It had been the sound of Mum’s footsteps coming up the stairs that had sent him scurrying out of my room, and I had listened to him whispering to her about how he thought he had heard a noise coming from my room so had gone in to investigate. I had pretended to be asleep when I had heard my bedroom door open again a moment later, which I often did when Mum peeped her head in to check on me, but I hadn’t been able to drift off again after that.
That was how I came to be standing at the top of the stairs a few minutes later, spying on Tim and my mum talking before she stabbed him with that bottle and watched him die.
I had crept back to bed as quietly as I could immediately after that, and I hadn’t dared to come out of my room until Mum had come in once the sun had risen the following day. I had been close to saying something to her as she told me to get dressed and get ready for school, but I had chickened out and just done as I was told. Then I had gone downstairs and seen the dark red stains on the carpet and on the sofa, stains that Mum explained away as being from a spilt bottle of wine. I had made sure to let her know that I believed her, even though all I was wondering at the time was where she had put Tim’s body. But I never found out. I slept over at my grandparent’s house that night, and by the time I came home from school the following day, we had a new carpet in the living room, and the sofa was covered with a throw.
I still don’t know what happened to Tim. I presume he was buried in the woods or on the moors, just like Rupert and Jimmy were. But I’m not going to ask Mum. She is entitled to her secrets, just like I was entitled to mine. I kept my secret for ten years, until tonight when I have told her everything. Now she knows the truth.
I saw her kill.
And I wanted to emulate her.
Mum hasn’t said anything for a few minutes, instead using the time to pull herself together and dry her eyes. I’m expecting that the questions will start again soon and that she will want to know the full extent of Tim’s death on my psyche. I expect to be asked about what really happened with Rupert. I expect to be questioned about what drove me to kill Jimmy in such a brutal fashion. And I also expect that she will want to know where I am going to go from here.
Am I dangerous? Am I going to kill again? Should she be worried about me?
But to my surprise, Mum asks me none of those things.
She doesn’t say a word as she gets up off the bed and walks towards the doorway, stepping over the dirty red stains in the carpet that are obviously not going to come out no matter how hard I scrub at them. She doesn’t say anything as she walks out of the room and glances back at where I remain sitting on the bed. And she says nothing as she disappears down the hallway, the only noise that follows being the sound of her bedroom door closing a few seconds later.
I get it. Mum needs time to process all of this. It is a lot to take in.
She has just found out that her daughter saw her kill a man. I expect she is feeling bad about that. But she needn’t worry. I don’t think any less of her. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
I think she is the best mum in the world.
39
HEATHER
I must be the worst mum in the world.
All this time, I thought I had shielded my daughter from what happened ten years ago, but now I know that is wrong. Chloe saw me kill Tim, which means she knows I hid his body and got away with it. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that she has been influenced by my actions, and it has driven her to replicate what she saw me do all those years ago.
I’m her role model, and now she is just like me.
She is a killer.
But there seems to be one big difference between the two of us. While I am constantly living in a state of fear and guilt over my earlier actions, Chloe seems to possess none of that. Instead, she seems to actually thrive on all the chaos and uncertainty that death and dark secrets bring.
It’s so much worse than I thought.
Now I am afraid of my own child.
‘Look alive, Heather. It wasn’t that boring, was it?’
I’m snapped out of my trance by the voice of my supervisor, who has just finished giving us a briefing on the latest in Rupert’s missing person case.
‘Sorry, long shift,’ I tell him, rolling my eyes and reaching for the cup of coffee that I had placed on the floor next to my chair when the briefing began ten minutes ago.
‘I’ll let you off,’ he replies with a smile.
I watch as he walks out of the room along with several other uniformed officers who had taken time out of their busy shift to hear if there was any news on the case that is still dominating the headlines in this part of the world. But he is wrong. The subject was a fascinating one,
