The Role Model: A shocking psychological thriller with several twists by Daniel Hurst (big ebook reader txt) 📗

shampoo or conditioner yet, happy to let the clean water do all the work for me for the time being because that way, I don’t have to move. Instead, I can just think about what I am going to have to do with Jimmy.

I really wish he had just asked for money. That’s because money can be replaced. All it would have taken would have been some extra shifts at the station and a few months of tightening my belt until I recouped the costs. But he asked for something else. Something much harder to give than cash.

He wants my body.

I guess that’s why I’m staying so long in the shower right now. Maybe I subconsciously believe that getting myself as clean as possible today will somehow make up for the unclean act I am going to put myself through tomorrow. But I know that water is only so good. There are limits to the things it can do, and cleansing myself of sins, whether it’s ones in the past, present or future, is not one of them.

No matter how long I stay in here tonight, I’m still going to feel dirty tomorrow.

That’s why I couldn’t be honest with Chloe and tell her what Jimmy has really asked for. It was so much easier to just say money and leave it at that. It’s the most obvious thing he could have demanded, and it was certainly what I was expecting him to request when I met him earlier. My daughter seemed to buy my latest lie, as she has so often done in our relationship, which doesn’t make me feel any better about myself as a mother or a human being, but at least she doesn’t know the truth.

She doesn’t know that I’m going to sleep with a man just to keep our secret safe.

There’s no doubt that she would have reacted in disgust if I had told her what was really going on between Jimmy and me. She would have begged me not to go through with it after her initial shock had worn off, of course. She would have told me that it was too much for me to do, and she would be right, and she would also have wondered how I could put myself through it. But if it’s bad enough to live with the memory of what I am going to do with Jimmy in some seedy hotel room tomorrow, at least I don’t have to live with the fact that my daughter will know it too. Just like what happened with Tim ten years ago, I am shielding her from the truth, hoping that by doing so, it will stop her thinking any less of me than I’m sure she already does.

She thinks I’m a callous person who can just bury a teenage boy in the woods and get on with things. I’d like to just leave it at that if I can.

I’m thinking of staying underneath this soothing water for at least another five minutes when I’m disturbed by the loud knock on the bathroom door.

‘Mum? Are you okay?’

It’s Chloe. She’s probably worried because the shower has been running so long, and she’s checking that I haven’t slipped over and broken my neck. But I haven’t. I’m still very much alive and very much drowning in my sea of worry.

‘I’m fine!’ I call back, although I do decide it’s time to get out now before a high water bill is added to the list of problems I have to deal with.

Turning off the shower, I reach for my towel and use it to quickly dry off, before stepping out onto the tiled floor and catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. With my wet hair and my makeup-free face, I almost find it laughable that Jimmy finds me appealing enough to want to sleep with me. Obviously, I look much more presentable when I have styled my hair and applied copious amounts of products to my face, but still, I’d hardly call myself a babe. It’s been a long time since any man wanted me, let alone one who was blackmailing me about a corpse, and I wonder if part of the reason I feel so uncomfortable about what I am going to have to do tomorrow is because I’m so out of practise with the opposite sex.

Never mind physical intimacy; I haven’t even been on a date or sent a few flirty text messages to a guy in over a year. I always told myself that it was because I was busy with work and keeping a teenage daughter out of trouble, but I know the truth. It’s because I’m so untrusting of every man I meet that it’s not worth the paranoia that always accompanies any feelings of lust or love. Chloe’s dad was a waste of space, and Tim was the boyfriend from hell who I ended up sending back there so I can be forgiven for not having the utmost faith in the male species. The problem is, I allowed those two men to represent every other man in this town, and before I knew it, my thirties have whizzed by, and here I am, almost forty and terrified of even making eye contact with any guy in case he pounces and makes my life a nightmare again.

Yet even when I’m not looking for a man to make me feel worse about myself, I seem to find one anyway. Enter Jimmy, the blackmailing witness to my crime against poor Rupert, who now wants to sleep with me as if he is doing me the favour, which annoyingly he is. If I lie down on a bed with him, then I get to keep myself and my daughter out of prison. I don’t know if that’s a fair trade to make, but it’s one I have no choice but to accept.

If only Jimmy could see me now, all pale, wet and scruffy from my shower. He might have second