The door opens, and I see Mum rushing in, the knife raised and her eyes wide, as well as Jimmy in front of me, who puts his arms up to protect himself as he tries to close the gap between them. But he has no protection against me approaching him from the rear, and it takes little effort on my part to stick the knife into the side of his neck and cause a large splatter of blood to erupt from within him.
Jimmy’s hands instantly rush to cover the large puncture wound in his neck, but I jab the knife into his back once, twice, three times before he stumbles away from me and falls to the floor, spilling out even more blood onto my once pristine carpet as he goes.
‘Chloe!’ Mum calls to me, no doubt in shock as she stands in the doorway with her much smaller knife in hand, but I ignore her as I advance again on the stricken man and drive my weapon into his chest before putting my bodyweight onto his like he just did to me.
Jimmy’s frightened eyes go wide with fear as I stare into them and watch the white colour quickly leaving, soon replaced by a dark, red hue that tells me that he doesn’t have long left on this planet.
‘Chloe, stop it!’ I hear Mum call to me again, and now she is trying to pull me off him, but I insist on staying in my position until I have witnessed the exact moment that Jimmy departs this life and enters whatever waits for him beyond.
It doesn’t take long.
The man in my bedroom is dead.
I allow Mum to pull me off his body, although the knife stays in place, protruding out from his chest like a proud flag signifying that I have occupied him.
‘What the hell were you thinking? He could have killed you!’ Mum cries as she looks at the blood splattered down the front of my nightdress as well as the wild look that is surely emanating from my eyes right now.
Her comment is almost laughable as I look down on Jimmy’s still body and see how easily I dispatched him in the end, but I say nothing, instead just enjoying the feeling of adrenaline that is surging through my shaking body.
‘Chloe!’ Mum cries again, and I notice she is checking to make sure I haven’t suffered any stab wounds in the melee, but of course I haven’t.
Jimmy barely knew what hit him before he was dead.
‘I’m fine,’ I say when I grow tired of her fussing over me and pull her in tightly for a hug, although it’s more to stop her from staring at all the blood on my nightie rather than because I need the comfort of her touch. ‘It’s over now.’
‘But what happened?’ Mum asks, breaking away from the hug and staring me down. ‘Where did that knife come from? And how did he know I was coming through the door.’
I think about answering both of those questions honestly, which involve me saying that I put the knife in my bedside drawer earlier today in preparation for killing him myself, as well as about the fact that I warned Jimmy that she was on her way in here. But I imagine that won’t go down too well with her, so I instead decide to go with the false answers I had already prepared for this very moment.
‘I put the knife in my drawer as a back up in case anything went wrong,’ I say, glancing again at the edge of the deadly weapon sticking out of Jimmy’s chest. ‘And it’s a good job I did because he heard you creeping across the floorboards out there and went to the door to check. He would have got that knife off you if I hadn’t stabbed him myself.’
I look down at the piddly knife in my mum’s hand and wonder if Jimmy really would have been able to stop her from sticking it into him, but I guess we’ll never know now.
‘The important thing is that he’s dead,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘It’s over. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.’
I can see that Mum has heard what I have just said, but I have a feeling that she doesn’t agree with it somehow. Judging by the look on her face, she still seems to have plenty to worry about.
If that is the case, then she wouldn’t be wrong.
37
HEATHER
The order in which things must be done has become familiar, almost like packing for a holiday or cleaning a house.
Move the body. Dig the hole. Bury the body. Clean up the evidence. Go to bed.
Wake up and carry on as normal.
I’ve done it before, and I’ve just done it again. But this time is different. After tonight, I’m done with breaking the law and burying my secrets, both literally and spiritually. This isn’t who I am. I get no pleasure from taking a life and getting away with it.
The question is, does Chloe?
It was clear from the second I opened her bedroom door to kill Jimmy that she had deviated from the plan. For a start, Jimmy was already waiting for me, almost as if he knew to expect me. Chloe blamed it on a couple of creaky floorboards in the hallway giving me away, and while I wasn’t so sure, I might have believed her if what happened next hadn’t occurred. As Jimmy and I stood face to face in the doorway, the knife in my hand and a look of determination on his, Chloe sprang into action behind him, revealing her own knife before plunging it into the victim, not once, not twice, but several times, even when it was clear that he
