by Daniel Hurst
I can’t believe he is trying to get me to trade my daughter’s safety for a chance to ease my loneliness. He really is despicable. But he is also getting closer to me, and I’m almost backed up to the staircase now. I really don’t want to move from here because I’m the only thing standing between him and Chloe upstairs, but he’s not giving me much choice. This isn’t going well. I need to change my tactics.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, nodding my head. ‘I was just surprised, that’s all. But you’re right. It doesn’t have to be the end of us.’
Tim smiles as he takes another couple of steps towards me until he is able to reach out and put his hand on my shoulder. His once-warm touch feels deadly cold now, but I do my best to not let it show as I maintain eye contact and pretend that I mean what I say.
‘I knew I could make you see things my way,’ he says. ‘You’re so much more understanding than Bethany’s mother was. I love that about you.’
The mention of his ex-wife fills me with dread because I no longer see her as a love rival or an obstacle for us to overcome. Now I see her as a victim, a poor mother who was just as unlucky to have this man come into her life as I was.
‘That’s right,’ I lie, nodding my head again. ‘I’m not going to leave you like she did. I just got scared. But I don’t want to lose you.’
I try not to break eye contact with him in case it betrays what I have just said, and I must do a good job of it because Tim smiles again before leading me back over to the sofa. But the firm grip he keeps on my right hand lets me know that this is not an affectionate gesture. Rather, it’s telling me that he is in control and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Unless I take my chance now.
As we pass the coffee table beside the sofa, I scoop up the empty wine bottle and bring it down hard on his head, hearing two loud noises as I do.
The dull thud of the bottle hitting his skull before the loud shattering of the glass.
Tim yelps in pain as he drops to the floor, and at first, I think I have drawn blood from him until I realise it is just the dregs of the red wine dripping onto the carpet from the jagged edges of the bottle top that I still hold in my hand.
I was hoping that the strong blow would knock him unconscious, but that hasn’t happened, and now he is getting back to his feet, one hand on his head but the other balled into a fist which I know is meant to be used on me.
‘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 in my front room.
The first job on my list had been an obvious one. I had to get the body out of the house.
After listening out for any signs from upstairs that my daughter might have woken up and heard what happen
ed, I had felt assured enough from the silence above that she was still asleep. Therefore, I had got to work straight away, grabbing several bin liners from the cupboard under the kitchen sink and laying them all out in a line, starting at the body by the coffee table and ending at my back door. Then I put my hands under Tim’s armpits and dragged him towards the door, careful to ensure that the blood being left in his wake was only spilling onto the bin liners and not onto the carpet.
There would only be so many red stains that I would be able to blame on a red wine spillage.
Opening the back door, I had dragged Tim through it and along the side of the house before bringing him to a stop just before my driveway. There, I had checked that there was nobody out walking on the street at that time in case they witnessed what I was about to do. After putting a couple more bin liners in the boot of my car, all I had to do then was get Tim from the side of the house and into the back of my vehicle without anybody seeing me in that two minute window.
If there was ever a time when you didn’t want a nosy neighbour peering out through their curtains, it was that moment right there.
It had been hard work to not only drag Tim the rest of the way to the car but more so to lift him into the boot. But I had managed it, no doubt helped by a combination of desperation and fear, and it had been a relief to close the boot and have his body out of sight.
From there, I had run back inside and done my best to clean up the mess in the house, which mainly involved trying to get the bloodstains out of the carpet. Already knowing most of the tricks in the book when it came to getting red wine stains out, I tried everything, but all I had seemed to do was make more of a mess. There was no doubt about it. The carpet was ruined. So too the sofa where Tim had reached out a bloody hand in a desperate attempt to cling to life. I knew Chloe would buy my lie about it being a disaster caused by a bottle of red wine, but not many other people would, which meant a redecoration was in order. But that came later.
The body in the boot took priority.
With Chloe asleep upstairs, I hadn’t been able to deal with Tim’s corpse that first night for fear of leaving her on her own. Therefore, I had little choice but to wait for the next day, where I would be able to arrange for my parents to have Chloe for a sleepover so I could deal with the small matter of burying the body in the boot. That meant I had to go to bed that night with the knowledge that Tim was still out there on my driveway, his blood dripping onto the bin liners in the boot as I tried to close my eyes and get some rest.
Just as had been the case with Rupert more recently, I got no sleep that night as I counted down the hours until the morning when Chloe would wake up and ask me if I had a nice time with Tim. She had been her usual sleepy self when I had gone into her room that morning to make sure she was up in time for school, and she only really woke up properly when she went downstairs and saw the red patches on the carpet and sofa.
‘What happened, Mummy?’ she had asked me, looking rather upset at the state of the room that she spent so much time in after school.
‘Mummy spilt some red wine,’ I had told her, shaking my head to reinforce how silly I felt about the whole thing. ‘Almost a whole bottle.’
‘Do you want me to help you clean?’ Chloe had replied sweetly, but I had shot that idea down straight away, not wanting her to go anywhere near the red patches if I could help it.
‘Thank you, love, but that’s the best I can get it. I’m going to have to get a new carpet, I’m afraid.’
‘And a new sofa?’
‘Yes, and a new sofa.’
I was fortunate that Chloe didn’t mention Tim much that first morning, instead content to quietly have her breakfast before I told her it was time to leave to catch the school bus. Normally we would drive to the bus stop, which was around five minutes from the house, but that day, and with what I knew to be residing in the back of the car, I suggested that we walk. Thankfully, Chloe hadn’t protested.
It had been a relief to see her off on that bus so that I could get back home and organise my day. I’d phoned in sick from what should have been another day of police training before calling my parents and asking them if Chloe could stay over that night. I told them I had an issue at the house that needed fixing, and it would be easier if she was out of the way, but they didn’t complain. They always loved spending time with their granddaughter, although I did have to resist all attempts by my father to call around and offer his assistance to whatever the problem was at the house.
With that done, I had been free to get started on the tedious but critical task of ripping up the blood-stained patches of carpet from the living room floor. I knew that calling a carpet fitter to do this for me would have been too risky as they may have easily spotted the difference between a red wine stain and blood splatter, so I had no choice but to do it myself. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to get it all up, and it would have been a very botched job, but all I needed to do was to get the blood-covered sections out before I could call a professional to come and finish the job. As for the sofa, I planned on just putting a throw over it and replacing that at a later date when I could afford to do so.
After what had been a full and painstaking day of cutting into my carpet and trying to pull as much of it up as I could with my tired and aching fingers, I had eventually decided that I’d made enough mess for one day and left it at that. But as darkness had fallen, and with Chloe having been collected from school by her grandparents and now safely out of the way over at their house, there had been no putting it off any longer.
It had been time to deal with the body.
Thinking back on that fateful night a decade ago, there are many similarities between that one and the one only a week ago when I had buried Rupert. The same feeling of dread as I moved the corpse. The same shovel used to dig the hole. And the same sickening noise when the body hit the bottom of the grave. But unlike with Tim, in which I am certain I have got away with that crime now, it is still far too early to say if I have been as fortunate with Rupert. The local papers and news broadcasts are full of reports about the search for the missing teen and all the speculation about the fate that might have befallen him. The searches have become more thorough now than they were that first day when he had been reported missing, as well as posters stuck to lampposts and appeals for information made on television.
It’s a tough time for the town right now as everybody is inundated with the bad news on a daily basis. It’s also a tough time for my daughter. Unlike me, this is her first experience of carrying a deep, dark secret, and I can see the strain it is having on her. She has become quieter, more withdrawn and has refused all my attempts to talk about what we did together with her. She seems to have her own way of dealing with it, and I guess I just have to leave her to it, besides letting her know that I am there for her if she needs me. But it’s not just the guilt and fear we carry from that night a week ago that is troubling me now. It’s also the fact that my daughter no longer sees me as a perfect role model.
Before that night with Rupert, while she might have treated me like a typical teenager with her tantrums and tetchiness on occasion, she always respected me, and I would like to think she looked up to me too.
But those days are obviously over now.
While I might have shown her how much I loved her by committing to hide the body and protect her from any potential problems with the police or general public, I have also shown her that there is another side to me.
A side that is capable of doing dangerous things and keeping them a secret.
The fact I have managed to keep what happened with Tim a secret from her after all these years is an achievement, telling her that after a brief disagreement between the pair of us, we decided to end our relationship and go our separate ways. But now she knows that I’m not the perfect parent I have tried to be all her life.
There is more to me than that.
I just hope she still loves me in the same way now she knows it.
21<
br />
CHLOE
I’m supposed to be revising for my first exam which is fast approaching, but try doing that when all you can think about is the dead guy that everybody in town is trying to find.
Seven days have passed since Rupert died and Mum saved me from a lifetime of being associated with the terrible event, but things haven’t got much easier in this house. I spend most of my time holed away in my bedroom, pretending to be revising while she is either at work or sneaking extra glasses of wine in the kitchen downstairs. She thinks that I don’t know how much she is drinking, but I do. I always have a look to see which bottles are in the fridge whenever I go to the kitchen for food, and the labels on them are changing all the time. Numbing her thoughts with alcohol is obviously the way she plans to deal with what we did, but I’m trying to deal with it in a much healthier manner.
I cry when I feel like I need to cry. I rest when I feel like I need to rest. And I listen to my favourite music whenever things seem particularly bleak because that is how I have always dealt with troubling times in my life.
I have used music to help me get through many sad periods in my youth, from the breakups of my favourite pop groups to the time Mum told me she had broken up with Tim and he wouldn’t be around to play with me at the park anymore.
I didn’t mind growing up without a father figure for the most part when I was younger, but I did like having Tim around for those few months that he was a part of our lives. I remember him as being so caring towards me, always trying to make me laugh and never growing tired of pushing me on the swings or spinning me on the roundabout. I used music to help me get over the disappointment of finding out that he wouldn’t be around anymore, and it worked. I soon forgot about him, just like Mum seemed to forget about him too.
Letting out a deep sigh, I give up on trying to read any more passages in this textbook and instead decide that I am going to get some fresh air. It’s only a five minute walk to the corner shop, and I need refreshments if I am going to get through another few hours of revision in between bouts of paranoia, regret and deep thinking about Rupert and where he is now.