Echoes of Guilt

by Rob Sinclair

  With Christmas a little over three weeks away, the overworked staff had somehow found the time to put up decorations and twisted plastic Christmas trees. It didn’t look much, but Dani knew it would mean the world to the patients who’d be stuck here through the festive season. She herself had spent two Christmases on a ward not dissimilar to this one, back when she was first recovering from her TBI; a recovery that would never fully be over, even if she had long since left behind those dark days in hospital.

  By now all of the regular staff on the rehab ward recognised Dani, and even though she’d only been here the previous evening, it took her several minutes of hellos and chit-chat before she finally came to Jason’s room.

  When she stepped inside, the familiar smell – what was that hospital smell? – and sound of the room filled her head and sent her mind spinning with almost entirely miserable memories.

  She noticed the staff hadn’t yet been in here with their glittering decorations. Was that because there was still hope that Jason could be back home before then?

  Dani was disappointed to see that Jason was asleep in the bed, and she tiptoed over to him. She took the seat next to the bed and put her hand onto his, hoping her gentle touch would rouse him. Jason had been in this hospital, albeit not in this room, or this ward, since the summer. Since Damian Curtis had turned up at their house and tried to tear Jason apart with an axe and knife. Although he was now heavily scarred, Jason’s surface wounds had healed while he was still in a coma. The most serious of his injuries were internal; in particular, the damage to his brain from cracking his skull on the floor, and the knife wound to the back which had wreaked havoc with his nervous system.

  When he’d first woken from his coma nearly six weeks ago, he had been paralysed from the neck down. That had come as more of a shock and trauma to him than it had to Dani, who’d already been prepared for the painful fact. The days since then had been gruelling for everyone, but Jason in particular as he mustered every ounce of resolve to try to get his body and his brain working again.

  He’d made massive progress too. He could now speak more or less normally, and his mind was improving daily. The doctors expected him to make a full mental recovery, and he was unlikely to be blighted by the same issues that Dani still suffered from as a result of her own head trauma, which had irreparably damaged her frontal lobes – the part of the brain that controls emotion and personality. As for the rest of Jason’s body… he could now use his arms and hands almost freely, including eating on his own, although his stamina was non-existent and his dexterity remained shot, causing him to seriously struggle with seemingly simple tasks such as writing his own name. Much of his time these last couple of weeks had been spent trying to get himself on his feet again. A task which largely ended in frustration and tears.

  But Dani was sure he’d pull through. Hell, she had, from her own ordeal at the hands of her brother, and she had no doubt Jason was a stronger person than she was. The worst of it, certainly from the outside in, was the pain he was still in. Jason’s nervous system remained in pieces and his body, his limbs and his head, were riddled with pain every second of every day due to misfiring nerve responses. The only way for him to gain relief was through drugs, which meant he spent much of his time asleep.

  Dani squeezed his hand a little harder and this time he responded, his hand twitching before his body shuffled. Eventually his eyelids fluttered open. Dani didn’t say anything as she waited for him to come around.

  It took him a couple of minutes before he sat up in the bed. He winced in pain as he did so and squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds.

  ‘What time is it?’ he said.

  ‘Just gone seven.’

  ‘You’ve finished work?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  More than likely she’d be straight onto the computer when she arrived home. She briefly explained about her day. Strangely she focused on the couple of hours she’d spent at court that morning, rather than the new case. Why was that?

  Probably it was because she was terrified about the implications of the link to Ben.

  Jason took it all in. Didn’t say a word. Not that she needed him to. She just needed to rant. She hoped his silence was due to the fact that he understood that, and not because he didn’t have the heart or the strength to tell her she was wrong.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ he said, after a few moments of silence.

  ‘To get Ben?’

  ‘To get whoever. It’s never too late.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Dani said, waving away that ambiguous remark. ‘Tell me about your day. How many steps did you manage earlier?’

  Jason started talking, though Dani knew she was only half listening.

  Steps. Not real steps. Not yet. Most of his body weight was taken by his arms on the parallel bars, but still it was a start, and a horrifically difficult process she herself had once gone through.

  She often wondered whether it helped or hindered the position she and Jason now found themselves in that she too had come back from the brink of death; had had to relearn so many basic activities like eating, talking, walking, just as Jason now was. Or did her experience somehow compound the problems, and add a layer of resentment to it all, particularly given how she’d been a terrible patient herself. Not necessarily all her fault, as the damage to her brain, and by extension her personality, was beyond her control, even if she and others didn’t always get that. Jason had at least been spared that affliction.

  She couldn’t count the number of arguments she’d had with him back when she was recovering. The number of times she’d flipped at him, at others, for no real reason. She’d screamed for Jason to leave her alone. She’d pushed everyone away, him included, partly because of some sort of shame, but mostly because that was just the way her brain had rewired itself. She was angry, impatient now, and struggled with empathy far more than before.

  Jason had been so much more upbeat, basically his old self. But was a part of that because he was simply determined not to follow Dani’s dark path? Was it all a front?

  Either way, Dani felt downright miserable about the whole thing whenever she thought about it.

  ‘Dani, are you even listening?’

  Jason’s face was screwed up in concern now. Or was it just the pain?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just been a really tough day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  He looked at her as though to say, ‘I get it.’

  Perhaps he did, but it didn’t really make her feel much better.

  ‘I’m really tired,’ he said. ‘And I can sense you’ve plenty on your mind. If you need to go…’

  She squeezed his hand and he squeezed back as firmly as he could.

  ‘I love you,’ she said as she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  ‘I love you too,’ he said.

  She got up and headed for the door.

  Chapter 5

  Despite the cold and the dark, the streets in the centre of Liverpool were busy when Ana emerged from the revolving doors of the office block. A fierce wind whipped across the street from the nearby Mersey, as it so often did here, but today the blast of air was bitingly chilly too, stinging Ana’s cheeks as she walked. Still, she had on the woolly hat and gloves that her friend Cat had bought for her birthday a couple of weeks ago, and she was plenty used to cold winters anyway, though this would be her first in the Northwest of England.

  Walking through the revamped shopping streets surrounding the trendy Liverpool ONE development, Ana was soon heading away from the eager crowds of commuters on their way home, and Christmas shoppers out spending more money than they could afford on gifts that people hadn’t asked for, and onto much quieter streets. In the near distance was the city campus of Liverpool John Moores University, which was encircled by a swathe of modern but affordable apartment blocks, many exclusively housing students, but plenty of others, used by young professionals and the like.

&nbs
p; As ‘affordable’ as those apartments were, Ana wasn’t quite flush enough just yet to afford one, not after only six months of her new job. Her new life, really. Not long ago she would never have imagined living such a relaxed and free life as this, even if she was earning little more than the minimum wage. For now.

  Perhaps sometime next year she’d be able to upgrade accommodation, once the initial twelve-month rental period on her low-grade ground-floor room in the shared house she was now living in was up.

  A shared house, but actually there were only three bedrooms in the 1960s semi. It was on a stretch of two dozen identical properties that were otherwise surrounded and dwarfed by much larger and grander blocks. Only one of the other bedrooms was currently occupied, by a young Chinese PhD student who’d taken on the Western first name Meghan to try to fit in to her new environment. As pleasant as Meghan was, she was rarely around. In fact, Ana hadn’t seen her at all in the last few days, and wondered whether perhaps she’d already gone back to China during the university’s Christmas break – the students seemed to be forever on a holiday of some description.

  Ana dug in her pocket for the key as she walked on down the street, her eyes busy working over the space in front of her and across the road. However safe this place felt, the whole city really, she would always feel on edge walking alone at night.

  The only people about were a couple across the road, walking a little dog, and they passed on, mid-chat, without even looking in Ana’s direction.

  She headed up to the front door, unlocked and opened it. The hallway was dark. So Meghan still wasn’t around. Ana flicked on the lights, glanced briefly down the hallway to the open doorways for kitchen and lounge – no sign of anyone – before she shut the door behind her. She stripped off her gloves, hat and coat as she headed to the locked door which was first on her right. Her bedroom. The other two bedrooms were both upstairs, where it remained pitch black. Ana shivered at the thought as she looked up. Even though she and Meghan didn’t socialise together much, it was at least comforting when someone else was in the house. But was this how it would be now for the next few weeks? Just Ana on her own each and every night?

  Perhaps she should ask Cat to come and stay with her, though with her new boyfriend, she had become more and more busy recently.

  Ana turned the key in the lock then pushed open the bedroom door. She was instinctively reaching for the light switch when she knew something was wrong. Yet she could see nothing inside the room. Could hear nothing untoward either.

  What hit her was the smell.

  His smell.

  She’d never forget it.

  Her fingers completed the journey to the switch, even though she wished they hadn’t, because as soon as the cramped space beyond was lit up, she was left staring into Victor’s menacing eyes.

  ‘Nice to see you, Ana,’ he said in their native tongue, the words dripping from his mouth with unspoken hate.

  Ana was already turning, but as she did so she spotted the shadow moving behind her, out in the hall, and she could only shrink down and flinch uselessly as the thick arms wrapped around her and crushed her, lifting her off her feet. She let out a stifled scream before a gloved hand clamped over her mouth. She wriggled and writhed but was no match for the man’s strength. He carried her into the room and threw her down onto the bed.

  Her hair flopping in front of her eyes, Ana gasped for breath as she propped herself up on the hard mattress. She could scream. She could charge for the door. But what good would it do? Victor had found her. There was no escape.

  She blew the hair from her face. Set her cold stare on Victor who was sitting on the worn Ikea sofa in the corner of the room.

  ‘You’re doing well for yourself,’ Victor said, looking around the room as though he was impressed. ‘Clever girl.’

  ‘I’m not a girl.’

  ‘But you are clever. At least you think you are. Running from me like you did. To here?’

  ‘I didn’t run.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me where you were going.’

  That was true enough.

  ‘Did you think I’d just forget about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  Victor chuckled. Ana’s insides boiled with hatred at the mocking sound.

  ‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘I always told you, Ana, you’re special to me.’

  ‘You say that to every woman.’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, a beastly smile on his face. ‘Only those that I control.’

  The goon by the door – Ana didn’t even know his name – scooped up Ana’s coat and threw it onto her. She angrily swiped it away.

  ‘You’re going to need that,’ Victor said. ‘It’s cold outside.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she spat.

  Victor got to his feet. He moved over to the bed and Ana squirmed back.

  ‘Oh, yes you are,’ Victor said. ‘You’re coming home.’

  She only saw his balled fist a second before it smashed into her face. Seconds later, she was out.

  Chapter 6

  Dani wasn’t sure whether to feel happy with the little time she’d had, or disappointed that she’d not managed to spend more than the grand total of ten minutes with her niece and nephew before they’d headed out to school with Harry’s friend’s mum. She got to see them so rarely that even ten minutes was a bonus, though it was never long enough. It felt even more strange that she saw them so irregularly now that Dani was living only a couple of miles from them, but the relationship between her and Ben’s ex-wife, Gemma, was never going to improve beyond its current level – a level of acceptance of each other – and Dani had stopped even trying to figure a way to make it anything more than that.

  Not that Dani didn’t like Gemma. There was nothing particularly offensive about her; she was kind, caring towards her kids, amenable – generally, at least. And outsiders might have thought that their shared trauma, the fact that Ben had tried, and failed, to kill them both, would be something that brought them closer together. Unfortunately, it was the opposite. Ben’s crimes, his very existence, had ultimately put a huge wedge between the two of them, and Dani couldn’t erase the feeling that Gemma, in some way, blamed Dani for what had happened – simply because she shared DNA with Ben.

  ‘How’s the new place?’ Gemma said, coming back into the lounge which was, as ever, messy with kids’ toys and clothes. She handed Dani a steaming mug of coffee.

  Dani leaned forward and manoeuvred a pile of football comics and Lego pieces out of the way to make space for the mug on the coffee table.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Dani said. ‘A bit lonely, but…’

  She didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  For a few weeks after Damian Curtis’s bloody attack at Dani and Jason’s home in Harborne, on the other side of the city, Dani had stayed in the house alone. Those had been among the worst weeks of her life. An old, creaky house, haunted by its recent bloodshed. Jason, still in hospital in a coma. Dani, her own demons amplified by it all, had been in a nosedive and on the brink of teetering back into a normality of pills and alcohol to see her through. But she’d soon realised there was no solace there, and so, even before Jason had woken from his coma, Dani had not only forcibly weaned herself off the medication – at least back to prescribed levels – but she’d moved herself and all of their things out of their Harborne home and rented a three-bed semi in a leafy part of Sutton Coldfield. It was not only near to where Gemma lived, but also Easton. Not that their proximity had a direct bearing on the choice. It had been suggested to her by more than one person that perhaps a three-bed semi – a traditional family home – was overkill for her living on her own. But it wasn’t just for her. It was for her and Jason, even if he wasn’t yet there by her side.

  ‘Jason’ll be out soon, though, won’t he?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  ‘You’re going to stick around here then?’

  ‘I reall
y don’t know. But it’s certainly more convenient for coming to see Harry and Chloe.’

  Gemma went silent at that and Dani had to push her embarrassment and disappointment to one side. She got that she wasn’t the ideal aunt. Not just because of her history, but because of her hectic, unpredictable and often macabre workload. Yet she really would push the boat out to be a bigger part of the kids’ lives if Gemma would just let her. It wasn’t as though Gemma had a big family in the local area that she put ahead of Dani.

  ‘So come on then, spit it out,’ Gemma said.

  Dani raised an eyebrow.

  ‘We’ve done the chit-chat,’ Gemma said. ‘You’ve asked about my job, my crappy love life. I’ve caught up on the perils of being a murder detective. So now we can get to it. What’s Ben done now?’

  Dani didn’t know whether to be angry or amused by that, though it was true that the interactions between the two of them usually came back down to Ben eventually, one way or another. An incredibly depressing predicament as far as Dani was concerned.

  ‘Possibly nothing actually,’ Dani said as she fished in her bag for the picture.

  ‘Really? Last I heard you thought he’d set that Damian Curtis guy up for several murders.’

  Dani winced at that comment. ‘Kind of,’ she said.

  ‘What happened to that then? I read in the paper the other week that Ben’s lawyer—’

  ‘Daley?’

  ‘Yeah, that arsehole, he’s suggesting Curtis’s psychiatrist did it.’

  ‘Dr Collins? We don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Daley seems to know. Apparently he’s preparing an appeal to have Ben’s sentence overturned, because her evidence is so tainted.’

  ‘It’s not quite as straightforward as that. Ben isn’t innocent, they won’t get away from that. The point is that if Collins is proven to have coerced Curtis, then all of her work is irrevocably tarnished. She stood on the stand at Ben’s trial. They’ll say the outcome of his trial was compromised because of her now-tarnished testimony. It gives them scope to enter new evidence as to Ben’s mental state at the appeal. If that happens then, in theory, it’s possible Ben’s murder conviction could be reduced to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.’