Echoes of Guilt Read online

  Echoes of Guilt

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Five years later

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52 Ten days later

  A Letter From Rob

  Books By Rob Sinclair

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Echoes of Guilt

  Rob Sinclair

  For my Gran

  Prologue

  Hope? No, there was no hope left inside him now. Not after so long. Not after what he’d already been through.

  Guilt? No. Not that either. He didn’t deserve any of this, even if it was inescapable that his own choices and mistakes had led him to be here.

  Fear? At one point, yes. In fact, before fear, there had even been courage, back when his initial fight was still burning strong. His confidence, charisma, arrogance even, had seen him through the first stages of this ordeal. He’d firmly believed back then that there’d be a way out. A way to turn things on his captor. A way to make him pay.

  Such optimism was nothing but a blurred memory. Fear had soon taken over, but he wasn’t sure there was even any of that left any more. His tormented mind had moved to a different place altogether. A grim and dark place from where he knew there was no chance of a return.

  So what was this emotion that so consumed him now?

  He heard the footsteps outside. Hard. Slow. Deliberate. His tired and pain-wracked body instinctively tensed. The throb of his weak heart, which had miraculously kept him going through all of this, ramped up to a soft thud – the most dramatic response it could now muster.

  He struggled against the restraints – a thick metal chain, wrapped around his midriff and chest – that dug into his skin and kept his arms pinned to his sides, and also kept him pinned to the metal workbench he was lying on. His legs were similarly tethered, and with the patchwork of open wounds across his flesh he’d long ago realised that the less he moved, the more he was able to push the persistent agony he was in deep into his troubled mind.

  What was that? The well in the pit of his stomach.

  If not fear then what?

  The thick key turned in the lock and the sturdy metal door heaved open with a whoosh of fresh but cold air that sent his hacked skin prickling.

  The man walked in and a switch was flipped and the darkened room became bathed in a sinister orange glow.

  Could light from a flickering overhead bulb really be sinister? It seemed ridiculous to think so. Yet in this dank and depressing room, he had no doubt it was true, even if it was more to do with what the light illuminated rather than the light itself.

  The door closed with a hefty thunk.

  His eyes were moving rapidly now, his gaze flicking around the room, looking anywhere but at the man who was slowly taking off his overcoat as if eking out every last millisecond of tension.

  He glanced over to the ghoulish array of items on the shelves to his left. The tidbits – souvenirs – were the little that remained of the countless lives that had ended within this room.

  Next his eyes settled on the bench across the way, upon which sat the tubes and the vials and jars that had been used to force-feed him after he’d refused to eat for so long. The paltry liquid nourishment had done its job – just – of keeping him alive when he would otherwise have been dead.

  Just looking at the equipment made his throat ache. And yet that was nowhere near the worst of it. On the adjacent bench sat the nightmarish collection of metal tools. Instruments that had already been used to inflict the most horrific pain and injuries that he wasn’t sure could ever properly heal. That bench was where his eyes now remained fixed.

  The man stepped over to him… Picked up a scalpel that he twisted in his fingers. The tormentor caught the eye of his captive. No words were needed. Both men knew what was coming next.

  And that was when he finally put his finger on what the emotion was that now swelled inside him, nearly bursting from every pore.

  Desperation.

  That was all he had left. More than anything, he was simply desperate for this trauma to be over. Desperate to be given the chance to breathe his last undignified breath. He wanted… no, he needed to die. Today. Here. Now. This had to end.

  And so he mustered every ounce of strength to do the only thing he could think of doing.

  He begged.

  Over and over. He pleaded desperately, horribly. Seconds passed. Minutes? He couldn’t tell, as the garbled words fell from his mouth one after the other.

  All to no purpose.

  Soon he was spent. He had nothing left to give. Nothing left to say. The man still held his eye. Still held the scalpel between his twisted fingers. His eyes burned brightly in the electric light.

  ‘No,’ he said. Calm. No amusement, no anger or hostility. Absolute calm and detachment from the hideous actions he’d already undertaken. ‘I’m not even close to finishing with you yet.’

  Then he stepped forward, blade in hand.

  Chapter 1

  Five years later

  Dani rolled her eyes when the door to the house finally opened and DS Easton tumbled out, doing up the top buttons of his shirt as he went, his winter coat draped over one arm as he shuffled along the path to her car.

  He sank down into the passenger seat, shivering away, but then it was only one degree outside and his coat was uselessly dumped on his lap. When he caught Dani’s eye, she couldn’t resist an accusatory glance at the clock on the dashboard.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Dani said. ‘The kids?’

  Easton nodded. Not that they were his kids. Aaron was unmarried, didn’t even have a girlfriend right now. Unfortunately Dani believed it was increasingly likely things would stay that way for some time, with his sister and her kids having apparently moved into his cramped two bed house for good. What had started as them seeking shelter for a few days after his sister had walked out on her last down-and-out boyfriend over the summer, had turned into a six-month stay. So far. The kids had even been enrolled in a local school three months ago, much to Easton’s dismay.

  Dani had seen the girl and boy – Jasmin, eleven; Carl, nine – leaving the house ten minutes earlier, all bright and breezy.

  ‘I don’t know how anybody does it,’ Easton said as Dani pulled the car back onto the road. The rear tyres slipped on a pa
tch of black ice but Dani soon found traction again, though she’d keep her speed steady until they were on roads that the council had actually bothered to grit. The cold snap was already a few days in, and cars and homes and trees and gardens were covered in a thick layer of silvery frost that the low winter sun would struggle to shift. ‘Getting those two ready and out the house… I’ve been up since six.’

  It was now eight thirty.

  ‘So where’s Sis?’ Dani asked, sounding about as unsympathetic as she felt. Perhaps not an uncommon position for Dani, given her continuing battle to overcome the after effects of the TBI – traumatic brain injury – that had nearly ended her life a little over four years ago, though in the case of the Easton domestic situation, she really believed it was a mess he should have sorted by now. At least his police work was far more organised and far less calamitous than his home life.

  ‘She never came back last night,’ he said. ‘Who bloody knows where she’s ended up this time.’

  ‘You never sound too bothered by—’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She texted me to say she’d be back to pick the kids up from school. She’s not laying in a ditch somewhere.’

  Dani knew he was glad about that, even if he didn’t sound it.

  ‘So, we’re off to court, eh?’ Easton said.

  Dani nodded.

  ‘What exactly are we expecting to get out of this morning?’

  The way he asked the question made it seem as if he thought they were wasting their time. Easton was the closest thing to a partner that Dani had ever had in the police force. As a DI she was his superior, and technically on any case there could be a whole team of Sergeants and Constables working with her, but she trusted Easton more than any of them and regular had him by her side. Yet on more than one occasion recently he’d expressed his doubt about the amount of time she continued to spend on the Damian Curtis case. But then the case remained far more personal for her than it was for anyone else. She wouldn’t give up, even if the trial was already underway, and the CPS, in theory, already had everything they wanted from the police.

  ‘I want to hear what this new psychiatrist has to say for himself on the stand,’ Dani said.

  ‘Everett?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Probably the same as he said the last time we went to see him at Rampton.’

  Rampton Secure Hospital, where Sheldon Everett’s patient, Damian Curtis, was being held; Curtis, who’d murdered six people over the summer and was now on trial for his crimes. His defence team were doing everything they could to argue that he hadn’t the mental capacity to kill. That his hands had taken those lives, but that he couldn’t be held culpable. But this wasn’t a simple case of diminished responsibility – a mentally ill person taking the lives of others, their actions caused by their mental issues. Curtis’s defence were arguing that, in fact, his actions had been very clearly and carefully directed by another party, with Curtis nothing more than a puppet in a sick and twisted charade.

  The prosecution had robustly rebuffed those claims so far, instead setting their sights on Curtis and Curtis alone. They wanted a murder conviction. Curiously Dani found herself on the defence’s side. Her serious issue, and one that had caused her to lose many nights of sleep over the last few months, was that she disagreed with who the defence team were claiming to be Curtis’s directing influence. Both in the courtroom, and throughout the UK press, Curtis’s now dead ex-psychiatrist was being blamed. Dani, on the other hand, seemed to be the only person in the world who thought the culprit to be someone else entirely.

  Her twin brother.

  * * *

  The public gallery in the courtroom inside the unnecessarily square and bland-looking Crown Court in Birmingham city centre was only half full, despite the large media focus that the trial had garnered in its build up. In a way Dani was glad about that. She and Easton took seats at the front of the gallery where nothing but a wooden barrier and low tinted glass separated them from the prosecution and defence teams.

  Despite it being his first appearance at the trial, Sheldon Everett looked tired and dishevelled, both in his clothing and his appearance, as he headed up to the stand. His thinning mucky grey-brown hair was a flopping mess, his glasses hung lopsidedly across his face and his cream shirt was rapidly untucking itself and spilling out around his low-riding trousers. He looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, but Dani knew from her previous interactions with him that he was both intelligent and articulate. He was also strangely charismatic, though Dani had never mentioned that fact to anyone else for fear of ridicule.

  Damian Curtis’s lawyer, Iona O’Hare, a heavyset woman in her forties, warmed Everett up with a series of open questions which did little other than give the judge and jury and every other person in the courtroom a potted history of Curtis’s recent past: his actions a number of years ago which had led to the deaths of his girlfriend and young son and for which he’d been convicted of their manslaughter; the years he’d since spent in Long Lartin prison – though it was conveniently omitted that for much of that time Curtis had been sharing a cell with Dani’s brother, Ben, who himself was serving a life sentence for murder – and the fact that Curtis had been released on parole earlier in the year, having served a little more than half of his sentence, and how, after just a few weeks of freedom, he’d gone AWOL and his killing spree had started.

  There were six victims to that spree, all of them people involved, one way or another, in Curtis’s previous manslaughter trial: judge, lawyer, witnesses; even Dani and her boyfriend Jason had been targets of Curtis – Jason, when he’d still been with the police, having been Curtis’s arresting officer all those years ago. Jason, had remained in hospital as he battled to recover both physically and mentally from his near-death experience at the hands of Damian Curtis during his rampage of violence.

  But what was the truth about why Curtis had snapped?

  ‘And the final victim of the defendant’s alleged killing spree was Dr Helen Collins,’ O’Hare said, a statement rather than a question. ‘She’d been the defendant’s psychiatrist for much of his time in incarceration.’

  ‘So I’m led to believe,’ Everett responded.

  ‘And can you explain, based on your knowledge of criminal psychiatry, what the nature of her work with the defendant would have entailed?’

  ‘In fact, I’ve had open access to her records,’ Everett said. ‘So I’ve the benefit of a great deal of information as to her relationship with Damian Curtis.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And her initial appointment came while Curtis was being held on remand over the deaths of his girlfriend, Charmaine Dillon, and her son. Collins was an expert witness at Curtis’s first trial, testifying as to his mental health issues.’

  ‘And what issues were those?’

  ‘Collins attested that Curtis suffered an array of mental health problems. Severe manic depression, psychosis. Her conclusion, which she shared with the court, was that Curtis acted with diminished responsibility the night he killed Ms Dillon and her son. He pleaded guilty to their manslaughter and was sent to Long Lartin prison, which I’d argue was unlikely to be the best place for him.’

  ‘Could you explain that?’

  ‘Damian Curtis is a very damaged and disturbed man. He needs constant medical supervision and intervention, and a highly secure mental institution, such as Rampton where he is now being held, is by far the most appropriate facility for such a person.’

  Dani looked from Everett over to Lloyd Barker, the CPS barrister who remained seated, eyes cast down at the folder he had on his lap. Was he even listening to this? Why wasn’t he interjecting? Not that Dani knew exactly what he should be objecting to, but currently Everett was being given free rein, it seemed.

  The conversation went on with Everett describing, in his own opinion, the work that Collins had carried out with Curtis while he was in prison: the number of meetings the two of them had held, the contents of the many wr
itten notes Collins had kept of their sessions, together with audio recordings, all of it pointing to the ongoing belief that Curtis remained a seriously troubled man, although not necessarily one who had ever displayed sociopathy.

  At least not until his release.

  ‘Which leads us to the defendant’s parole in May of this year,’ O’Hare said. ‘Weeks after his release, he is alleged to have killed his first victim, Oscar Redfearne.’

  Alleged. Why was O’Hare even bothering to stick with using that word all the time? Everyone knew Curtis had killed those people – at least in a physical sense. The only real question was why, and whether he could be held responsible.

  Still nothing from Barker.

  ‘According to the charges put against him, yes,’ Everett said.

  ‘And in the days that followed, it is alleged that he took another five lives.’

  ‘Again, that’s not a proven fact, but that’s why we’re here, I guess.’

  Everett looked nervously over to Barker, as though he too was expecting an objection. Barker still said nothing.

  ‘Was there anything in Dr Collins’s records to suggest the defendant was a threat to the public, prior to his parole?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been released.’

  ‘Collins never noted that the defendant displayed any indications of sociopathy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So this violent spree was somewhat out of the blue, would you say?’

  ‘It didn’t fit with his previous behaviour.’

  ‘Objection,’ Barker said, suddenly rising to his feet. ‘This witness had no direct contact with the defendant until some time after the alleged crimes, so his view as to the defendant’s previous behaviour is without grounds and irrelevant.’

  The judge concurred. O’Hare didn’t look in the least perturbed. In fact she looked faintly amused for some reason.

  ‘Mr Everett,’ she said. ‘Was the defendant’s alleged violent behaviour, that is the subject of this trial, at odds with the evidence you have seen of his behaviour and mental health issues through what you know of Dr Collins’s work?’