The Insomniac: A gripping psychological thriller by Miranda Rijks

Author:Miranda Rijks [Rijks, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkubator Books
Published: 2022-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

13

DAISY

The hot bath with the glorious essential oil that Amity gave me relaxes my exhausted body and settles my weary brain. She’s right, I do feel a sense of unburdening now I’ve written everything down. The only problem is, I can’t stop thinking about what happened in that second court case while I was hiding away in Spain.

I get out of the bath and drink the herbal tea she left me, which is now cold. I wonder whether I should continue writing down my memories, but I don’t have the energy. Instead, I lie in bed and recall that time.

Everything I learned about Leon Johnson’s brutal murder was discovered second-hand, but it was easy enough to find out what happened through online reporting and English newspapers. Goodness, I was a mess back then. I was grieving Mum, yet I couldn’t return to be with Dad and my sister. I had to pretend I didn’t care, when in fact my heart was breaking. At the end of a two week trial, Kyle Franklin was found guilty. The judge subsequently sentenced him to life in prison for the murder of Leon. He then admitted to the murder of Jason, so he’ll be incarcerated in a maximum security jail for the rest of his life.

I scoured the news every day to try to work out whether Kyle was sentenced because I tipped off the court clerk or because the prosecution just had a stronger case against him this time around. But there was nothing about jury influencing in the Leon murder trial. After the sentencing I became even more paranoid. What if the jury nobbler blamed Kyle’s incarceration on me? What if he tipped up in Spain and knifed me on my way home from work, or he did something terrible to Dad or my sister, Marnie? That fear consumed me for about three months and then to my relief, I found an article about jury intimidation, just a small paragraph tucked away in the middle of The Times.

Aaron Sullivan was prosecuted for intimidating a member of the jury in Kyle Franklin’s first trial and consequently reverting the course of justice. It turns out that Aaron was Kyle’s cousin and he got sent to jail for four years for jury nobbling. The jury spokesman confessed to accepting bribes and he was given time too. To begin with, their convictions gave me an overwhelming relief. The horrors were all over while all the guilty defendants were behind bars. I partied hard and tried to forget that I was meant to be grieving the loss of my mum. And then one evening I spilled a drink down the front of a cute English guy in Marbella who was attending a stag party. We got talking, he asked for my number and I fell in love. Just like that. Haydn and I tried the long-distance romance thing but it didn’t work for either of us. I had no choice: it was time for me to go home.

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