Guilt: The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018. Amanda Robson
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Chapter 148
Chapter 149. Sebastian
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153. Sebastian
Chapter 154
Chapter 155. Sebastian
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158. Sebastian
Chapter 159
Chapter 160. Sebastian
Chapter 161
Chapter 162. Sebastian
Chapter 163. Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Read on for a sample of Amanda’s debut, Obsession.
About the Author
By the Same Author
She presses a tea towel to her wound to try to stem the blood, but it is gushing, insistent. The harder she presses the more it pushes back. She cannot look at her sister, at her clammy, staring eyes. A siren grinds into her mind. Louder. Louder. Her eyes are transfixed by repetitive flashing lights. The doorbell rings and she feels as if she is moving through mercury as she steps to answer it. To open the door with a trembling hand – a hand that smells like a butcher’s shop. Three police officers stand in front of her: two men, one woman.
The woman asks her name softly.
She gives it.
‘Can we come in?’ the female officer asks.
She nods her head.
Two steps and they are out of the tiny hallway. Two steps and her entourage follow her into the living room of their shiny modern flat: stainless steel and travertine, brown IKEA furniture. Two more steps and three police officers stand looking at her sister’s blood-mangled body. At hair splayed across the white floor. At alabaster stiffness.
The larger male police officer barks into his phone, demanding backup, forensics, a police photographer. And someone who sounds like a robot talks back to him.
‘Backup on the way.’
The policewoman turns towards her, puts her hand on her arm. She has soft blue eyes that remind her of a carpet of bluebells hovering like mist on the floor of the woods back home in springtime. Woods where they used to play.
‘You said on the phone that you’d killed your sister. Is that what happened?’ the policewoman asks.
‘I thought she was going to kill me. So I … So I …’
She cannot continue. She cannot speak. She opens her mouth but no words come out. She hears a howl like a feral animal in the distance, and then as the policewoman puts her arm around her shoulders and guides her towards the sofa, she realises that she is the one making the noise.
The policewoman sits next to her on the sofa, smelling of the outside world. Of smoggy city air. Soft blue eyes melt towards her.
‘What happened?’ the policewoman asks.
‘My sister was angry. So angry. I’ve never seen her like that. Never.’
Her words die in the air, like her sister has died. They just stop breathing, without the blood. She moves towards bluebell eyes. The police officer puts her arm around her and she clings to her, sobbing. The woman strokes her back, whispers in her ear, rocks her back and forth, like a baby.
She sits for a while. She does not know for how long. Time has abandoned her. Somewhere in the distance of time that she is no longer part of, her neck stops bleeding. Somewhere in the distance of time her flat is invaded. By people in cellophane suits wearing plastic caps and rubber gloves. By a photographer. By an army of dark-suited people with no uniforms.
Somebody is moving towards her. She cannot see him properly; everything is blurred – nothing in tight focus. He is speaking to her, but she cannot hear him. He looks so concerned, so insistent. Some of his words begin to pierce through the silence that is pushing against her eardrums.
‘Arrest. Suspicion of murder. Something which you later rely on in court.’
And he is pulling her up to standing and cuffing her. The gentle bluebell woman has melted away. As he leads her out of her flat, she cannot bear to turn to say goodbye to her sister. She cannot bear to take a last look.
Into the custody suite. Plastic bags taped to her hands and feet. When did that happen? In her flat? Before she got into the police car? The custody suite is a state-of-the-art tiled rabbit warren. No windows. No corners. No edges. It doesn’t seem real, just as what has happened doesn’t seem real. Voices don’t speak, they reverberate. It smells of stale air and antiseptic.
A police officer wearing rubber gloves and carrying a pile of paper bags escorts her to a cell. The cell is so modern it doesn’t even have a traditional lock on the door. Everything is electronic. Space age.
‘I’m just going to take a picture of your neck wound,’ the police officer says.
A small camera appears from her pocket and the officer takes a string of snaps.
‘And now I need to remove your clothes and bag them. They will be sent for forensic analysis. Is that OK?’
The prisoner nods her head. The police officer removes her clothes, so gently. Folds them and puts them in individual paper bags. Gives her a paper jumpsuit and instructs her to put it on.
‘Forensics will be here soon to examine your hands.’
Hours later, hands inspected, plastic bags removed, a silent police officer is escorting her to the interview room in the custody suite. She looks at the wall clock. Eleven p.m. The officer opens the door of the interview room to reveal her family solicitor, Richard Mimms, sitting behind a plastic table, the skin around his overtired eyes pushed together too much, framed by black-rimmed glasses.
She has only seen him once before, when they went to his office with her mother, many years ago. She thought his eyes were strange then. They’re even stranger now. She sits down next to him on a plastic chair, the grey table in front of them. The officer leaves the room, locking the door behind him.
‘Your mother has instructed me to act for you. Is that acceptable?’ Richard Mimms asks.
The word mother causes nausea to percolate in her stomach. She pictures her being told the news. Home doorbell slicing through canned TV laughter. Mother putting her teacup down on the coffee table and walking across the sitting room, into the hallway to answer the door, silently begging whoever is disturbing her evening peace to go away.
But the voice she doesn’t recognise in the hallway isn’t going away. It pushes its way into her quiet evening, tumbling towards her, becoming louder, more insistent. Mother is pale, moving like a wraith. For she has seen the foreboding in the police officer’s face.
‘Please sit down, I’ve something to tell you,’ he says.
‘Your mother has instructed me to act for you. Is that acceptable?’ Richard Mimms repeats, jolting her back into the room. She looks at him and nods her head.
‘Yes. Please.’
‘So,’ Richard Mimms continues, ‘we’re