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

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.

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