The Role Model: A shocking psychological thriller with several twists by Daniel Hurst (read aloud TXT) 📕

‘Stay back!’ I tell him, prodding the piece of broken bottle in his direction to keep him at bay.

Surely he will just leave now. I clearly have the upper hand. But I’m wrong.

‘You stupid bitch,’ he says with a snarl as he advances straight for me.

‘No!’ I cry, closing my eyes and thrusting the bottle towards him as my last line of defence.

I feel the force of it making impact with him, and I wait for him to grab hold of me and wrestle me to the floor. But he doesn’t do that. Instead, it all goes quiet.

It’s only when I open my eyes that I see why.

The broken edge of the bottle is wedged in his throat.

Tim’s eyes flicker as he tries to stem the flow of bleeding from the puncture wound in his neck, but there’s simply too much blood leaving his body to keep him on his feet now. Stumbling down onto the carpet, I stand over him as he gasps and chokes, fighting for air while bleeding out at my feet.

He shoots out a bloody hand towards me, and I step away instinctively, more out of fear than of a desire to not help him, so he grabs for the sofa beside him instead, trying to pull himself up onto it.

I watch as his red hand leaves a huge smear print on the sofa cushion before he loses his grip on it and falls face down onto the floor.

That’s when he stops moving completely.

I must have stood there for two minutes before I snapped out of my trance and realised I needed to do something about the body in my front room. As if on auto-pilot, I had taken out my mobile phone and prepared to call 999, ready to report the gruesome incident and explain myself to the paramedics and police officers who would inevitably be descending on this address once the call had been made. But it was just before I pressed the third number nine when I paused and tried to see this scene not from my point of view but from an investigating officer’s.

While I’m still only going through the training that is required of me to become a police officer, I have learnt enough already in that time to know how the first people at this scene will view this incident. While I can tell them what I found on the victim’s phone and explain that I took such dramatic steps to protect my daughter upstairs, there is no evidence that Tim forced me to act in such a brutal fashion. With no signs of a struggle and no hints of bruising or blood on my own skin, will the police officers believe me when I say I had no choice but to bludgeon and stab him with the wine bottle?

Obviously, I know it wasn’t as simple as that, and I just behaved instinctively when I saw I had a chance to disarm him, acting out of fear that it may have been the only chance I got. But will an unbiased third party see it that way? I doubt they would class this as murder based on what I told them and the type of man the photos could prove Tim to be, but what about manslaughter? What if they think I acted with unnecessary force and violence and decide that I should be punished for killing this man, no matter how afraid I might have been at the time?

At best, my aspirations of a career in the police force will be cut short, and all my hard work to prepare myself for that line of work will have been in vain. But at worst, I may be charged with manslaughter, and that would mean prison time.

Where would that leave Chloe?

I keep a firm grip on the mobile phone as I debate the alternative. If I don’t call the police, then I will have to cover this up. Judging by the graphic scene in front of me, that won’t be an easy thing to do. The carpet is blood-stained, as is the sofa, and there’s also the small matter of the corpse lying spread-eagled alongside the coffee table. There would be an overwhelming amount of work required to not only clean up here but get rid of the body and hide it somewhere where nobody would ever find it. That’s why I decide that it’s simply too much for me to handle.

I press the third nine on my phone’s screen and wait for the operator to pick up.

‘Hello, emergency service operator. Which service do you require? Fire, police or ambulance?’

The sound of the voice at the other end of the line gives me further pause for thought, and I’m aware that the next words I say could change mine and my daughter’s life forever.

‘Hello?’ the operator repeats.

I say nothing.

‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

I have to say something otherwise they are going to dispatch somebody to this address regardless.

‘I’m so sorry. My daughter got my phone and dialled by mistake. I apologise. I’m sorry to bother you.’

I finish speaking and then hang up quickly.

I guess I’ve decided what to do now.

I’m going to deal with this myself.

20

HEATHER

PRESENT DAY

It’s been ten years since I buried Tim’s body, and it’s now been one week since I buried Rupert’s.

I’ve been forced to tell many lies to my daughter in relation to both of those terrible events in my past, but the main one has to be this:

“Time makes it easier.”

Based on my experience, I have to admit that it certainly does not.

A decade is a long time to go with a dark secret rattling around in your head, but that is what I have carried around with me ever since that traumatic night in my own home. After deciding that I wasn’t going to risk calling the police in case any charges were brought against me, I had got to work on cleaning up the mess