Obsession: A shocking psychological thriller where love affairs turn deadly

by Amanda Robson

  Footsteps in the corridor. The door handle turning slowly. Brown eyes moving towards me.

  ‘I missed you, Rob. You didn’t even tell me you were going. You cut yourself away from me and it was painful.’

  ‘I had to, Jenni. For the sake of my family. You must know how difficult it is for me,’ I say as I take you in my arms.

  ‘It’s always been difficult for both of us,’ you whisper before you kiss me. I kiss back, hungrily.

  ~ Jenni ~

  The bonfire party is approaching and I’m looking forward to it. I have bought a new dress for you, Rob, a dress that emphasises my figure. A toffee-coloured woollen dress that matches my eyes. As you know only too well, chocolate and toffee together are delicious. Rob. I am so sorry for you. The way Carly behaves with her raucous laugh and over-exuberant personality. Carly Burton. Curly hair and stupidity. Like an overweight Golden Retriever. You stay with your chubby wife with a questionable intellect because of your religious convictions. Loving me for so long has made your life difficult, so very difficult. I’m sorry, Rob. Really I am.

  ~ Rob ~

  A bonfire is being built in our garden. The biggest bonfire our garden has ever seen. We have fireworks and sparklers. Homemade fudge, treacle toffee and hanging lanterns. We have a large guy, stuffed with newspaper to help start the fire. He has a languishing head that keeps falling off no matter how much time we spend repairing it. Carly has everyone helping. Pippa, Matt and John. Your boys, Jenni, looking like clones of Craig with their strong frames and clumsy features – the very sight of them making my stomach tighten because of what happened to him. In a few days we will have our party and you will be here, Jenni, enjoying Carly’s efforts.

  Jenni. Because of what is happening between us I visit church every day and pray for redemption. The church where you married Craig. When I visit church, the noise of the world lessens. We were always the religious ones, weren’t we, Jenni? Do you think religion helps? I must admit I sometimes wonder. Being true to your religion isn’t an easy pathway. Or at least it seems that way right now. Knowing our affair can’t continue. Knowing it should never have started in the first place. Praying. Praying for forgiveness. Praying for the strength to finish it.

  ~ Carly ~

  You arrived at the party early, as I asked you to, and we are laughing and chatting in the garden. Rob is in the kitchen watching us. I see his face at the window, by the kitchen sink. I see his fine head of shiny hair, his broad shoulders. Jenni, he belongs to me. You know that really, don’t you? You put your hand on my arm and tell me how nice it is to be together again.

  ‘Like old times,’ you say.

  It is a crisp November evening and darkness has already descended. The lanterns in the tree above us are bathing your eyes in soft, forgiving light, making the laughter lines around them dissolve a little. For we are not getting any younger, Jenni, are we? The scent of dying pine wafts towards us from the unlit pile of logs.

  ‘Let’s get the bonfire going before everybody arrives,’ I say. ‘I tell you what, you light it.’ I pass you the matches and the paraffin. ‘Slop the paraffin on, it rained so hard yesterday that the wood’s very wet.’ I pause. ‘I’ll go and get us a glass of wine. Red or white?’

  ‘Red,’ you reply, starting to twist open the lid of the green paraffin container.

  ‘Hold on a minute. Wait until I’m inside to light it. The smell of paraffin exacerbates my asthma.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had asthma.’

  ‘There are a lot of things we don’t know about each other, Jenni.’

  You put your hand on my arm and drown me with your eyes.

  ‘We have the rest of our lives to find out – now that our friendship is strong again. Now that the past is forgotten and forgiven.’

  Forgiven but not forgotten. Forgiven. Forgotten. Which is it, Jenni? Is it either? Your words rotate in my mind.

  ‘Remember to really slop on the paraffin,’ I shout back to you, as I head towards the house, towards the wine.

  ~ Rob ~

  I’m washing up at the kitchen sink, watching you both standing together laughing, two shadowy figures beneath the hazy light of a paper lantern. Carly hands you the paraffin, Jenni, and the matches, kisses you on both cheeks and turns to walk up the garden. The kitchen door opens and shuts.

  ‘Have you opened the wine?’ Carly asks.

  ‘Yes. It’s by the—’

  The garden explodes. A volcano of flame, Post-it yellow, cascading towards the sky, engulfing you, Jenni. I grab a bath towel from the laundry room and dash outside, running towards you, towards the furnace that is devouring you. The stench of burning flesh mixed with the heady odour of petrol hits me and forces me back; I cannot reach you, Jenni. My face is scalding. My hair is singeing. I feel it, I smell it. The inferno subsides and I see your charcoaled body. Feeling as if I am moving through a vacuum, I walk back to the kitchen and with trembling hands telephone the emergency services.

  Collapsing in the leather armchair in the kitchen, on the edges of my mind I wonder where Carly is. But I cannot go and find her. If I move I will vomit.

  The police and the fire brigade are here in minutes. I am not sure who arrives first. The light from an ambulance rotates outside. They trample in and out, between the garden and the house. The fire brigade have brought a hose down the side passage and are drowning the bonfire in foam. It is almost out. Your body is surrounded by medics and police. Police are everywhere, searching our house, searching the shed. The vomit that I have been suppressing surges in my stomach. I rush to the downstairs bathroom – just in time. When I have expunged the turmoil inside me, I have a hot flush and splash my face with cold water from the basin. Then I shiver. My shiver becomes a shake, which builds more and more uncontrollably. I stand still in the downstairs cloakroom, waiting for my body to calm.

  When I recover enough to return to the kitchen, the house has become a crime scene, tape across the front door, a policewoman guarding it. Pippa is walking towards the house, arm in arm with my boys. Where are your boys, Jenni? They mustn’t witness this horror. If they do it will stay with them forever, contort their memory of the real you. They haven’t arrived. The police must have stalled them. They must be at Stuart’s. At the thought of Stuart without his precious daughter, my stomach cramps begin again. The policewoman is waving my children away. In the recess of my mind, I know Heather must be on her way to get them. Heather, our backbone.

  Carly stands next to me now, stinking of the bonfire, her face streaked with tears and charcoal. We move together into the sitting room and collapse onto the sofa. She clings to me, pushing her smoky hair in my face, making me choke. A policeman is here, appearing as if from nowhere, sitting in the easy chair opposite us. A burly man with high shoulders. He has sandy eyes and sandy hair, which give him a gentle look.

  ‘It looks as if Jenni tried to light the fire with petrol instead of paraffin and the can exploded. Poor girl didn’t have a chance,’ he says.

  ‘I gave her paraffin,’ Carly says violently.

  ‘The red can, the one we always use?’ I ask.

  The policeman leans forward.

  ‘A red can with paraffin in is still in the shed.’

  Carly inhales sharply.

  ‘Do you think you gave her the wrong can?’

  Carly bursts into tears. She doesn’t reply.

  They take Carly to the police station to make a statement whilst I stay at home and console myself with a glass of whisky. Police wearing rubber gloves are everywhere. In the shed. In the kitchen. In our bedroom. Somewhere through the darkness I am moving in, the children are back home, walking towards me in the sitting room. I am too choked to talk to them. I hug Pippa. She smells of apple blossom. I hug the boys. We sit together and put the TV on; its coloured shadows flicker in front of me. I don’t know what we are watching. It might be a film. It might be the news. I don’t know and I don’t care. All that I know is that Pippa and the boys are sitting next to me. The fact t
hat they’re there comforts me. Pippa is holding my hand.

  At some point, I’m not quite sure when, Carly returns to a place which is no longer a home but a crime scene. Your body, Jenni, is interred beneath a tent, waiting for more forensic analysis tomorrow. We have to move out of the crime scene right now.

  ‘Just for a few days,’ the sandy policeman says as he watches us gather a few overnight possessions, making a note of what we take.

  ‘What happened at the police station?’ I ask Carly as she stands in front of me trembling, moonlight pale.

  ‘I made my statement. Explained that it was a complete accident.’ She bursts into tears, pressing her body against me. ‘I don’t think they believed me.’ There is a pause. ‘They say there’ll have to be an inquest in a case like this.’

  ‘Of course there’ll be an inquest. That must be routine.’

  Does she really think something as fatally destructive as this could happen without an inquest?

  Too unstable to drive, the police order me a minicab. Heather has arrived; at least our children will be all right. That gives me some small sense of relief. Silently we all pile into the minicab and are taken to the local Travelodge, where Heather and the children disappear to a family bedroom. Carly and I take another double room. We are alone together for the first time since I lost you, Jenni. Where are you? Where has God taken you?

  In the plastic privacy of the Travelodge, surrounded by cream walls and MDF furniture, I fling my overnight bag onto the bed, pull out my whisky bottle, and pour a generous slug into a water glass from the bathroom. Whisky mixed with an edge of dry toothpaste.

  ‘Would you like some, Carly?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head, kicks off her shoes, and sits on the bed supporting her back with two pillows. I remove my bag from the bed and sit next to her, necking whisky. She rocks back and forwards, crying, a high-pitched eerie cry, haunting and ghostlike. I try to soothe her, putting my arms around her shoulders, rubbing her back, talking to her, but her wailing will not stop and the rocking intensifies. The stench of burning which surrounds her cuts into my nostrils, sears through my lungs, my gullet, choking me, making me feel sick.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, but Carly remains unable to speak.

  I leave her to her rhythmic grief and move away towards the shower. At the doorway I turn to check on her. Her eyes are clamped shut, she does not seem to have noticed that I have gone.

  The bathroom, despite the clanking central heating, is damp and cold. Grey tiles that once were white. A clouded mirror. A stained bath. I strip off my smoke-drenched clothes and step into the shower. The water is lukewarm, and the shower gel provided is thin and smells like washing-up liquid. With considerable effort I manage to work it into a lather on my skin and attempt to wash the stench of smoke away. I rub harder and harder but I cannot remove the odour of your burning flesh, Jenni, or the heat of the bonfire, from my mind. I stand in the shower, pummelled by moving water, wishing I could turn back time. I stay in the shower until the water runs cold and my skin is pink and crinkled. I step out and return to the bedroom to put on fresh clothes from my overnight bag. Carly is still rocking and crying, but silently now. She doesn’t hear me. She doesn’t open her eyes. I dress and then clean my teeth, as obsessively as I have washed, and then I sit with my arms around her and wait. For her to come round. For her to speak to me.

  She melts against me, and falls asleep, still choking me with the stench of the fire. I untangle myself from her, rest her sleeping head on a pillow, and pour myself another whisky.

  A knock at the door, loud and demanding. I put my whisky glass on the bedside table and move towards the door, expecting it to be one of the children. But no. When I open it two police officers are standing in front of me. A man and a woman. Young and slim and pale faced.

  ‘May we come in?’ the woman asks, her voice harsher than her honey looks. The man is expressionless at her side.

  Behind me I hear Carly start to wake, start to stir. The police officers walk into the room smelling of cold night air and authority. Their shoulders and uniforms are tight and stiff.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I ask. ‘You’ve already questioned her.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Carly says, in a voice cracked with exhaustion.

  ‘We have more evidence.’

  She is looking at me, terrified, asking me for protection with her eyes. She gets up from the bed and stands next to me. I put my arm around her. The blonde policewoman steps towards her. She opens her mouth and starts to speak like an automaton. At first I am so shocked that I am not listening properly and then her words come into focus and I begin to realise she is arresting Carly. I’m familiar with these words only from watching too much crime drama on TV. The speech is in the closing stages now:

  ‘… it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do or say may be given in evidence.’

  ‘Are you coming voluntarily or do we need to cuff you?’ the male police officer asks.

  Carly does not reply quickly enough and so he cuffs her, whipping her arms behind her back. He must have been well trained. He is assertive without being rough. My arm is still around her, trying to protect her.

  ‘Step away,’ he requests. ‘I’m afraid you’re not invited to come with us.’

  I let go of my wife and step back as requested. The blonde police officer hands me a card.

  ‘Some information for you,’ she says.

  Flanking Carly, they begin to escort her towards the door.

  ‘Help me, Rob, there must be some mistake,’ she pleads in a fragmented voice.

  Somewhere deep inside I do not think this is a mistake. The police are too sure of themselves. Too confident. Before I have managed to find something comforting to say, she is gone. Leaving me alone in this shabby Travelodge that needs refurbishing. Leaving me alone, looking at grey walls, feeling empty inside. I move to the window to try and have a last glimpse of her. I am in time to see her stumble as she gets into the police car. I wave, but it’s too late. She doesn’t see me. The car drives off, lights flashing, bathing the road in repetitive discord. I return to sit on the bed, to numb my mind with whisky. I drink whisky. Whisky resonant on my tongue. Until I cannot see. Until I cannot think. Until I fall asleep, semi-comatose.

  ~ Carly ~

  A remand prisoner, charged with the murder of Jenni Rossiter, sitting in the transport van, in a cubicle on my way to Moormead prison. No one seems to believe me that I made a mistake; not even Rob. It’s Rob’s attitude that hurts the most.

  Rob, looking even more unkempt than me, was allowed to visit me at the police station before I was transferred into this horsebox. How can it be acceptable to treat people like animals? I could only talk to him from behind a barrier of glass, pressing my face against it to get as close to him as possible.

  ‘What’s this about fresh evidence?’ he asked.

  ‘They have CCTV footage of me filling up a green can with petrol, at the petrol station, the week before the fire.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Don’t you remember, Rob? You were worried about running out in case the leaf blower needed topping up.’ I paused. ‘You asked me to fill it up, so I did. It doesn’t prove anything. I didn’t do it on purpose.’

  Rob’s freckled eyes looked scared for a second, before he masked them.

  ‘They must think it proves something or they wouldn’t have charged you.’

  ‘I’m only charged, not convicted. What do you think a trial is for?’ I asked.

  Rob, how can you be so judgemental, so harsh?

  ‘OK, OK, calm down,’ he said. ‘Don’t snap.’ His face had looked distant. ‘It’s not easy for you, I know, but it’s been a terrible shock for me too.’

  He’d put his hand to the glass, as if he wanted to get nearer to me.

  ‘When are you coming home?’ he asked.

  ‘Bail will be refused, apparently.’

  ‘Why?’


  ‘They think I’m dangerous.’

  ‘To who? Other people or yourself?’

  ‘Both.’

  He sat there looking at me. At my collapsed face, at my crumpled clothing, my rounded shoulders and hands now folded together, my bitten nails. And I sat looking at a man with skin as white as rose petals, almost translucent in the electric light above him. A man who needed a shave, a shadow of a man, with a bad hangover.

  ‘Did you deliberately set fire to Jenni?’ he asked me.

  I whimpered like a dog that had been whipped, stood up and left the cubicle. Is that the thanks I get for being his longstanding wife, the mother of his children? For him not to trust me. For him not to believe that I am innocent. His words were like a knife in my heart. What did he want? Did he wish it was me that had doused the fire with petrol? Me who had died, rather than Jenni?

  The prison transport van moves through Stansfield, past all my familiar places. The children’s school. Our 1930s semi. The surgery where Jenni tormented me. Along the A70, towards the motorway. I feel sick and my hands are trembling but I am not going to worry – my ‘legals’, as the police call them, will sort everything out. As soon as I get the opportunity I will telephone Rob, and tell him to instruct the best barrister possible.

  It’s all a misunderstanding. All of it. Even this business about not allowing me bail. Where has it come from? I know I will move through this to a better place. I don’t have religion like Rob, but since I recovered from my depression, I do have a strong sense that my life will always move forwards, whatever happens. Jenni Rossiter, however hard she tries, will not ruin it again. Jenni Rossiter will never ruin anything again now.

  The van is moving along the motorway, high banks, grey upon grey. When we reach the winding, twisting roads of the countryside my sickness increases. Eventually, after several hours of feeling wretched, we arrive at Moormead. Almost as soon as the van begins to slow down, my sickness starts to dissipate. Through the limited vision of my cubicle window I see iron gates open automatically. The van pulls into a tarmac square, surrounded by brick walls, topped with razor wire. A grim, grey nightmare.