The Tutor

by Daniel Hurst

  I can see the front door to her flat across the street. The rain is getting harder, and my hair is ruined. But I don’t care. I could be seconds away from having all of my dreams come true.

  49

  AMY

  I wish I hadn’t sent that text message to Petra. I wish I hadn’t said that I thought it was her who had sent me the photo and asked what she wanted. I wish I hadn’t done it because she had text me back, or at least I presume it was her.

  Now I know what she wants.

  And it’s worse than I feared.

  She wants to make me pay for what happened all those years ago after the fire at the school. She wants to get justice for the people whose lives were ruined that day. And she wants to ruin my family.

  She doesn’t want much, does she?

  I can’t deal with this on my own. I need my husband’s help. I still haven’t shown him the text message that I received but I’m going to do it now.

  I knock on the study door and walk in, expecting to see Nick sitting at his desk, working away on his latest I.T. problem. Instead, I find him lying on the floor doing sit-ups. He seems embarrassed when I catch him.

  ‘Oh hey,’ he says, quickly getting to his feet and clearing his throat. But I don’t have time to ask why he is suddenly so interested in his figure again. I just show him the message on my mobile phone.

  It takes a few seconds for the words to process in his brain, but I know the moment they do because his eyes go wide and he looks up at me with the same expression he has displayed before.

  It’s an expression of fear.

  ‘Petra sent this?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I asked if it was her and she said yes. Who else would it be?’

  ‘There must be a mistake,’ Nick says, shaking his head. ‘Why would she do this?’

  ‘Because she’s crazy.’

  ‘Is she? She’s just a tutor.’

  ‘I think it is obvious now that she is so much more than that,’ I say, taking back my phone and re-reading the message for what must be the thousandth time since I received it.

  ‘I don’t understand. How could she know?’ Nick asks, slumping into his desk chair.

  ‘I’ve no idea, but she obviously does. Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘Of course not. You?’

  I gave him a stare so cold that he knows better than to ask me that.

  ‘Okay, it doesn’t matter,’ he says quickly. ‘She knows. But what could she gain from this?’

  ‘That’s the thing. She hasn’t asked for anything. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  My husband hasn’t been much help so far. He is just stating questions that I have already asked myself dozens of times.

  ‘We have to meet with her in person and find out why she is doing this and how we can make it stop.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Nick replies, and I don’t either, but it’s the best one I can come up with right now.

  ‘Any other suggestions?’ I ask.

  His silence tells me there are none.

  ‘I’ll text her and tell her to come to the house during the day when the kids are at school. Then we can find out what all of this is about.’

  ‘Michael will be here,’ he replies.

  Shit. His suspension. He will be here.

  ‘I’ll speak to the school again. I’ll beg them to let him come back earlier for the sake of his exams. They owe me one after what one of their pupils did to Bella.’

  ‘There has to be another way,’ Nick says, but my mind is made up.

  I type out the message quickly and press send.

  It’s time for Petra to come back to our house.

  50

  PETRA

  This is going to be all over soon. I’ll get the money and be on my way, and I’ll never have to think about this town or any of the people in it ever again. But first I have to get through this meeting with Amy and Nick.

  It’s raining again, and it’s starting to feel like it hasn’t stopped over these past few weeks. That’s the last bit of motivation I need to make my way up this driveway and towards the front door of the house where the truth will finally come out. Soon I’ll be lying on a beach somewhere with the hot sun on my skin, and this dreary place with its gloomy weather will be a distant memory.

  It can’t happen quick enough.

  I knock on the door and wait for the homeowners to answer. I hope it will be Nick, but I expect it will be Amy. I haven’t seen the man of the house since he left my flat having spent an hour in my bed, but I don’t imagine it will be too awkward. At least it won’t be on my part. I’m not the one who is married after all.

  But I am relieved that Michael won’t be home. This meeting has been set for 10 am on a Wednesday, which means he should be at school right now, along with his little sister Bella. Amy would never have arranged this meeting for a time when her children were in the house, and I am grateful for that. Now I won’t have to see the boy whose heart I broke just a few days ago.

  Michael confessed his love for me at my flat during our last lesson, but he didn’t take it too well when I told him that I didn’t feel the same way. I felt bad for being so brutally honest with him, especially after he had just been the same way with me, but I couldn’t give him false hope. He was only ever supposed to be a way into the family for me, and I hate that he is caught up in this because he doesn’t deserve that. But I couldn’t give him what he wanted, or at least not all of it. I couldn’t give him my love.

  But I did give him a quick kiss.

  I know he wanted so much more but it was the best I could do. It will be one positive thing for him to look back on after this whole sorry mess is over.

  The sting of my rejection coupled with the surprise of the kiss meant he had left my flat before I even had a chance to wish him well for his exams. I will be long gone by the time he takes them, but I sincerely hope he does well. There’s no doubt it’s going to be a struggle for him and the fact I have broken his heart won’t have helped matters, but things will work out in the end.

  Or at least I told him they would.

  I can see movement through the frosted glass of the front door and recognise the silhouette of the person coming to open it. It is Amy, just as I predicted. I imagine that it was her idea to set up this meeting today and I bet that she will be doing most of the talking within it. Nick will probably be very quiet, one because of the subject matter being discussed and two because the woman he just cheated with will be sitting across the table from his wife. But he’s not my concern. I’m here to do the last part of my job. Then I get paid and I can leave. Then this fucked up family can sort out their issues on their time, not mine.

  The door opens, and Amy and I come face to face.

  Neither one of us says hi.

  The time for small talk is over.

  51

  AMY

  The three of us sit at the kitchen table. Nick sits with his back to the shelf full of my cooking books. Petra sits opposite him with her back to the kitchen counters that I didn’t bother to clean before this meeting. And I sit in between them with my back to the wall because it’s the perfect position to sum up how I feel in my life right now.

  Nobody has said a word yet, but I’m about to put us all out of our misery.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask the Swedish woman with the annoyingly calm expression on her face.

  Petra takes a moment to answer, and it annoys me that she is looking at Nick instead of me as she keeps us waiting. But then she finally turns to look at me and speaks her mind.

  ‘Two hundred thousand pounds.’

  I feel a mixed reaction to her answer. My first thought is that thank God she is giving us a way out of this and only wants money. But my second thought is how the hell are we going to pay her that ridiculous amount?

  I laugh, more from nervousness than anything else, before looking at my husband. But he’
s still keeping his eyes on the table rather than on this evil cow who has entered our home and asked us for a small fortune.

  ‘Two hundred grand? You think we have that kind of money?’ I say, shaking my head at the naïve woman in my kitchen. ‘And there was me thinking that you were clever.’

  ‘I am clever,’ Petra replies, and her confidence is unsettling. ‘I know you have the money otherwise I wouldn’t have asked for it.’

  I still feel assured in my original response to her that we don’t have it, but there is something about the way she speaks that is making me start to doubt things. I look back to Nick and notice that he is now staring at the tutor for the first time.

  ‘How do you know that?’ my husband asks, and I feel a wave of anxiety rushing through me. Why is he asking that? Why isn’t he saying the same thing as me? We don’t have that kind of money.

  Do we?

  ‘You’re not the only I.T. whizz in the world,’ Petra replies with a sly grin. ‘You really should be more careful which clients you take on. They give you access to their computers, but some of them have ways of getting access to yours too.’

  Now Nick looks worried and that isn’t helping my nerves.

  ‘You hacked into my computer?’ Nick asks, sitting forward in his seat and closing the gap between him and the young woman opposite him. It’s funny how I used to worry about anything ever happening between the two of them, but I have much more important things to worry about now.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Petra replies. ‘Somebody else did. And they know that you have secret bank accounts with just over two hundred thousand pounds inside them. They also know how you have accrued this money. You’ve invested in many things over the years. Tech companies in Silicon Valley. Cryptocurrency. And even good old Amazon. And you’ve made quite the profit. But I’m guessing your wife doesn’t know anything about that?’

  I hate the woman, but she is right. I had no idea that my husband had been investing in things, and I certainly had no idea that he had been sitting on so much profit.

  ‘Anyway, we know you have the money so just pay up and we will leave you and your sordid little secrets alone.’

  Petra takes out her mobile phone and holds it out towards us so that we can see what is on the screen.

  It’s a bank account.

  ‘You’ll transfer the money into this account,’ Petra says, her once pleasant accent now like nails down a chalkboard to my fuzzy brain.

  ‘Who is we?’ Nick asks, ignoring the bank details that are being flashed in front of his face.

  That’s a good question. Petra said “we.” She isn’t working alone.

  Who the hell is the other person?

  ‘That’s not important,’ Petra says, turning her phone screen back towards herself and scrolling onto another app. ‘What is important is where they are right now and what they are going to do if you don’t pay up.’

  Petra turns her phone around again and then we see it. It’s a photo of Michael and Bella. They are in their school uniform and standing together on the playground.

  ‘I’m not a bad person,’ Petra says as my husband and I continue to stare at the phone. ‘But the person who took this photo is, and she is watching your children right now. I can’t stop her doing anything to them if you refuse to pay up.’

  ‘You crazy bitch!’ I cry as I dive across the table towards the tutor.

  I get a fist of her blonde hair in my hand, and I’m just about to try and yank it out of her scalp when Nick pulls me off her.

  For a second, I see the fear in Petra’s eyes, and I have no doubt that I could take her in a fight right now. But I’m not the one in danger here. My kids are.

  ‘Control your wife Nick,’ Petra says as she touches the tender part of her hair that she was almost relieved of. ‘You can make all of this go away if you just put the money in the account right now.’

  Nick and I share a look, and we both know that we don’t need to discuss it.

  ‘I’ll go and get my laptop,’ Nick says sullenly, and he heads for the study, leaving Petra and I standing across the table from each other.

  I want to ask her more questions. I want to know everything that she knows. But I’m scared to learn the answers. She is clearly a lot smarter than us and on a level far beyond simple GCSE Maths.

  By the time my husband returns with his laptop, I am sitting down again. The next few minutes go by in a blur of fingers on keyboards and digits on screen until suddenly it is done.

  With the money in the account, Petra is ready to leave but not before she has assured us that our children are safe.

  Time only seems to return to its normal speed again when I hear the sound of the front door closing behind her.

  The tutor has gone.

  52

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  MICHAEL

  I stare at the envelope in my hands. Everybody else around me has already opened theirs, but I’m in no rush. I know that I have already failed. I feel like my exams were a disaster. I couldn’t concentrate on them. All I could think about was Petra.

  All I could think about was that she was gone, and I would never see her again. The results inside this envelope are meaningless to me now that I have lost the thing that mattered. Even a miracle of an A* isn’t going to bring Petra back. I knew she was gone when I saw the strangers going into her flat. She moved out, and she didn’t even say goodbye.

  What a bitch.

  ‘I got a B in English!’ Nev shouts beside me, and I look at him and his stupidly excited face.

  We’re friends again now, which I am glad about. The fight was silly, and the person it was over was definitely not worth it. I was sticking up for Petra, but I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I shouldn’t have risked losing one of my oldest friends over her, especially when it turned out she didn’t give a damn about me.

  ‘What did you get in Maths?’ Nev asks me with his face still buried in his results sheets. That’s when I look back down at the envelope in my hand and decide to just get it over and done with. If it was up to me, then I would just throw this letter in the bin and go and start a game of football in the park, but I can’t do that yet. Mum and Dad are desperate to know my results, and I have promised that I will call them straight away. I better find out what I’ll be saying to them.

  I take a deep breath and open the envelope.

  53

  AMY

  ‘To Michael!’ I say as I hold my glass of wine out in the centre of the table.

  ‘To Michael!’ Nick repeats from his seat beside me, and he clinks his bottle of beer against my beverage.

  ‘Well done bro,’ Bella offers begrudgingly, reaching out to make her glass of orange juice touch our drinks.

  ‘Thanks guys,’ my son says as he brings his glass of coke into the small circle to complete it.

  The waiter is quickly at our table as soon as we are finished toasting Michael’s exam results, and we quickly run through our order with him before he gives us a smile and leaves us alone again. I’ve ordered the salmon and Nick has gone for the steak. Bella has asked for a tofu salad because apparently she is vegan now, and the man of the hour has chosen the burger. We have been to this restaurant many times before and the food has always been excellent, so I know we are in for a great evening. And thank God too because these last few months have been horrendous.

  Petra might have left our house that day after taking nearly all of our money, but that didn’t mean that life had been able to return to normal right away. There had been much for Nick and I to discuss, or rather argue about, and we had certainly done that. I tried to figure out why he had kept so much money a secret from me in his private bank account, and he tried to figure out how somebody had been able to hack into his computer while he worked on it. And together we both tried to figure out who Petra had been working with.

  We had our answers to the first two problems but not the third. Nick had kept the money a secret as a safety net in case I one day changed my mind abo
ut forgiving him for his affair and kicked him out of the family home. It’s not a good excuse, but he said it was the truth and while I’m good at knowing when he is lying to me, I can also tell when he is being honest. It seems I hadn’t been the only one who had been left paranoid after his affair. He was worried about me leaving him and taking everything.

  As for the computer hack, a gap in a firewall had allowed a mystery hacker to access his laptop and see everything that Nick was doing on it. That meant they had seen him accessing the secret bank accounts, as well as find out that he had been googling tutors in the area. That is presumably how the plan was formed for Petra to come into our home and get close to us. An I.T. expert that Nick hired told him that the tutor website he had found Petra on had been purposefully set to appear at the top of his search results.

  But the question of who else she had been working with was still a mystery, along with how they knew that Nick and I had been involved in the school fire. The two of us have spent all summer trying to figure out how somebody could have known what we had done when we were sixteen, but we still have no clue.

  We know how the fire started. We know how quickly it got out of hand. We know that the school was destroyed along with the teacher who had been working late inside it. We know that we panicked and planted the evidence on a girl in our year so that she would go down for the crime instead of us. And we know that the girl was killed by a maniac inmate two years after that.

  What we don’t know is how the hell does somebody else know all of that?

  ‘So how does it feel to be free of school forever?’ Nick asks our son as he unfolds his napkin and lays it across his lap in anticipation of the delicious meal that will soon be served at this table.

  ‘I’m not going to lie. It feels pretty amazing,’ Michael replies and we all laugh, except Bella who I know is feeling a little jealous that her brother doesn’t have to get up early and put on a uniform every day anymore.