Amanda Robson - Guilt - The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018

‘Have you eaten here before?’ Zara asks, as I sit opposite her at Chez Luigi’s.

‘Once or twice, on special occasions,’ I reply.

‘So being here with me is special?’ she asks, flicking her hair from her face. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘I don’t usually pick people up in supermarkets.’

‘Neither do I,’ she replies.

‘When I met you in the supermarket, you said you were a twin,’ I remind her. ‘Are you identical?’

‘No.’ She pouts a little. ‘I can assure you that I am one hundred per cent individual.’

Zara Cunningham. Not defined by being a twin. Zany. Interesting. Button nose. Perfect cheekbones. So spontaneous, so free flowing. Someone I so want to fuck.

The chicken tikka meal you brought back from Tesco tastes weird: a mix of canned tomatoes, anchovy paste, ground coriander and additives. After I have forced myself to finish it, I download the latest series of Game of Thrones from Amazon – my latest addiction. This evening, its strange world engulfs me as usual, then spews me out, as my favourite character dies. She is decapitated, which distresses me. There is something about decapitation that seems so much more brutal than other sudden deaths.

I am contemplating why this is when you float through the front door at midnight humming to yourself, looking ethereal and strange. You seem overfriendly, elated, holding me against you and hugging me before you go to bed, as if I am long lost, and you haven’t seen me for years, not just a few hours.

And the next morning, over orange juice and Dorset Cereal, your Sebastian Templeton monologue starts.

Sebastian. Sebastian. Sebastian. A eulogy to a modern-day god.

‘He’s from Bristol,’ you say as we sit cramped together at our veneer table. ‘Attended Bristol Grammar School and then went to Cambridge to study maths. Stellar CV. Like yours. His parents are doctors. His dad’s a consultant in obs and gynae. His mother’s in community medicine. A lot of medical women do that. Go into community medicine because it’s more nine to five, easier if you have children, or so Sebastian says.’ Silence for a second as you take a spoonful of muesli and sip your orange juice. ‘He’s so empathetic because he’s so close to his mother.’

Zara, you talk about Sebastian all the time. I know more about him than anyone else in Bristol, even though you’ve only known him for five minutes and I’ve lived here for years. He doesn’t drive a car because of its effects on the environment. His chest size is forty-four. He votes for the Green Party. He supports Chelsea FC. He isn’t religious. He isn’t superstitious. An Aidan Turner lookalike. A dark-eyed cavalier of a man, whose hairy arms turn you on. His favourite film is Love Actually, which always makes him cry. Thirty-two years old.

He knows how to find the G-spot and tells you you are the first person he has ever been in love with. He told you he loves you, two days after he met you. A real romantic – big time. You love him back. You know I will appreciate him when I meet him. What’s not to like, about a man like that?

Her mother is visiting her at the custody suite, allowed to see her in the visit area. Waiting, surrounded by grey sterility. Shell-shocked by what has happened. By what she has done. Exhausted by her long drive from the Lancashire coast.

She is being escorted to the visiting area, along the corridor, not knowing at first that her mother is here. She hasn’t been told. She assumes she’s being interviewed again. When the door is opened and she is brought in, the sight of her diminished mother greets her. She inhales sharply and struggles for breath.

Mother and surviving daughter are standing opposite one another, eyes locked. Her mother sees a bedraggled young woman standing in front of her, panda-eyed from lack of sleep, hair tangled, hands trembling. She smells her other daughter’s blood. Her daughter sees the earthy fragility of her mother’s grief. The damage it has done. Grief more virulent than disease.

Her mother steps towards her. They clamp together. At first, touch replaces words. For a while neither can speak. The more her mother holds her, the more the screaming in her head begins to decrease. Then, slowly, slowly, pushing back the tears, she tells her mother what happened. What her sister did.

The day of the bail application arrives. She is escorted from her cell by a police officer with friendly eyes and a sympathetic smile. The sympathy cuts into her. She shrugs it away, too emotionally closed down to cope with it. She pulls her eyes away from the officer as they step out into the yard and he hands her to the guard.

For the first time in days, fresh air assaults her face. She inhales greedily, drinking it like champagne, but before she is satiated, she is shunted into the van – a cattle van. Or at least that is what it looks like. The sort that takes sheep and bullocks to be slaughtered. The sort she has seen so many times rattling up and down the motorway, making her think how awful it must be to be inside.

Inside such a thing now, in her own pen, which has a seat and a high window. All she can see through the window is sky. She looks up intently. A mackerel sky. Pale blue. White feathers. Beautiful white feathers. She would like to be up there with them, flying and floating, inhaling fresh air. The van sets off, jostling her from side to side. Making her feel sick. Look at the horizon, look at the distance, she tells herself. Her mind rotates towards the feathers in the sky, but still she feels sick. She feels sick as she remembers.

The van finally judders to a halt in a car park at the back of the crown court. Now her experience becomes surreal. She cannot believe it is happening to her. She feels as if it is happening to someone else and she is looking down upon it from above. Someone else being cuffed to a middle-aged guard with grey hair and dandruff. Being taken in a small lift to a holding cell beneath the court. Sitting on a wooden slatted bench, head in her hands, waiting to be called into court. Someone else turning her mind in on itself to close it down and allow time to pass in a mist.

After a while, the grey middle-aged guard is standing in front of her again. ‘You’ve got a legal visit. Your brief.’

She is ushered along a winding corridor, through two metal gates, and escorted into a legal visit room. A man is sitting waiting for her. A man who looks about her age. He stands up when she enters the room. He has golden amber eyes and auburn hair with a wave in it that caresses the top of his shoulders. The shoulders of a rugby player. Smiling at her with a wide dimpled smile. He moves around the plastic table he was sitting at to stand in front of her.

‘Hi, I’m Theo Gregson, your brief.’ His voice is strong and deep.

He takes her hand in his and squeezes it lightly. Her eyes are caught in his. He doesn’t look like a barrister. He looks like the front man in a sexually pumped-up rock band. Springy and virile. About to go on stage to play a riff.

He removes his hand from hers.‘Let’s sit down and talk about the bail application.’

He sits back down at the other side of the table; she sits opposite him. He pushes his hair back from his eyes.

‘I’ve read the papers so far. Bail isn’t normally granted for the defendant in a murder trial, but you have made it quite clear from the moment the police arrived that you acted in self-defence so I am going to give it a go.’

She looks into his amber eyes.

‘Thanks.’

Time has melted away. She is sitting in the dock, behind a wall of glass, next to a rotund guard with a red face. She looks across at her mother in the front row of the public gallery, head turned anxiously towards her. She smiles at her across the courtroom. A whisper of a smile, tangled by grief. Her mother is wearing her best black trouser suit and a baggy frilly blouse, which disguises her love handles. Her heart shreds as she looks at her, eyes stinging with tears.