The Tutor

by Daniel Hurst

  ‘It won’t be long until you get your exam results and finish too,’ I say to my daughter, even though she is still four years away from experiencing that momentous day herself.

  ‘I’ll get better results than him,’ Bella says, jabbing her brother with her fork and Michael winces in pain before snatching it out of her hand and putting it across the table where she can’t reach it.

  ‘Be nice to your brother,’ I say, shaking my head at their antics in such a posh establishment. ‘He worked hard to get his grades, and we’re very proud of him.’

  ‘He only got C’s,’ Bella says in a tone meant to make Michael feel stupid. But I know he doesn’t care because he did much better in his exams than he expected to do and it was certainly better than Nick and I could have hoped for.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I got,’ Michael says, picking up his drink with a smug grin on his face. ‘All that matters is that I don’t have to do homework anymore and you do.’

  I can’t help but laugh at that as I take a sip of my wine, and Nick seems just as content right now with his beer. But Bella is still annoyed.

  ‘It’s not just him that worked hard, is it? He wouldn’t have passed without his tutors. They did all the hard work, not him.’

  I smile because that obviously isn’t true. Michael was the only one who could answer the questions on those exam papers so he deserves his fair share of credit, and I’m just about to say that when Bella continues.

  ‘I won’t need tutors when I do my GCSE’s. I won’t need Mum and Dad to pay for me. I won’t need Petra and Sue.’

  I see the waiter coming towards us from across the room, but that’s about all I see before the glass of wine falls out of my hand and splatters all across the table.

  Nick’s white shirt is suddenly covered in the red liquid before he can jump out of the way in time and everybody in the restaurant has stopped to turn and look at our table, but I don’t care. I dropped my wine, and it was an accident, but I’m not interested in the waiter who is now trying to get past me to clear up the mess. All I care about is what my daughter just said because now it has suddenly clicked.

  The other person. The one who the Swedish woman was working with. That website was designed to be seen by Nick, and it only featured two profiles.

  I turn to Nick because I have to tell him right now. I have to tell him that we didn’t get screwed by one tutor.

  We got screwed by two.

  54

  SUE

  School is very much like prison.

  Towering walls. Drab uniforms. Employees to enforce the rules. And rubbish food. Yep, school really is like prison. I should know because I’ve been in both. But the places I have been in weren’t nearly as nice as the grounds where I photographed Michael and Bella only a few months ago. My school was a dump, and the prisons I experienced during my time as an inmate were even worse. But their school is actually quite nice. Of course, it didn’t always look that way.

  It didn’t look that great on the day it got burned to the ground.

  That was the fault of their parents, Nick and Amy. They were the ones to blame for what happened at the school on the night it took a teacher’s life, and they are the ones to blame for what happened to the innocent girl who ended up in prison instead of them. I know this because I was the only one in prison who listened to the woman who killed that innocent girl.

  I was an inmate alongside that woman at the time she killed that poor eighteen-year-old, and I was her only friend in there. That is why I was the only one she explained her actions to before the prison guards dragged her away. She wanted that girl dead so that the school fire would die with her and stop the real truth from coming out, which was that Nick had started it and his girlfriend Amy had helped him cover it up.

  She told me that she had seen Nick and Amy at the school that night and witnessed what they had done. She had also followed them to the innocent girl’s home where they had planted the evidence in her garden. The prison killer had been in love with Nick and had been driven by the need to protect him at all costs, ultimately committing crimes just so she could end up in the same prison as the girl her crush had framed. Then she killed her because she thought that was the only way to stop the truth from coming out. She thought she was protecting Nick, even though he barely knew she existed.

  Nick knows what happened that night. Amy does too.

  But they didn’t know they had been seen.

  It took a long time for me to finish my sentence and be released into society again, and it took a little while longer to put my plan into action. I had to learn new skills, and I had to hire an assistant. But cyber-crime is the new way of doing things so it was worth learning how to hack somebody’s laptop and it sure was better than the type of crimes I had been locked up for in the first place. But things don’t always go to plan, which is why it was worth me bringing on an assistant too.

  I knew I was going to blackmail Nick and Amy for whatever amount of money they had once I got released, but I enlisted the help of a fellow inmate to be my partner when we were on the outside. That woman was Petra from Sweden or rather, it was Stacey from Solihull. The whole Swedish persona was just something Stacey did for fun after falling in love with the Scandinavian culture while in prison. She spent months on the inside practising that accent and even I was impressed by how good she became at it. All she had to do when she got out was dye her hair blonde and use teeth whitener and she had suddenly turned into a Nordic goddess.

  As for me, after posing as a male client for Nick’s I.T. business, I had hacked into his PC and found out exactly how much money I was going to be able to bribe him out of if he wanted his dirty little secret to stay hidden. I was shocked to see he had so much, but I wasn’t complaining. Then I had watched his movements on the web and waited for a way in.

  I wanted that way in because I needed to get to know Nick and Amy better before I attempted to bribe them. Understanding the psyche of a mark is a crucial step that I had overlooked in my youth, and it had led to most of my earlier attempts at crime failing. I’ve learnt my lessons after decades behind bars because I had underestimated people or not done my research thoroughly before acting. This time was different. This time I was determined to find a way to get as close to the targets as possible. And I knew it was important to because Amy and Nick weren’t just some naïve couple.

  I knew exactly what they were capable of.

  After a while, I noticed Nick’s frequent internet searches for a GCSE tutor and that had been our way in. He had also been searching for cleaners around that time, but I’m glad we could go the tutor route instead. Reading questions out of a textbook is easier than scrubbing toilets, that’s for sure.

  In order to make sure that Nick and Amy got in touch with me, I had manipulated Nick’s search results to show him the site with mine and Petra’s fake tutor profiles on and then it had just been a case of at least one of us getting through the door and into their lives. Fake Facebook profiles had been the icing on the cake.

  As it happened, we both ended up teaching their son, and we ended up working well as a team together. I paid Petra £20,000 of the total takings, which I know she wasn’t happy about at the time we agreed on it, but it’s certainly more than real tutor’s get paid for a couple of month’s work. And I know that she ended up having a little fun with the married man during our scheme because I kept an eye on her too.

  I wasn’t impressed by what she did with Nick, but then she has spent a lot of time behind bars and missed the company of a man. In the end, she didn’t do too badly out of the whole thing. Of course, I did much better, taking £150,000 for myself. The remaining £30,000 was left in a box on the doorstep of the innocent woman’s house for her parents to find, which won’t make up for the loss of their daughter but at least makes me feel like I have done something to get justice for the deceased.

  Now I’m wealthy, free and unburdened by any guilt, which means I can enjoy my cocktail as I sit here and look
out over the beautiful blue sea in the Algarve. I imagine Petra is on her own beach somewhere right now doing the same thing. We might meet up again and work another job together, but it will be a long way from Nuneaton, that’s for sure.

  I don’t know what I will do next, but the world is my oyster. I could find myself a rich man, I could do some more travelling, or I could go and get myself a job. But what would I do for work?

  I hear being a tutor pays well.

  THE FINAL LESSON

  There isn’t much a teenage couple won’t do to be together, but those two sixteen-year-olds went far beyond the line that night. Amy was at the school because Nick was there, and another night of fooling around outside of their parent’s homes seemed on the cards. But it wasn’t just any old night of teenage tomfoolery.

  They had a plan.

  They wanted to start a fire.

  The jerry can full of fuel that he had stolen from a classmate’s house during a party last week would be the way. But the fire quickly got out of hand, and the whole building was soon ablaze. If he had known that a teacher was working late inside, then he would never have done it. But he had no idea. Neither did Amy. They just thought they would cause a little damage and get the school shut down for a couple of days, while also landing a certain classmate in trouble.

  In the end, they destroyed several lives with their actions that night.

  As the fire took hold, Nick and Amy made sure to leave the jerry can nearby for the police to find. That was important because on the bottom of the can was the address for the girl who they wished to frame for the crime.

  It was the girl who had bullied Amy for much of her youth, and after Nick had attended a house party at the girl’s house and seen the jerry can, he and his girlfriend had seen an opportunity for revenge. Amy knew that girl was at the local park on the night of the fire, which meant her parents wouldn’t be able to give her an alibi. She would be alone after leaving her friends in the park to go home, which provided a window of opportunity that the police would later be interested in. Without anyone to confirm her whereabouts for the whole evening, and already a renowned troublemaker at the school, she could fit the bill as a suspect. The recovery of the jerry can with her parents’ address on would make sure she was the only one and the fact that she had been seen walking back from the park that night which was nearby the school also put her in the area where the crime took place.

  With that evidence, no other suspects, and pressure from the public for the police to solve the case quickly, Nick and Amy’s plan worked.

  The young couple had no idea of the severity of the situation that night. If they had done then maybe they would have acted differently. They just wanted Amy’s bully to get into a bit of trouble. Maybe get expelled. They never wanted her to be blamed for manslaughter. But by then the school had been burned down, the teacher’s body had been found and the innocent girl had been arrested. The teacher’s grief-stricken wife killed herself, the people of the town vilified the accused, and the judge felt compelled to not only find the defendant guilty, but to give her a harsh sentence.

  Amy and Nick had been bonded by love.

  But after that night, they had been bonded by so much more.

  Death.

  Destruction.

  And one dark secret.

  The final lesson is that love makes people do crazy things.

  THE END

  Coming soon from Daniel Hurst

  RUN AWAY WITH ME

  What if your husband was wanted by the police?

  Laura is feeling content with her life. She is married, she has a good home, and she is due to give birth to her first child any day now. But her perfect world is shattered when her husband comes home flustered and afraid. He’s made a terrible mistake. He’s done a bad thing. And now the police are going to be looking for him.

  There’s only one way out of this. He wants to run. But he won’t go without his wife...

  Laura knows it is wrong. She knows they should stay and face the music. But she doesn’t want to lose her man. She can’t raise this baby alone. So she agrees to go with him.

  But life on the run is stressful and unpredictable and as time goes by, Laura worries she has made a terrible mistake. They should never have ran. But it’s too late for that now. Her life is ruined. The only question is: how will it end?

  You can run but you can’t hide...

  Available February 2021

  Join my free mailing list to receive updates about this book, as well as for freebies, competitions and a sneak peek into the life of an author at www.danielhurstbooks.com

  Also By Daniel Hurst

  The bestselling psychological thriller:

  TIL DEATH DO US PART

  What if your husband was your worst enemy?

  Megan thinks that she has the perfect husband and the perfect life. Craig works all day so that she doesn't have to, leaving her free to relax in their beautiful and secluded country home. But when she starts to long for friends and purpose again, Megan applies for a job in London, much to her husband's disappointment. She thinks he is upset because she is unhappy. But she has no idea.

  When Megan secretly attends an interview and meets a recruiter for a drink, Craig decides it is time to act. Locking her away in their home, Megan realises that her husband never had her best interests at heart. Worse, they didn't meet by accident. Craig has been planning it all from the start.

  As Megan is kept shut away from the world with only somebody else's diary for company, she starts to uncover the lies, the secrets, and the fact that she isn't actually Craig's first wife after all...

  Available now on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited

  Read on for the first two chapters...

  1

  MEGAN

  The thought of getting out of bed to do nothing all day might appeal to some people, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve never considered myself to be a lazy person, yet that seems to be what I’ve become. How did this happen?

  Three words.

  I got married.

  I don’t regret saying ‘I Do’ to my husband, Craig, but I do regret saying ‘I quit’ to the only boss I’ve ever had before. That’s because while I have a sparkling ring on my finger, a large home in the country and a loving husband who earns a fortune in the city, I don’t have much else.

  No children. No friends. No job.

  The no children situation is okay because both Craig and I agreed not to have kids before we married. He said he’d never wanted them, and I was happy to say the same, having always doubted I’d be able to pull off motherhood without going insane. My lack of friends is a shame but is unfortunately just what happens when you buy a house at the opposite end of the country from where you were born. But the job situation...

  Now that is something that I would like to change.

  Craig is the General Manager at the London Branch of a Swiss bank, so money is not an issue for us. His base salary is staggering enough before you factor in the end of year bonuses, which are frankly obscene, but are still gratefully accepted. But the financial security that my husband’s job has given us has meant that it was deemed unnecessary for me to work as soon as we were married. Being told at the age of twenty-nine that you could retire and put your feet up might sound like a dream come true to most people, and it certainly was to me when I heard Craig say it, but now I’m thirty-two, and I’m not so sure.

  Yes, I have money, but it’s my husband’s money, not mine. I haven’t earned a penny of it, and while he is happy for me to spend a chunk of it each month on nice things for myself and the house, even that’s starting to grow old.

  I want to make my own money.

  I want to have a purpose and a profession.

  Most of all, I want to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

  The sound of Craig’s electric toothbrush in our en-suite bathroom is like a buzz saw to my fuddled brain right now. But I’m not tired. I’m the opposite. I sleep too
much. Through until noon some days. But not today.

  Today I am determined to get up and make the most of all my free time.

  Craig will leave the house in about twenty minutes when he has put on one of his expensive suits and chomped down a Granola bar. He will close the front door behind him at 6:10 am before getting in his Porsche and driving to our nearest train station, which is fifteen minutes away, or ten if he opens up the engine on the quiet country roads. I’ve told him he’s not to speed, but boys will be boys. Besides, it’s not as if there is ever anybody else out on the road at this time.

  We really are in the middle of nowhere.

  With Craig out of the house all day, I will be alone again. But instead of browsing retail websites and filling my virtual shopping basket with things that I don’t need, I am going to do something productive today.

  I am going to look for a job.

  It’s hardly an earth-shattering thing to do, but I haven’t worked for three years, and the thought of putting my CV out there is enough to give me butterflies. But that’s not the only thing that I’m anxious about.

  I’m not sure how Craig will take the news about me wanting to go back to work.

  The toothbrush is turned off, the toilet is flushed, and finally, the bathroom door opens, and I get my first glimpse of my handsome husband today. He’s always been a morning person, and his smart appearance is evidence of that. The clock beside the bed is showing 06:06, but my man is up and ready to take on the world, which is more than can be said for me, as I lie beneath the duvet suffering from a bad case of what can only be called ‘bed-head.’

  “Oh, you’re awake,” Craig says, obviously surprised to see my eyes open and watching him from across the spacious bedroom. “Sorry, I thought I was quiet.”