Obsession: A shocking psychological thriller where love affairs turn deadly

by Amanda Robson

  The door of my cubicle is opened by a prison officer who escorts me through the yard, into a reception area built of concrete mixed with small stones, two-toned grey concrete everywhere; on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls. I think there are two other prisoners who have come out of the van, but they are blurring on the edge of my vision. My escort is standing next to me, not taking his eyes off me, as if I am about to bolt. I want to put my hand on his arm and assure him that I am not dangerous. To tell him the truth.

  ‘I am Carly Burton,’ I want to say. ‘I’m a well-respected nurse, wife of the local GP, mother of three children. Please don’t be scared of me.’

  But I cannot because I am still cuffed, and he will not want to listen to me. A woman in prison-officer uniform standing behind a glass screen asks us to fill in forms and sign them, pushing them with some bendy plastic pens through a slit in the glass screen. Now he has to un-cuff me. I shake my wrists to encourage the blood flow back to my hands. I open my mouth to speak to him but he gestures to me to be silent, and the look on his face is such that I judge it best to obey him. I stand next to him by a counter against the right-hand wall, filling in my form – my name, address, date of birth, height and weight. Nothing complicated. In the corner of my mind I see a woman who arrived with me struggling to read the form, holding the pen awkwardly. I finish and am escorted into a small side room to find two female prison officers waiting for me, standing either side of a small wooden desk. My escort leaves.

  I am staring at them and they are staring at me. Their eyes burn into me. They look dark and smart in their black and white uniforms. Dark and smart and full of authority. These women must not be messed with. One removes and audits my handbag. One examines me with a metal loop, attached to a baton, which periodically beeps across my clothes, across my orifices.

  ‘Everything seems in order,’ one of them snaps. ‘You’ll see the doctor next.’

  The doctor’s consulting room leads off the reception area and has no windows. A woman of about fifty with iron grey eyes and matching hair is waiting for me, sitting behind a metal desk, surrounded by mauve painted brick walls. She’s the first person I have seen who isn’t wearing a uniform.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Not for many years.’

  ‘Have you had a problem with drink in the past?’

  ‘No. Why would you ask that?’

  Her eyes tighten their focus on me.

  ‘Lying won’t help you in here.’

  ‘Why do you think I’m lying?’

  ‘Just guessing.’

  ‘I don’t lie. You need to know that.’

  She leans back in her chair and crosses her legs.

  ‘Take any drugs?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even the contraceptive pill?’

  ‘Well that hardly counts as a drug.’

  She taps something into the computer screen in front of her.

  ‘Do you have any history of mental illness?’

  ‘Nothing I haven’t recovered from.’

  ‘Well then, since you’re so squeaky clean – you can go straight to your cell.’

  I’m walking behind the ample buttocks of my jailer, along endless white painted corridors, up flight after flight of green metal stairs, listening to keys jangling at her waist. She stops outside a cell door and unlocks it. She enters and I follow. A cell with mauve painted walls. A cell with a window that looks out onto concrete.

  ‘This is your new roommate,’ the officer says, craning her head up to the top bunk.

  The officer leaves, metal grinding against metal as she locks the door behind her.

  The blanket on the top bunk moves and a head appears. A head of pale ginger hair. A girl with a thin, mean face – if her eyes were further apart and she had a broader nose she would have been pretty.

  ‘Sarah Jane Moore,’ she says. ‘Attempted bank robbery.’ There is a pause. ‘You?’

  ‘Carly Burton. Wrongly accused.’

  She puts her head back and laughs. A real hyena cackle.

  ‘We all try that one to start with. Everyone is wrongly accused in here.’

  ~ Rob ~

  It is visiting time at Moormead prison and Carly and I are sitting opposite each other, across a grey, grubby plastic table, trying to act naturally – Pippa at the end of the table.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask, reaching for Carly’s hand and then remembering that I hugged her when she arrived. That’s my quota. I’m not allowed to touch her again this visit. I place my hand back on my lap, keep it to myself.

  Her head drops.

  ‘No. I’m not all right. Not really,’ she replies.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’

  ‘No one sleeps well in here. It’s so noisy.’

  Carly stares into a space in the air behind me, eyes blind and unfocused.

  ‘We’re doing everything we can to get you out.’

  Her cornflower eyes sharpen.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pippa stands up. She makes me jump. I’d been so concerned for Carly I had almost forgotten Pippa was here, sitting at the table with us.

  ‘Are you hungry, Mum? Would you like something from the vending machine?’ Pippa asks.

  ‘Yes, please. Chocolate.’

  She walks across the visiting area, leaving Carly and me alone. She is Carly but not Carly. A woman in crumpled clothing who I hardly recognise. I feel stuck, as though I don’t know what to say.

  After a while, I speak.

  ‘What do you do all day?’ I ask limply.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Then why did I ask?’

  ‘You’re a GP, trained to be interested. Trained to be polite.’

  ‘Come on, Carly, stop that. Tell me what it’s like.’

  A half smile.

  ‘You don’t want to know. I promise.’

  ‘So it’s sex and drugs and rock and roll, is it?’

  ‘Something like that.’ She laughs.

  I hear Pippa clicking back, her shoes cracking across the concrete flooring. Carly’s eyes shine with greed as Pippa passes her a cup of hot chocolate and a large Kit-Kat. Carly devours the Kit-Kat and gulps the hot chocolate.

  ‘When are you coming home, Mummy?’ Pippa asks.

  Pippa. Lower lip protruding, legs crossed, foot shaking the way it does when she is anxious.

  Carly is crushing her empty cup of hot chocolate in her right hand.

  ‘I don’t know when all this will be over. They’ve not even set a trial date yet. My legals are coming to see me sometime in the next few days.’

  She leans forwards as if she is about to put her hand on my arm, but stops herself. She sits there, biting her nails, eyes softening with tears.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. Get me out of here, as soon as possible. Please.’

  ~ Rob ~

  The surgery is ticking on. Without Carly. Without you, Jenni. Without the depth of my old enthusiasm. Heather and Sharon both deserve beatification. Heather, even though her spirit seems cracked by what has happened, still supports me, still helps run my home. Sharon continues to run the surgery. I float in and out of both, vaguely pretending to cope.

  Lunchtime. A wet, damp day, moisture hanging in the air but it isn’t raining, not at the moment. Moving along the high street, head down, not wanting to speak to anyone, stopping at M&S to buy flowers. Clutching a bouquet, I move away from the high street on to Church Street with its cobbles and individual shops with personality. Towards our church.

  Towards the church where you lie. Fresh granite resting brutally on the ground above you. The lilies I put there yesterday haven’t withered yet. I lay my new bouquet next to them. Roses and lilies. Ephemeral beauty about to fade. Jenni, you are with the Lord now. Your beauty will never fade. I close my mind in on itself and reach you. I feel you. I breathe your scent. You are here in this moment, watch
ing me like you always used to.

  Lunchtime is over. I go back down Church Street, back to the high street. Past the lap-dancing club that was closed down. Everything is so familiar and yet so distant. Back to the surgery. The surgery I have given my life to. Clean and kind and warm, wrapping me in a blanket of security, giving me a sense of purpose. The needs of my patients pulling me forwards, providing me with a routine to hook my life jacket onto, for outside I am drowning. I push the ghosts of Jenni and Carly away. I ignore the passing whiff of their perfume, the distant sound of their arguments, their laughter, as I move through the reception area where a few patients are already gathering for the afternoon surgery, smiling at the receptionist on duty. I go into my consulting room. As soon as I sit at my desk my phone buzzes. I pick up.

  ‘A man from the Met to see you,’ Sharon tells me.

  My body goes limp.

  ‘Send him in.’

  A few minutes later a ruddy-faced man who looks as if he is seven months pregnant enters my consulting room, extending his hand to me. I take it and we shake hands gently.

  ‘Inspector Johnson,’ he announces.

  His eyes shine at me as he sits in my patients’ chair.

  ‘What can I do to help you?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve just popped in to look at your staff rota for last year. Double-checking Carly’s movements.’

  Double-checking Carly’s movements. I swallow slowly. I feel saliva move down my throat but it doesn’t ease its dryness.

  ‘I expect she was either here or at home looking after the children. She never went anywhere else, except out with a few friends in the evening.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure, but we just need to check that.’

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing complicated. To look at your personal diary. I’ve just checked the surgery’s with Sharon. Carly wasn’t here on the days in question. Sharon says you keep a private diary, so I want you to go through it with a toothcomb, and get back to me by tomorrow morning if possible, with your record of Carly’s whereabouts on the days we’re interested in.’

  ‘Which dates and why are you interested in them?’

  ‘The ninth of July and seventeenth of September – both Saturdays, if that’s any help. The days Craig and Anastasia died.’

  ‘But surely you don’t think …?’ I splutter. He is staring at me with hard grey eyes. ‘Carly never worked on Saturdays,’ I continue. My hands are trembling. ‘I’ll look it up tonight and get back to you.’

  He sits back in his chair a little.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He continues to stare at me, smelling of the cold air inside the police station. Making me shiver inside as I remember visiting Carly there, the sting of disinfectant in the air mingled with stale vomit. Carly locked up with Saturday night inebriates. Her whimper of pain when I asked her about Jenni.

  ‘Was she in love with Craig?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘But she had an affair with him, didn’t she?’

  ‘If you could call it that. More like a sexual fling. A long time ago, when she wasn’t well.’

  He crosses his legs. He is wearing dark navy socks with little red dots.

  ‘She hated Jenni Rossiter, didn’t she?’

  ‘When Carly was ill she was suspicious of her. Paranoia was part of her illness. But they were very friendly around the time of Jenni’s death.’

  ‘But she had complained to the police about Jenni, shortly before Jenni died, hadn’t she?’ he pushes.

  ‘Yes. But the police had reassured us that she was mistaken about Jenni, so Carly had moved past that.’

  ‘She must have moved on very quickly. Complaining about her in September. By early November, Jenni was dead.’ He pauses. ‘And did Carly suspect you were having an affair with Jenni?’

  I sigh inside.

  ‘Inspector, Carly had suffered paranoia in the past, but she’s recovered now, so no, of course not. Why would she suspect that?’

  ‘Well, if it were true, for example?’

  A stone drops in my stomach.

  ‘I find your suggestion deeply offensive. I’m a religious man, Inspector.’

  He leans towards me. His eyes are like polished marble.

  ~ Carly ~

  Oh, Jenni, what are you doing to me? I am locked up in here, all because of that stupid accident. I know I told you to slop the fuel on, but I really thought it was paraffin. It wasn’t my fault that it was petrol. It was Rob’s. He’d asked me to fill up the spare can with petrol the week before the party. I got the colours mixed up, that’s all. Why does no one believe me when we’ve been friends for so long? And why are the police coming to ask me more questions now, about Craig, about Anastasia? Jenni, what have you done? Have you managed to set me up from beyond the grave?

  ~ Rob ~

  The silence of what once was my home pushes against me. Leaden silence. It is no longer a home, it is simply the house where I live. The children have gone to Heather’s for the night. I wade through the silence. Towards a tumbler of whisky and a slouch on the sofa. I close my eyes and feel Carly lean towards me. Her early touch. The way she used to touch me when I first met her. Carly’s face contorts into Jenni’s. Jenni’s face with her vanilla-fudge eyes. My girls. Vanilla fudge and coconut ice both leaning towards me, telling me that they love me. I try to embrace them both in my mind but I cannot quite reach them. They are pulling away from me. I open my eyes. I feel so tired, so very tired. I finish my whisky. I groan inside and force myself to stand up, remembering I have promised the inspector that I’ll look for my diary. I haven’t been filling it in since just before the fire. Where did I leave it? In my bedside drawers? In the kitchen dresser? I am methodical. I don’t randomise things like Carly does. It will be in one of my usual places.

  My usual places. My bedside table. The bottom right drawer of my chest of drawers. Downstairs on the kitchen dresser. Looking in my usual places doesn’t work. So I start at the top of the house and ransack everywhere. Rummaging. I go through drawers of bunched-up underwear, tangled tights and lacy knickers. Cupboards of children’s toys. Children’s clothing. Through bookshelves and piles of correspondence. Through our overflowing filing cabinet. I even look in the fridge. In the freezer. In the dirty linen.

  Carly must have destroyed it. I can’t find it anywhere.

  ~ Carly ~

  Visiting time. I’m sitting at a plastic table waiting for my mother, surrounded by screws. Screws staring at me without blinking, waiting for me to make a wrong move. I have made such an effort to look nice today for my mother. If I look unkempt she worries about me even more, and she worries about me too much already. We are allowed so little pocket money that even getting hold of good-quality soap or shampoo is difficult. So, unless you are an extremely natural beauty, looking halfway decent is impossible. But today with a little help from my cellmate, Sarah Jane, who exchanged her fags for some expensive shampoo, I have managed to minimise the damage this place is doing to my appearance. As I turn my head, soft freshly washed curls vibrate against the edge of my face.

  Mother is here, moving towards me. She has lost weight; she’s still barrel shaped but a thinner barrel. We greet each other with a hug and then, tired, panda-eyed tired, she sits opposite me and reaches for my hand beneath the table. Her hand feels hot in mine. But we are not allowed to keep touching each other, so a quick squeeze, a glance to check whether a guard is looking this way, he is, and our physical contact is over.

  ‘The bitch-whore set me up. Have you heard about it?’

  ‘Of course I have. The house is crawling with police. With forensics.’

  ‘How dare they charge me with Craig and Anastasia’s murders? Saying I forged both suicide notes. Fucking CCTV footage. A blonde woman who apparently looks like me in a canary yellow sundress and matching shoes was filmed on the ninth of July walking across the small car park in Trethynion; the one right by Craig and Jenni’s cottage. And on the seventeenth o
f September wearing a bright red raincoat, like mine. The days of their deaths. So it’s me, apparently. Ha ha, I bet it’s her in that camera with socks in her bra, wearing a blonde wig. And I bet she enjoyed spending hours trying to get her handwriting to look like mine. She must have seen my handwriting in the logbook in the surgery so many times. That fucking bitch-whore, smarter than everybody thought.’

  ‘Calm down, Carly, don’t swear.’

  ‘But I’m frightened. The police want to know where I was on those days and I can’t remember. She was cleverer than people thought. She wanted me out of the way so that she could have Rob. The fucking bitch-whore was a witch. A fucking witch.’

  ‘Just stop swearing, please.’

  ‘Swearing is the least of this family’s problems.’

  ‘I hate it when you swear. Please stop it. It doesn’t help.’ Ignoring the rules, she puts her hand on my arm. Her touch comforts me. ‘I’ve been thinking hard.’ She pauses. ‘Those two Saturdays must be two Saturdays when we went shopping together.’

  ‘Shopping?’

  ‘Yes. We were always going shopping together at weekends, weren’t we, Carly?’

  ‘What about the children?’

  ‘Can’t you remember? The children came with us.’

  ‘Will they remember that?’

  ‘Don’t complicate things. Children their age can’t remember anything.’ There is a pause. ‘I’ve reminded you where we were, and now I’m going to tell the police.’ The determined look on her face tells me not to argue with her. ‘Carly, you can stop swearing now. Calm down.’

  ~ Rob ~

  I move through what feels like a large version of a public school or an Oxbridge college. Past a chapel. A library. A fountain. Balanced Georgian buildings. Past the Great Hall, whose function I am not quite sure about. I turn right, past old brick and sleeping winter flowerbeds, which in summer must be a burst of colour. I know my plants. Delphiniums. Hibiscus and Hydrangeas. Daylilies. Candytuft. Brown Eyed Susans. Sunflowers. Marigolds. Ornamental grasses. Even today, with bare trees and depleted flowerbeds it is an oasis of peace trapped in a bygone age, the sounds of the city muted.