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

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