The Role Model: A shocking psychological thriller with several twists

by Daniel Hurst

  Until now.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Mum asks me with tears in her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you saw?’

  ‘You never asked me,’ I reply truthfully. ‘If you had asked, then I would have told you that I saw everything.’

  A tear runs down her cheek, but she doesn’t wipe it away because that would mean she has to let go of her tight grip on the duvet, and I’m guessing that is the only thing stopping her from falling off the bed onto the floor right now.

  ‘All this time, you knew what happened to Tim?’

  I nod my head.

  ‘I can’t believe you didn’t say anything.’

  ‘I didn’t want to upset you,’ I reply, which is the honest answer. ‘I knew you would worry about what seeing such a thing might do to me.’

  Mum doesn’t react well to that comment, almost laughing as she continues to fight back tears. I feel bad for seeing her like this, so I get up off the floor and go for the box of tissues on my dresser table, handing them to her before taking a seat on the bed beside her.

  I can tell that she feels uncomfortable to be this close to me right now, but she doesn’t move away. Is she scared of me? I certainly hope not. I think she just needs time to process all of this.

  ‘I don’t blame you for what happened with Tim,’ I say, watching as she wipes her eyes. ‘I know you were just trying to protect me.’

  I was only trying to make Mum feel better, but that last comment seems to have made her feel worse, and now she is really crying, sobbing hard and rendering the one tissue she has in her hand useless against the tide of so many tears.

  ‘Mum, it’s okay,’ I say, reaching out for her hand, but she pulls it away quickly, confirming my fears.

  She is scared of me.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she tells me in between sobs. ‘I don’t know what you’re capable of.’

  The look in her eyes as she stares at me is one of genuine confusion, but I can’t blame her. I have given her a lot to take in over these last few minutes. Not only have I shocked her with the admission that I saw her kill Tim ten years ago, but I also admitted to killing Rupert. I’m sure she has gathered from that what happened tonight with Jimmy wasn’t just me acting in a way to protect us. It was a way of me getting to experience my favourite thing and the thing I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was seven years old and saw that dead body lying downstairs in the front room.

  Murder.

  Seeing Mum kill Tim when I was so young made an impression on how I developed as I continued to grow. I’m well aware that very few people are ever supposed to see such an act of violence as that one, let alone a seven-year-old girl who had just woken up and crept out of her bedroom to see what all the noise was about downstairs. The sight of all that blood pouring from Tim’s neck is almost as vivid to me today as it was all those years ago, and there has not been a night since when I haven’t gone to bed and thought about it over and over again. But it wasn’t just the shock of what I saw that kept the image replaying in my mind.

  It was also the thrill of it.

  The more time that went by, the more I longed to experience it again. I wanted to see somebody else die. I wanted to see that blood again. But this time, I wanted to be the one who made it happen.

  It took ten years before I finally made a plan to act out my fantasy. Getting Rupert alone in that park was all done to ensure that I would get my chance to do what Mum had done to Tim all those years ago, although, in the interests of making it look like an accident, I couldn’t make it quite as bloody. Instead of a broken wine bottle through the neck, I came up with the idea of making it look like he had fallen and banged his head. In reality, I had beaten him to death with the bottle of vodka, which had proven surprisingly sturdy as I had bashed it against his skull over and over again until he had stopped fighting.

  I know Rupert didn’t deserve to die, and unlike Mum, I hadn’t acted in such a violent manner to protect somebody else, but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel good. Taking a life had felt just how I had imagined it would.

  Exhilarating. Breath-taking.

  And terrifying.

  As much as I would have loved to have been as composed as Mum was back when she killed Tim, who was able to hide the body and get on with her life as if nothing had happened, I wasn’t quite as capable as that in the moment. I panicked a little and started to worry that I was going to get caught and spend the rest of my young life in prison. That was why I decided to call Mum. Not only did I need her help, but I was already aware that she knew exactly what to do to make a problem like that one go away. If she could hide Tim’s body, then she could hide Rupert’s.

  And so it proved.

  Mum came to my rescue, selflessly and tirelessly working to ensure that Rupert’s death would not ruin my life just like Tim’s had not ruined hers. It also proved to me something that I already knew from that fateful night ten years ago, which was that Mum really would do anything to keep me out of danger.

  I have never known the full story of why she killed Tim, although as I got older, I began to form a good idea. At the time Tim was around, I was too young and innocent to read anything into his behaviour towards me, but when I got older, I was able to look at it with a more experienced eye, and that’s when I realised that he was probably more interested in me than he was in my mum. The fact that he approached us in the supermarket, pretty much making a beeline for the first single mother that he came across. The amount of time he would spend playing with me at the park while Mum stood idly to the side and watched. And the fact that he had crept into my bedroom on the night he died and stood by the side of my bed, not even moving when I woke up and saw him standing there with that strange grin plastered all over his face.

  It had been the sound of Mum’s footsteps coming up the stairs that had sent him scurrying out of my room, and I had listened to him whispering to her about how he thought he had heard a noise coming from my room so had gone in to investigate. I had pretended to be asleep when I had heard my bedroom door open again a moment later, which I often did when Mum peeped her head in to check on me, but I hadn’t been able to drift off again after that.

  That was how I came to be standing at the top of the stairs a few minutes later, spying on Tim and my mum talking before she stabbed him with that bottle and watched him die.

  I had crept back to bed as quietly as I could immediately after that, and I hadn’t dared to come out of my room until Mum had come in once the sun had risen the following day. I had been close to saying something to her as she told me to get dressed and get ready for school, but I had chickened out and just done as I was told. Then I had gone downstairs and seen the dark red stains on the carpet and on the sofa, stains that Mum explained away as being from a spilt bottle of wine. I had made sure to let her know that I believed her, even though all I was wondering at the time was where she had put Tim’s body. But I never found out. I slept over at my grandparent’s house that night, and by the time I came home from school the following day, we had a new carpet in the living room, and the sofa was covered with a throw.

  I still don’t know what happened to Tim. I presume he was buried in the woods or on the moors, just like Rupert and Jimmy were. But I’m not going to ask Mum. She is entitled to her secrets, just like I was entitled to mine. I kept my secret for ten years, until tonight when I have told her everything. Now she knows the truth.

  I saw her kill.

  And I wanted to emulate her.

  Mum hasn’t said anything for a few minutes, instead using the time to pull herself together and dry her eyes. I’m expecting that the questions will start again soon and that she will want to know the full extent of Tim’s death on my psyche. I expect to be asked about what really happened with Rupert. I expect to be questioned about what drove me to kill Jimmy in such a brutal fashion. And I also expect that she will want to know where I am going to go from here.

  Am I dangerous? Am I going to kill again? Shoul
d she be worried about me?

  But to my surprise, Mum asks me none of those things.

  She doesn’t say a word as she gets up off the bed and walks towards the doorway, stepping over the dirty red stains in the carpet that are obviously not going to come out no matter how hard I scrub at them. She doesn’t say anything as she walks out of the room and glances back at where I remain sitting on the bed. And she says nothing as she disappears down the hallway, the only noise that follows being the sound of her bedroom door closing a few seconds later.

  I get it. Mum needs time to process all of this. It is a lot to take in.

  She has just found out that her daughter saw her kill a man. I expect she is feeling bad about that. But she needn’t worry. I don’t think any less of her. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

  I think she is the best mum in the world.

  39

  HEATHER

  I must be the worst mum in the world.

  All this time, I thought I had shielded my daughter from what happened ten years ago, but now I know that is wrong. Chloe saw me kill Tim, which means she knows I hid his body and got away with it. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that she has been influenced by my actions, and it has driven her to replicate what she saw me do all those years ago.

  I’m her role model, and now she is just like me.

  She is a killer.

  But there seems to be one big difference between the two of us. While I am constantly living in a state of fear and guilt over my earlier actions, Chloe seems to possess none of that. Instead, she seems to actually thrive on all the chaos and uncertainty that death and dark secrets bring.

  It’s so much worse than I thought.

  Now I am afraid of my own child.

  ‘Look alive, Heather. It wasn’t that boring, was it?’

  I’m snapped out of my trance by the voice of my supervisor, who has just finished giving us a briefing on the latest in Rupert’s missing person case.

  ‘Sorry, long shift,’ I tell him, rolling my eyes and reaching for the cup of coffee that I had placed on the floor next to my chair when the briefing began ten minutes ago.

  ‘I’ll let you off,’ he replies with a smile.

  I watch as he walks out of the room along with several other uniformed officers who had taken time out of their busy shift to hear if there was any news on the case that is still dominating the headlines in this part of the world. But he is wrong. The subject was a fascinating one, at least to me anyway. I listened intently to every word that was said about the search for Rupert and heard that there are no new leads or discoveries that could get anybody any closer to learning the truth about what really happened to the young man.

  It’s now been three weeks since he was last seen, and his family still don’t have answers. That’s because the only two people in the world who have them are Chloe and I, and neither of us are going to breathe a word. But that doesn’t mean we have got away with it. Far from it, in fact.

  We’re just being punished in a different way.

  What was once a close relationship between us has become a strained one, and neither Chloe nor I have been the same since all our secrets were laid out on the table that night in her bedroom shortly after Jimmy had died. It would have been weird if things had been able to go on as normal, but then we’ve obviously never had a healthy dynamic before, so maybe I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had been able to find a way through this troubled time too. But there is no doubt about it now.

  My daughter and I are simply in each other’s lives because we have to be, not because we want to be.

  If I’m honest, I’m just counting down the days until she goes to university. She is currently taking her exams, and all I can hope is that she performs well in them and achieves the grades she is capable of getting. But my desire for my daughter to succeed is not born out of the traditional wish of a parent to see their child reach their potential. Rather it is because I need her to pass her exams, so she gets into the university of her choice and moves out of my house, packing her bags for Newcastle and leaving for at least the next three years.

  I know that I’m not going to settle until she is gone. How can I when I know that I am living under the same roof as a cold-blooded killer who saw me take another person’s life ten years ago and has now grown up with an interest in doing the same thing?

  There is little doubt about it.

  Chloe is a dangerous young woman.

  As the last of my colleagues filter out of the briefing room, I force my weary body up out of my chair and fall into line behind them, not wanting to stand out from the crowd anywhere, least of all in a place like this. But just like everything else in my life, work is getting harder.

  The police force is under growing pressure from the general public to produce results in the search for Rupert, something they have so far been unable to achieve. While each day that passes is a signal to the missing man’s family that he is most likely dead, there is still the need to produce a body as well as let the public know that they are not in any continued danger from the person or persons responsible for the young man no longer being around. That is why briefings like this one have just taken place. While the detectives and their teams work tirelessly in a different part of this police station to solve the mystery of what happened to Rupert, constables like myself are kept abreast of the situation and told to keep an eye out for any clues while on the beat around town. Homes have been searched. Parks and playgrounds have been scoured. And rewards have been offered for anybody who could come forward with information that might lead to Rupert being safely reunited with his family. But so far, nothing has come of it all.

  Rupert is still buried in the hole I put him in.

  And my daughter has got away with his murder.

  I hadn’t thought it possible to feel any worse about what happened to Rupert than I already did, but I’d been proven wrong when I found out that his death hadn’t been an accident at all. The fact that Chloe wilfully took his life changes everything. It certainly would have changed how I handled the following hours after it. I wouldn’t have been so eager to help her cover it up if I had known that she had caused it on purpose. Instead, I would have been more interested in finding out why she had done it and getting her some help before she took another innocent person’s life. I would have done the right thing and called the police.

  Or at least I like to think that I would have.

  But how do I know that for sure? How do I know that I still wouldn’t have tried to keep my daughter out of prison, even if I was fully aware that she was dangerous? I’m her mother, which means I can’t just turn off my feelings towards her. I will always love her, and I will always want what’s best for her, no matter what she has done.

  But what am I supposed to do?

  Ever since learning about who my daughter really is, I have been facing an impossible dilemma. Do I give her up, and in the process, implicate myself for helping her, just to give Rupert’s family the answers they deserve? Or do I continue to carry her secret with me day after day, living with the knowledge that the person I should feel closest to in the whole world is a dangerous and deadly individual who might kill again if she isn’t stopped?

  It’s no wonder my supervisor commented on how sleepy I looked just after the briefing had finished. I’ve been up late every night since Chloe told me who she really was, and I’ve been drinking even more than I used to. I’ve lost count of how many bottles of wine I have consumed over these last few weeks, and I haven’t even made an effort to hide it from my daughter when she is in the house. I simply sit at the kitchen table, lie on the sofa or cry on my bed with a full glass of wine in my hand as I think about how fucked up mine and my daughter’s life is.

  I don’t know what to do. I just want Chloe out of my house. Maybe if I don’t have to see her every day, then I don’t have to look at her face and wonder how she can take so much pleasure from killing another human being.

 
I just need her gone. Hopefully, it’s only a matter of time.

  But her leaving is not the only thing that time will tell.

  I will find out if she is planning to kill again one day too.

  40

  CHLOE

  I feel like I’m just getting started.

  It’s my first day at university, but more than that, it feels like the first day of the rest of my life. I’m eighteen now, and I’ve moved out of home, leaving Mum and my town behind for the freedom and unpredictability of new friends and a new place.

  As I stand here in the middle of campus and look around me, I see so much opportunity.

  Opportunity to meet new people. Opportunity to learn new things.

  And the opportunity to fulfil my fantasies of taking another life.

  These last few months at home with Mum have been trying for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the biggest one was that I knew she was watching me like a hawk to see if I was even thinking about committing another act of violence. The problem with me being honest with her on that night Jimmy died is that she now knows exactly the kind of person I am. She knows how I am not just used to seeing death but actively crave it these days, and obviously that has led to our relationship souring somewhat since then.

  Mum is no longer warm with me, instead, she treated me like a houseguest rather than a daughter as she counted down until the day when I would pack my things and move out to go to uni. There were no more friendly chats about our day or harmless gossiping about some juicy bit of celebrity news. Nor were there any offers or invites to go shopping on a Saturday afternoon anymore. She didn’t even buy me anything to celebrate me getting the results I needed in my exams. Instead, she has just treated me like somebody she must now tolerate in her life.

  That has obviously led to me feeling bad about how things have turned out, although I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do about it. It’s clear that what I witnessed when I saw her kill Tim in our house has had a profound impact on me and influenced the person I am today. I highly doubt that I would have a fascination with drawing blood and taking life from another human being if I hadn’t first seen her do it in our living room when I was seven. I get that she didn’t know I had seen her, but that doesn’t change the fact that she still did it. She killed a man, and then she buried him.