Obsession: A shocking psychological thriller where love affairs turn deadly

by Amanda Robson

  When I reach Mr Hockerman’s chambers the door is wedged open. Hesitantly, I step inside and wind along a convoluted corridor, walls laden with modern art; splodges, splats and lines, until I reach the clerk’s room. It is stark and utilitarian. Rows of black shiny suits are sitting at computers. One of them looks at me and smiles as I hover in the doorway.

  ‘Dr Burton?’ he asks as he abandons his computer and steps towards me. He smiles; I try to smile back but my mouth doesn’t move.

  ‘Mr Hockerman QC is in the conference room with your wife’s solicitor.’

  Along another rabbit warren corridor to a doorway in the furthest crevice of the basement area, where a man with dark hair and a fermented face is waiting for me, sitting at a circular plastic conference table that almost fills the room. He has papers spread in front of him; Carly’s solicitor, Mr Ward, a sullen young man, with hair cut so short he must have pushed a number four hair clipper across his head like a lawnmower, sits next to him. Mr Ward’s hair makes him look like a bouncer in an unruly nightclub, pugnacious and tough. That must be the look he is attempting to create. He sits next to Mr Hockerman QC as if he is guarding him. Mr Hockerman QC half stands as I enter, gesticulating for me to sit down at a chair opposite him. Mr Ward doesn’t move. The clerk disappears like a ghost. I had imagined leather winged chairs and bookcases. This is disappointing. White walls. Plastic furniture.

  Mr Hockerman leans forward to read a paper from the top of the pile in front of him, just for a few seconds, as if he is double-checking something. He has pubic sideburns and nasal hair that needs trimming. He looks up, eyes meeting mine over half-moon spectacles. Pale blue, watery eyes.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Burton. Thank you for coming,’ he says. His voice is educated. Long vowels. Clipped consonants. ‘I know it was a terrible shock to you, Dr Burton, the news that your wife is being charged with the murders of Craig Rossiter and Anastasia Donaldson, as well as Jenni’s.’

  Shock doesn’t even begin to capture what I’ve been going through. My life has become torture. Permanent hell. But I don’t share that with Mr Hockerman, I let him continue.

  ‘We have now received the evidence from the prosecution and we felt it is important to put you in the picture; keep you updated.’ Mr Hockerman is stirring in his chair, bristling with energy. Mr Ward is as still as a Chinese terracotta soldier. Mr Hockerman leans back. His trousers ride up to display bright red socks. Very non QC. Very non Mr Hockerman.

  ‘I want to reassure you,’ he continues, ‘that the evidence against your wife is flimsy. Let me show you – we’ve got a copy of the CCTV footage now.’

  He fumbles about in his pocket, and soon he is looking directly at me, brandishing a memory stick. He pushes the stick into a portal of his computer.

  ‘Stand behind me and look at this,’ he instructs.

  Mr Ward and I do exactly as we are told. He presses play and the CCTV evidence begins to roll. A chubby blonde-haired woman in a yellow dress is hobbling across the car park near Craig and Jenni’s house. The footage is very dark, very blurred. She is on the screen one moment and then before my eyes can get used to what she looks like, she is gone, to be replaced by a woman in a baggy red raincoat. This time the picture is worse; even grainier. I blink and she too is gone.

  ‘Let me show you again, in slow-mo.’

  We watch again in silence. Mr Hockerman switches his computer off.

  ‘So, Dr Burton, what do you think? Is it your wife?’

  ‘I can’t see it clearly enough to be certain.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mr Hockerman snaps. ‘No one can.’ He pauses. ‘Judges are not stupid. This evidence will go away. Which just leaves the handwriting travesty.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘How they’ve managed to contort this, we’ll never know.’

  Mr Hockerman’s face is pinched inwards to express his disgust. He is pulling some papers towards him from the plastic table in front of him, snorting with indignation.

  Mr Ward is watching him, shaking his head slightly. His lips have moved. A smile is attempting to play on his lips. It doesn’t quite appear.

  I close my mind to my surroundings. To Mr Hockerman and Mr Ward. To Mr Hockerman’s energetic self-confidence. To Mr Ward’s passive aggression. I need to concentrate. This is so different from how I imagined it. So different from Inspector Johnson’s snarling condemnation of my wife when he came to tell me he she was being charged with Craig and Anastasia’s murders. He made it sound as if the outcome was unquestionable. Or at least that’s how I interpreted what he said. And I have been to hell and back. My wife, the woman I married, a serial killer. Not even prayers have helped. I have just been helping Heather look after the children, attempting to run the surgery, like a shadow of a person, not myself. Like a burnt piece of debris, floating on the wind.

  I open my eyes. Mr Hockerman and Mr Ward are both sitting looking at me, frowning a little in concern.

  ‘What do you mean, contort this? What’s been happening?’ I ask.

  Mr Hockerman takes over again, a smile invading his lips.

  ‘When Carly was arrested over Jenni’s death, they reopened the two suicide cases. They had the handwriting on the suicide notes checked by a local expert who informed the police it looked a bit like Carly’s. But I’ve never seen such a sloppy piece of work. Look at this, I’ll show you.’

  He hands the piece of paper he is holding to me. I sit deciphering it. Reading the curly lettered note. Reading Anastasia’s less curly, more spidery. The curls of the letters are a bit like Carly’s, but not the spidery ones. I look up.

  ‘Well?’ he asks, eyes pushing into mine.

  ‘I’m not good with handwriting, but it doesn’t look definitive.’

  ‘Exactly. Not definitive. That’s the point. You should have been a lawyer, Dr Burton.’

  ‘That’s what Carly says sometimes.’ I don’t tell Mr Hockerman that she means it as an insult, not a compliment.

  Mr Hockerman continues, ‘I’ve got our forensic handwriting expert to start looking at this. Melissa Barrington. She’s got all the right state-of-the-art equipment. The woman is top notch. Apparently, the notes are obviously forgeries, but exactly by whom needs to be confirmed by more tests. So far they bear very little resemblance to Carly’s stroke work.’

  He beams at me. I didn’t think his long thin face was capable of beaming. Mr Ward is grinning too. A grin completely changes the landscape of his face. He must only be about twenty-five. He’s actually OK looking when he smiles; not such a hatchet-man.

  ‘And finally,’ Mr Hockerman taps his pen on his desk. ‘We have your mother-in-law saying she was with Carly shopping on both the days in question, even though you can’t back her up because you’ve misplaced your diary. So,’ a flourish of his pen, ‘a strong alibi, as well.’

  He seems so confident, so bullish, but still I tremble inside as I contemplate what might happen to my wife, my family. About what has happened to Jenni, to Craig, to Anastasia. About where my diary is. About whether Heather is lying. About whether Carly is.

  Carly.

  I feel so low every time I think of her. As if I’m about to go in front of a firing squad or be led into an electric chair. Heavy with grief, because I fear my wife is lying. I don’t trust her and yet I don’t want to admit it. If Carly didn’t do this, who did? Not Jenni. Jenni had the Lord in her heart. Jenni would never do this. My mind pushes back. I am standing in the coroner’s court, holding two girls’ trembling hands.

  ‘But what about the coroner’s ruling?’ I ask.

  ‘They had used a local handwriting expert who didn’t even have an electron-microscope.’

  Mr Hockerman raises his hands in the air. ‘Anyone who knows anything about this knows that this evidence is useless without that.’

  ‘So how did the coroner’s court get away with it, then?’ I splutter.

  ‘How do any of us?’ he asks, standing up and leaning across the plastic table to shake my hand in dismissal. As far as he is concerned Carly Burt
on is dealt with for the morning. He needs to get on. He terminates our meeting with a smile. Mr Ward copies him. I try to smile back but I’m not sure that I manage.

  I leave the conference room and move away, through the rabbit warren corridors, taking wrong turns a few times, but arriving back at the clerk’s room, eventually, to find my bearings from there and escape into fresh air.

  But fresh air does not help me feel any better. Nothing helps. I sidle back through Lincoln’s Inn, across the manicured lawn, surrounded by antiquity, feeling as if I’m carrying the weight of antiquity on my back.

  ~ Carly ~

  My time in here is suffocating me. The only time I am enjoying is association, when we are allowed to walk around the quad and chat. I like moving arm in arm with quirky, almost-pretty Sarah Jane. Even behind concrete walls decorated with hoops of barbed wire I can smell spring in the air, and it fleetingly reminds me of better times.

  Better times, walking hand in hand along the riverbank, my husband and I. Head singing with happiness as we stroll along beneath the canopy of trees, dappled by sunlight. Pippa, rollerblading ahead of us, hair streaming behind her as she weaves gently between other people meandering along the towpath – families out for their Sunday afternoon constitutionals, elderly couples clinging on to one another, shoulders bent. Dog walkers, joggers. A cacophony of people enjoying the river; its slow-moving peace, the serenade of the river birds.

  I remember Matt and John, ahead of us on their bikes. Making our way to the café by the bridge. The café serves a mean millionaire’s shortbread. A perfect Sunday, walking along the riverbank, the sun metallic across the water.

  Reaching the café by the bridge; iron tables and chairs scattered across a flat piece of grassed land in front of it. Yew trees and pigeons. A stone statue of a colonial Indian General I have never heard of. The café’s counter and kitchen are squashed into an archway in the bridge. Our offspring used to wait for us at a table near the statue, faces flushed with exertion, tea and cakes and my much-craved millionaire’s shortbread in front of them. We would sit and drink, chat and eat. In my mind, the soft toffee of my shortbread cake clings to my teeth. I savour it.

  But it is not like that in here. Jenni, you have taken my life away from me. Will I ever walk like that again, will I ever enjoy my family after what you’ve done to me? You have killed my ex-lover and his girlfriend, then set me up for their murders.

  I see you in your cottage, crushing drugs into his wine. You know what you are doing with drugs, don’t you, Jenni – look what you did to me! And now you are out and he is sitting watching TV and drinking your concoction. He didn’t have a chance, did he? After all, you’d had a practice on me. And now I see you writing his suicide note. Why are you doing that? Just in case setting me up goes wrong?

  I told the police what you did but they don’t believe me. They think I’m a killer. They think I killed you on purpose, don’t they? And even if I did, Jenni, wouldn’t you think that it was fair enough, that eventually everyone would realise how dangerous you were, and that in the end I had to protect myself?

  ~ Rob ~

  In life, I knew I would have to walk away from you. For the sake of my religion. For the sake of my marriage. And I was coming to terms with this. In death I cannot. I cannot walk away from you and the damage my wife has inflicted on you. I visit your grave every day to talk to you. Can you hear me, Jenni?

  I go back to all our old places. The church. The river. Soft Sunday afternoon walks beneath dappled light. I visit Stuart and your boys. Your dad’s a brick, isn’t he? But then you always knew that. And now, continually restless without you, I have boarded a train to Cornwall, to Trethynion where you used to live, to feel closer to you there. As I step off the train you step towards me as you did last time when Carly and I visited, smelling of musk and patchouli oil. Embalming me with your eyes. I weave around your village of winding streets serenaded by the melancholy cries of seabirds, the salt air you used to breathe corroding my face. I move past your cottage. It is still taped off, Jenni. Tired blue police tape is still flapping in the wind. I move out of the village and up the cliff path. Up the cliff path where you walked so often. Climbing. Climbing. Crumbling white cliffs and blue silken sea falling behind me. Up towards your church, to pray for you there.

  ~ Carly ~

  I’m lying on my bed in my cell, trying to relax. Sarah Jane is listening to her iPod in the bunk above mine, its distant sound scratching towards me, when a screw knocks on the door. The door is opened, closed again. The screw, a young man in a grey uniform, stands in front of me looking severe.

  ‘Carly Burton, come with me. Your legals want to see you.’

  No warning. No time to think. No time to smooth out my answers. What do they want now? I run my fingers through my unkempt hair, trying to tame it a little with my fingernails, and push saliva around my mouth to freshen it as I follow the screw along the corridor. At least he hasn’t cuffed me this time.

  Mr Hockerman QC and my solicitor, Mr Ward, are waiting for me in the out-of-hours visiting room, a small room at the end of my cellblock. The screw lets me in to join them and locks the door behind us. Mr Hockerman and Mr Ward smell of the City, clean and smart-suited. I sit in the plastic chair opposite them, across a plastic table. I am out of my cell but still locked in this grey plastic world.

  ‘Good news,’ Mr Hockerman says. ‘We came to tell you immediately.’

  I feel the bag of cement that I had swallowed as I left my cell start to ferment and lighten.

  ‘They’re dropping the charges against you for the murders of Craig and Anastasia.’

  My blood moves from the core of my body to its periphery. Dancing. Dancing. So much so that I feel as if I’m about to faint.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, clinging on to the table in front of me.

  ‘A proper forensic handwriting expert looked at the suicide notes. Melissa Barrington, far more experienced than the person the police first used. Internationally respected in her field. The writing in the suicide notes is completely dissimilar to yours. Her research had what they call a strong conclusion. She actually believes that Jenni wrote them both.’ He pauses for breath and to give me a jubilant smile. ‘And so the prosecution have dropped charges against you.’ Another pause. ‘You only have to go to trial for the fire.’

  I inhale. I exhale.

  ‘At last, someone believed me.’

  Mr Hockerman takes my hand in his.

  ‘I always believed you, Carly. We just had to wait until the police did.’

  Tears well in my eyes.

  ‘But what about Rob?’ I ask.

  Mr Hockerman does not reply.

  ~ Rob ~

  I am kneeling by your grave, talking to you, praying for you. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Please, Jenni, please tell me the truth. Please tell me you didn’t do this. That the police have made a mistake.

  We all sometimes make mistakes, don’t we, Jenni? Don’t we?

  ~ Rob ~

  Your trial starts today. So Heather and I are braving London together, to support you.

  London. People are moving, shoulder to shoulder, speed walking in suits and trainers, rucksacks on their backs carrying their shoes. People eating on the hoof. People with their heads down, checking their emails as they move. Moving, moving, everything is moving. Except for the buses, gridlocked on Waterloo Bridge. The river. The clouds. The Millennium Eye. Moving. Moving. Moving.

  At the bottom of Waterloo Bridge an army of bicycles is skipping the lights, protected by helmets and high-vis jackets; I have never seen so many bikes in my life. It takes ages to cross the road at the end of the bridge, but Heather and I stick together and eventually we manage. There is a bit more room on the opposite pavement, freeing us to turn down the Strand, and move at a normal pace towards Fleet Street and the Old Bailey. The Old Bailey. Portland stone pillars and majestic cupola. The gold figure of justice terrorising us from above.

  I push my bag and my coat through
the X-ray machine at the entrance. Heather follows me. Heather. The only person who knows where you were on the dates Craig and Anastasia died. Heather, do I believe you? Carly, do I believe you? Even though some of the charges against you have been dropped, I have continued to look and look for my diary to satisfy my own doubt. I can’t find it anywhere, and suspicion towards you continues to incubate inside me.

  Today I push through the security loop, an overweight guard eyeballing me. He lowers his eyes and waves me through. I grab my bag as it judders out of the X-ray machine on its side and stand and wait. Heather is frisked, arms splayed, legs apart, patted down by the gentle touch of the overweight security guard. She is released by a nod of the head, and we walk through the entrance hall of the Old Bailey together.

  It is the modern entrance. Not the original entrance, the marble-floored palatial hall of the internet and BBC dramas, now only used for high days and holidays. We are ushered straight into the back of a courtroom, where a wigged and gowned Mr Hockerman nods at us to acknowledge our presence. The courtroom. Solid with silence. Heavy with self-importance. Lawyers arriving to greet each other with meagre smiles. Gowned court officials, pacing up and down. I am not sure who they are, or why they are pacing so self-importantly. The air presses down on me and stifles me. I feel as if I need permission to think, permission to breathe.

  A door opens to the right of us, and we turn our heads towards the noise. A guard enters, a bull of a man, all torso and chest. You are handcuffed to him. Why? If you run away now, how far will you get? He uncuffs you and you sit down next to each other, in the area reserved for the defendant; in the middle of the court at the back, behind a glass screen. You are wearing a pink dress. You look thin and pale. Wide-eyed. Dusted with innocence. You rub your wrist where you were cuffed, as if the metal had been hurting you. When you finish making yourself comfortable, you look across, first at your mother, then at me. When our eyes meet, I silently ask you,