink.

  I replied with a simple, ‘okay,’ before telling her that I was going to go to bed. Chloe didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t offered my assistance with the blood splatter in her room, which would have at least told me that there was still a piece of my daughter’s personality in there somewhere. Instead, she simply said the two words that I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since I heard her deliver them in a cool and casual manner.

  ‘Goodnight, Mum.’

  That was it. That was all she said. The same two words she has said to me countless times over the years whenever I was putting her to bed as a child or whenever I passed her room on the way to my own at the end of the day. If this had just been any old day, then those words would have barely registered on my radar, and I would have simply replied in kind as if on auto-pilot. ‘Goodnight, love’ would have been my usual response. But this wasn’t any old day. This was the day when Chloe had just stabbed a man to death in her bedroom in full view of me. If that doesn’t warrant something a little different than ‘goodnight, Mum,’ I don’t know what would.

  It was the way she said it too, as if it really had been a good evening and she was looking forward to a relaxing night of sleep. It was certainly not said in the manner of somebody who had just committed a brutal act of violence only a couple of feet away from the bed where they were planning to get that sleep.

  I want to go into her room and talk to her now. I know she will still be up, scrubbing her carpet no doubt and learning exactly the same thing that I learnt ten years ago, which is that the bloodstains won’t come out, and the only way to truly get rid of them is to cut out the pieces of carpet that they have ruined. So why can’t I do it? Why can’t I get up off this bed and make the short journey into her bedroom?

  Why do I feel as if I am terrified of my own child?

  This is ridiculous. This is my house. Chloe is my daughter. I shouldn’t be tiptoeing around her.

  With that in mind, I pull back my duvet and put my feet onto the carpet, one that is thankfully blood-free, unlike the one I am about to step onto in a second’s time. Creeping out of my room and down the hallway, I approach Chloe’s bedroom door, which is closed, although that’s not unusual at this time of night. What is unusual is the fact that I can hear music coming from the other side of it. The volume is low, presumably because Chloe thinks I am trying to sleep, but I can still make out the words and the melody enough to recognise the song. Any hopes I had that it might have been a melancholy track selected to match her troubled mood are quickly dashed. This is an upbeat song, one of Chloe’s favourites, and certainly not the kind of track any sane person would choose to listen to just after they had killed somebody and buried the body.

  I reach out for the door handle, even though my brain is telling me to walk away and go back to the safety of my bedroom, before turning it and opening the door. As I do, I see Chloe on her knees on the carpet, a blood-stained cloth in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other. As expected, the look on her face lets me know that she was expecting the mess on the carpet to come out a lot better than it has done.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ Chloe says, getting up and going over to her phone where she quickly turns off the music. ‘I thought you were sleeping. Did the music wake you?’

  I stare at my daughter as if to try and understand what is really going on in that mind of hers. The fact she thinks I was sleeping is just one sign that she has no idea how tormented I am right now. But it’s also the fact that she has that same calm expression on her face as earlier, which tells me that she really doesn’t seem to have been affected by what happened here tonight at all.

  ‘Chloe, what’s going on?’ I ask, my voice shaking as I speak.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she replies as she drops down to the carpet again and has another go at scrubbing the blood.

  ‘I mean, why are you being like this?

  ‘Like what?’

  She keeps scrubbing.

  ‘Like you’re happy about what just happened.’

  ‘I am happy. He was blackmailing us.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid? Conflicted? Remorseful?’

  Chloe stops scrubbing for all of one second before shrugging and starting again.

  ‘No, not really.’

  I’ve asked my daughter a lot of questions since I came into her room a moment ago, but there’s only two that I really want to know the answer to. Based on how she has been with me so far, I see no other choice but to go ahead and ask them.

  ‘Chloe, stop scrubbing a moment,’ I say, but she ignores me and carries on. ‘Chloe, stop it!’ I repeat, firmer this time, but I also step forward and grab her arm before snatching the red cloth from her hand and throwing it away across the room.

  ‘Hey!’ she cries, but I ignore her and keep a firm grip on her arm as I make sure she looks at me so I can get a good idea of how she really responds to what I am about to say to her.

  ‘Did you warn Jimmy that I was going to come into the room so you could kill him yourself?’ I ask, feeling my stomach lurch as I dread the answer now that the question is out there.

  Chloe stares into my eyes, presumably to figure out if I am serious, but she must see that I am because she stops resisting now and sits still.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I warned him because I wanted to kill him myself.’

  It was the answer I was expecting but not the one I wanted to hear.

  ‘And why did you want to do that?’

  Chloe barely takes a second to answer that one.

  ‘Because I like killing people.’
/>   I let go of her arm and step away from where she sits on the floor, reaching out for the bed behind me as I lower myself down onto it and take the weight off my feet before I lose my balance and fall. I feel dizzy, and I feel sick, though it has nothing to do with the huge red smears all across the carpet in this room.

  ‘What do you mean you like killing people?’ I ask, my hands now gripping the duvet beneath me, almost as if to stop me sliding right off the bed and onto the bloody floor alongside my daughter.

  ‘I mean, I enjoy it. It makes me feel good.’

  Chloe looks so calm as she talks to me; it’s as if we are just discussing what she got up to at college or at Zara’s house. But this isn’t an innocent chat about her hobbies. This is me trying to find out whether or not my daughter is a complete psychopath.

  I know what my next question has to be, but it takes me a moment to summon up the courage to voice it.

  ‘Did you kill Rupert?’

  I expect a similar delay in getting an answer, but Chloe doesn’t skip a beat.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, nodding her head. ‘I killed him.’

  I don’t know how I haven’t been sick yet, but my throat is burning, and I’m starting to sweat, so it can’t be far off.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I wanted to know what it would be like to take someone’s life.’

  ‘Why the hell would you want to know that?’

  ‘Because you did it, so I wanted to do it too.’

  I stare at my daughter, trying to understand what she just said. But there’s only one possible explanation.

  She must know what really happened with Tim.

  ‘That’s right,’ Chloe says, reading my face and realising what I have just figured out for myself. ‘I saw what happened that night. I saw you stab Tim with the wine bottle.’

  38

  CHLOE

  It turns out that Mum isn’t the only one with a secret. I have plenty of my own too, the main one being that I wasn’t asleep in my bed like she thought I was when she killed Tim. I was at the top of the stairs, peering down through the bannister, watching with wide eyes as he clung to life while she stood over him with that broken bottle. She never looked up the stairs and saw me. She never knew I was there.