Guilt: The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018. Amanda Robson
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police car turns left at the roundabout, past Warren Farm onto Southport Road. Right onto Paradise Lane, past their primary school. Tracing the way they used to walk home from school, the wide bend at the corner of the lane, past what was once a private school with sumptuous grounds that has recently evolved into a housing development. Past the end of our close. Her stomach rotates. Left at the crossroads, where in late spring, they always stopped to admire the mass of bluebells. Her stomach is like a stone. Left again at St Peter’s Church.
St Peter’s Church. Attached to their local C of E primary school. The church they attended every term time Wednesday morning, for six years, from the age of five to eleven. Six long, slow years. Time is distorted in youth. Walking from school to church, hand in hand, along Church Path, beneath the dappled shade of chestnut and sycamore. Entering its hallowed hall. The smell of polish and silence. The thumping voice of the vicar. Boredom ameliorated by respect. Sisters together forever, frozen in memory, still holding hands.
The driver parks outside the church; the hearse and the family car arrive and park in front of them. She sees her sister’s mahogany coffin covered in lilies. Her mother unfolds herself from black metal and moves towards the police car. The guard she is cuffed to sidles along the seat and accompanies her out into this cloudy day, the air a cascading mist of dampness, the sky gunmetal black, to match her mood.
Somewhere on the pavement she meets her mother. Her mother manages to take her in her arms without manhandling the guard who stiffly avoids the love-in.
‘So pleased they let you come,’ Mother says in a weak voice.
Although she could stay like this forever, holding on to her mother for comfort, it starts to rain and they move inside. Past elders of the church handing out service sheets. Past sheaths of white roses and lilies. Past burning eyes. The church is almost full as they move to their reserved seats on the front row. Mother on her left, right hand in hers. Flanked on the right by her guard. Her mother squeezes her hand and turns to look at her, but her eyes seem veiled, concussed.
She turns to glance around the church. It is overflowing with people and restrained emotion. So many people – three lines standing at the back. Some people from school she recognises. Many people she doesn’t. She never realised her sister knew so many people. She supposes young death always attracts a big congregation. A tangle of pity and respect.
The organ begins to trumpet. Everybody stands. The organ continues: deep-throated, regal, majestic. Slowly, slowly, her sister is carried down the aisle, wrapped in her mahogany package of death. Slowly, slowly, balanced on the pallbearers’ shoulders, who place her carefully in front of the altar between the choir stalls, and gently move away.
Silence.
The vicar appears like an actor in a surreal play and stands to the left of her sister’s coffin.
‘First, let us sing,’ he announces.
The organ rises with a melodious thumping. They sing her sister’s favourite hymn. They kneel. They pray. Attached to the police officer it is uncomfortable. She closes her eyes to join in, but she cannot concentrate and opens them again. She turns around to look at faces, twisted shut in prayer. The church in ecclesiastical overdrive. All thoughts swirling towards eternity and the death of her sister. So much love. So much energy. The emotions of the people in the church press against her and make her feel wretched.
As she turns her head back to the front, back to the floor, she notices a length of gold braiding. A vicar’s belt. Nestling in the dust at the end of the pew. Gently, she stretches towards it, carefully pulling as far away as possible from the police officer she is attached to. He doesn’t notice. She manages to grab it with her fingers and push it into the pocket of her coat.
Prayers are over. They stand and sing again. They listen to the vicar eulogise. In death, her sister is even more perfect than she was in life. Mother cries. She cries inside. The organ pulsates more grandly than it did at the start and the pallbearers carry her sister away. A sleeping princess, away to the hearse, away to the crematorium where she will burn to ash. Mother will follow and she will be escorted back to Eastwood Park. She’s not even allowed to go to the wake. She walks with her mother behind her sister’s coffin, still shackled to the guard. Head down, the church’s sea of blue carpet drowning her.
Suddenly, she looks up to check her balance. Sebastian. Sitting at the end of a row. Eyes burning angrily into hers. Glowering at her, in a way she has never seen before. Her heart stops. She is frightened. He is trying to kill her with his eyes. To suffocate her. To drown her. She stops walking for a second. The guard has to stop walking too. Stopping to gain the strength to pull her eyes away from him. In the distance of her mind, she sees Theo. Theo’s gentle eyes push Sebastian’s eyes away. Amber eyes melting her pain. Soothing her like honey.
Sitting in the car on the way back to prison, after the funeral, she is crying. Tears tumble silently down her face. She can’t stop them. She wishes she had died at the same time as her sister. The day her sister died, her life also stopped. If only she had died instead. That would have been easier. This is no way to live. Body and brain numb. She cannot think. She cannot feel. She will never enjoy anything again.
The sight of her grieving mother sears across her mind, painful and corrosive. The sight of her sister’s grieving friends. Of Sebastian’s eyes. Sebastian’s eyes telling her how much he hates her. That he never ever loved her. He always loved her sister.
If she lived in America, they would electrocute her. If she lived a hundred years ago they would hang her. In modern-day UK she needs to find a way to kill herself. She touches the discarded vicar’s belt that is now – after she was uncuffed for a visit to the toilet – wrapped around her waist. Her stomach tightens. She is not quite sure what she can attach it to. But she will find a way. People frequently do, even in prison, in this day and age.
The guard she is cuffed to is watching her. His fingers reach for hers. He squeezes them. ‘It will get easier,’ he says. ‘This will be the worst day. They will help you when you get back to prison.’
His words float in the air, ineffective, meaningless. Help. How can anyone help? Her desperation has gone too far.
Back to Eastwood Park. Back through reception. Back into the holding area, face wet with tears. Into a room where she is patted down gently by an overweight prison officer, who smiles at her indolently, at first. But his search becomes more thorough. His fingers probing and insistent. He finds the rope.
‘What’s this?’ he asks, unravelling it from her waist.
She doesn’t reply. She stands silently, still crying. He presses a buzzer to request backup. Within seconds two more prison officers enter the room.
‘Watch her carefully. Watch her every move.’
He leaves the room, taking the rope. She sits down and continues to cry, while the two backup officers stand by her side, watching her like hawks. The overweight officer, whose thighs snake across one another as he walks, returns and steps towards her.
‘I know this has been a very difficult day for you. We will do our very best to help you. We are taking you to a new cell in the special wing and sending a doctor to see you immediately.’
She is crying and crying, head in her hands.
The cell in the special wing has no sheets, just a blue mattress and a duvet too thick to roll into a ligature. No hooks. No sharp edges. Totally open plan to the bathroom with a large window in the door so that her every movement can be viewed at all times. Suicide watch big time. No privacy.
She has changed out of her own clothes and is wearing paper pyjamas; they have even removed her underwear. She lies on the bed beneath the duvet and continues to whimper. Time has evaporated. Become irrelevant. Somewhere as she floats in its vacuum, the doctor arrives.
The doctor has ginger hair and watery blue eyes. His skin is pale. Almost translucent. Like delicate fine bone china. He is young and slim and riddled