Sincerely, Yours

by Charlotte Barnes

  Sincerely, Yours

  Charlotte Barnes

  Copyright © 2021 Charlotte Barnes

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  The right of Charlotte Barnes to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  * * *

  Print ISBN 978-1-914614-32-3

  Contents

  Love best-selling fiction?

  Also by Charlotte Barnes

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part II

  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

  Part III

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part IV

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part V

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Part VI

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

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  Also by Charlotte Barnes

  Psychological Thrillers

  Intention

  All I See Is You

  Crime Thrillers

  The Copycat

  The Watcher

  The Cutter

  Part I

  1

  2010

  I couldn’t stand to watch her die. But I couldn’t help her either.

  There was a quiet crack. If we hadn’t been standing stock still and silent when it happened then I doubt we would have heard it at all. A crack, then a pop. Mum looked at me as though I might know the source, but I didn’t. I shrugged, and carried on looking through the hanging clothes – ones she’d only brought home with her that day. ‘You don’t have to steal everything I buy,’ she’d said when I made a beeline for the bedroom. It was one of our ongoing jokes, though, how nice it was that we were both the same size – how convenient.

  Mum set a hand on my shoulder to halt my shuffling. The coat hangers had squealed from one end of the wardrobe pole to the other. But when we were quiet again, the sound of footsteps – the uncomfortable sucking of a shoe being lifted away from wooden floors – was somehow amplified. It was hard to tell which room of the house the sound was coming from, though.

  I opened my mouth – to scream, maybe, I wasn’t sure – but Mum clamped her fingers hard across my face. She rounded her lips as though to shush me, but she only mimed the instruction, and made those fiercely wide eyes she used to make, to warn me she was being serious. She took slow and deliberate steps to the doorway; it was open enough to peer through from the right angle. If we hadn’t been in the middle of a break-in, I would have laughed at her Scooby-Doo demeanour. She was too beautiful to be anything but a Daphne.

  I’ve no way of knowing what she saw around the bend of the doorway. But she hurried back into the room with a different kind of wide-eyed look. Her finger was pressed to her lips then, as though to underscore the importance of my quiet. She rushed me against the open doorway of the walk-in wardrobe, wordlessly warning me of something – I didn’t know what until later. It was only when I was inside the space, squashed mute against soft linens and stiff jackets that she said, ‘You stay in here, whatever happens.’

  ‘Mum, I–’

  ‘Sarah.’ She fixed a hand over my mouth again. ‘Please.’ I’ve never been sure whether she whispered this or only mouthed it. But I nodded my understanding and, as though only in that moment realising the danger of whatever was walking through the halls, I crouched small in the belly of the cupboard. She pushed the door closed as I shrank away from her. But she left a wide enough crack for me to see.

  2

  The police thought I was joking, I think. In their defence, I don’t imagine it’s a call they get that often. Or, if it is, the person on the other end of the line is probably biting back on tears of laughter. The only thing I was biting back on was a growing urge to curl up and die next to her, as though I could make myself into one of those loyal dogs – the sorts you read about in the human-interest section of a newspaper. They’d find us both, weeks later: Mum suffocated and me starved to death.

  ‘Have you called an ambulance?’ the operator asked.

  I stammered over the admission. ‘No– no, I– I didn’t think to. Should I call them instead?’ Through this messy plea for help, this plea for someone who might know what to do, I watched Mum the entire time; she’d always been the one to know how to handle things. ‘I saw it happen, though, I saw him.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Okay, my love, can you take some deep breaths for me?’

  ‘I didn’t try CPR,’ I said, misunderstanding the request.

  ‘No, no. That’s okay. There’s an ambulance on the way, okay?’ She used hush-baby tones. ‘The police are coming, too, so it’s really important that you don’t touch the body, okay? Can you do that for me? Are you alone in the house now?’

  There were so many questions that I didn’t know which to answer first. ‘He left,’ I said, simply. ‘I watched him leave too.’

  Before she could add anything more there was a thunderclap hammering against the front door – loud enough for the woman to hear. ‘That’ll be the police, my love, okay?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I thought he might have been back – with reinforcements, ready to do away with the witness.

  ‘I’ll stay on the phone with you, okay? I’ll be right here.’

  On the other side of the front door there was a man and a woman, both in bright yellow garments, with a medical kit slung over each shoulder. It seemed wildly optimistic of them, but I think I was also holding on
to some hope. I stepped aside, the phone still pressed to my ear, and let them flood the hallway.

  ‘It’s the paramedics,’ I told the woman on the phone.

  ‘Okay, the police won’t be long now.’

  ‘We’ll need to know where your Mum is.’

  ‘They want to know where she is.’

  ‘Okay, my love, I’ll let you go.’

  Enough people had let me go for one evening. But the line went dead.

  ‘She’s in the bedroom.’ I think I expected them to know where that was. ‘I’m sorry – it’s through there, in here,’ I moved as I spoke, and it occurred to me then how I was retracing his steps – how all of us were. ‘Are we disturbing evidence? Will the police– Can they tell our footprints–’

  ‘Can I get your name, honey?’ This new woman asked, in soft tones again.

  I hated but needed to be spoken to like a child. ‘I’m Sarah. Mum is Evelyn. Or Eve, she doesn’t mind Eve, she–’

  ‘Sarah, could you walk me through what happened here?’ she interrupted me, guiding me away from the room I’d just shown them to. The man was in the background, busying himself with clicks and zippers and alchemy.

  She listened with a neutral face and I remember wondering how she wasn’t horrified by my behaviour – disgusted that I hadn’t gone out there, disturbed him, maybe died. There was the occasional headshake from her, something that could have been a twitch, but that was the closest she came to a reaction.

  At the end of my sad story-time she opened her mouth to add something, but her colleague interjected, as though he’d been waiting for a natural pause. ‘Alex,’ he called her attention. ‘The police are here. I’m going to walk them through the state of play in the bedroom.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ She didn’t even look at him; she stayed looking at me. ‘Can we talk some more, Sarah? Is it just you and your mum that are here?’

  ‘My dad, he isn’t around.’ I could hear a flurry of newcomers in the hallway and I wanted to warn them: Watch your footsteps; that’s where he was. But they’d probably already guessed. ‘I don’t have any siblings, either. It’s just me. She always joked,’ I stopped to let a smile escape, ‘she always joked I was enough, that she didn’t have enough clothes for– for two.’ I thought of the wardrobe, the new clothes, the wailing screech of coat hangers that had disguised his first moments in the house.

  ‘Okay, that’s good, that’s really good, Sarah. Does your Mum have relatives?’

  ‘None that we’re close to.’ Her own mother hadn’t been around, I remembered.

  ‘She doesn’t have siblings either?’

  I shook my head and sucked in my chest. ‘It’s really just us.’

  ‘Alex.’ The man appeared again. ‘We’re going to need to head out.’

  From the corner of my eye I saw her throw him a pleading look and he backed away. ‘Do you have any family friends that we can call, honey?’

  ‘The police are going to need–’

  ‘Noah,’ she snapped across him. ‘Anyone at all?’

  ‘Madison. I could call Madison.’

  ‘Okay, who’s Madison?’ she asked, feeling through her pockets. She pulled out a scrap of paper and clicked her pen alive. ‘Is that someone we could call for you?’

  ‘I don’t know her number. My phone is around– My phone might be–’ I gestured to the hallway. I’d used the house phone to call them. But when had I last seen my mobile? ‘Can I?’ I looked from one to the other. The man – Noah – shifted from one foot to the other and avoided my gaze, as though he hadn’t been looked at like this before – or maybe he had, but not so he’d notice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sarah, there’s nothing to apologise for, okay? Noah will get your phone.’

  ‘Alex, the police should be the ones–’

  ‘Can you tell us whereabouts it is, or does it have a cover we might spot, maybe?’ she asked, as though her colleague hadn’t spoken.

  There was a set of drawers as you came in through the front door, I explained. He disappeared and I imagined him retracing those same steps again. How many footprints were over the original footprints? I thought of Noah backtracking along the hallway, towards the open front door. He would be walking past the bedroom, along the outside of the wall where the wardrobe cupboard stood – where I’d folded myself. Then he’d walk back. Is that the way he’d left, after he–

  ‘Sarah.’ My name sounded strange coming from Noah’s mouth. ‘I got your phone,’ he said, handing it to the woman, ‘but the police want to have a quick talk with you. Would that be okay?’

  ‘Now?’ I asked.

  ‘Only if you’re okay with that.’ He looked behind him and I saw his head twitch, as though signalling to someone. ‘Why don’t we try to get in touch with Madison first, and we can go from there? Does that sound better?’

  I closed my eyes to stifle the onset of tears and nodded my head. ‘That would be better, if that’s okay, I think.’ All the while thinking that nothing would ever be better again.

  3

  They took my clothes. The saving grace being that, while treading through my house, they managed to pluck out some fresh items for me to wear. I told them I hadn’t disturbed her; only held her for a minute or two. But they said something about trace contact; no stone being left unturned. I wanted to ask them about the footprints, then, but it didn’t seem like the right time. They left me ‘sitting tight’ in what I guessed was an interview room designed for victims; there were sofas rather than hard-backed chairs, and a box of tissues nearby. It was nothing like the crime series Mum and I had binged, though. But then, watching someone die had felt different to how I’d expected as well.

  I slept for an hour or so. When I came around, my neck cricked from the fantasy angle that my head had lolled at, I wasn’t sure whether I’d slept at all, or just passed out. Either way, time had moved on, which was both a blessing and a disappointment. This is really happening then, I remember thinking, in the seconds before a police officer I half-recognised from earlier eased their way into the room. It occurred to me that even in a victim’s interview room there were probably cameras and I wondered whether they’d watched me sleep.

  ‘Can I get you anything, Sarah?’ she asked, and I didn’t like how familiar her tone was. There was something too friendly about the way she sat opposite me, two fingers pressed to my knee as though to ground me.

  But please, let me drift away, I thought as I shook my head in answer. ‘I’m okay, thank you.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘I’m okay.’ Which was a lie because I would, of course, seldom be okay again. ‘Can I leave yet? Is there more that you…’

  ‘We’re going to need to ask some questions, if you think you’re up to it this evening.’

  ‘Is it still evening?’

  She frowned. ‘It’s the early hours.’

  And I wondered how a night could last so long.

  ‘We can get some coffee, or even something to eat if you think you can manage it. It’s really important we keep your strength up right now.’

  ‘Tea.’ I gave in. ‘I don’t have sugar.’

  ‘Okay.’ She pulled her phone out and thumbed in my order. ‘I’m texting my colleague, okay. She’s on her way to us so she can stop and get tea.’ When she put her phone away she gave me a tight smile. ‘You don’t have to be alone again tonight, okay? We’ll have a talk while we’re waiting for your guardian – Madison, is it?’

  ‘She’s a family friend.’ It was disingenuous to call her that. Madison had been in my life for as long as I could remember. Once, she’d even gone as far to joke that if she’d had a child then it would have been me. I knew Mum would want Madison here, for this. ‘You’ve managed to get in touch with her though?’

  The door opened and another woman sidled in. ‘Tea?’ She smiled and set it down in front of me.

  ‘I’m DS Laing, and this is DC Brooks,’ the first woman introduced them both, and ignored my question. ‘If you’re up to it, Sarah,
we’d like to have a talk through some of the things that happened this evening, while you were at home.’

  People kept making it sound like they were asking me things when they weren’t. I knew I would have to talk about it, for as long as they wanted me to. Why ask? I thought and sipped my drink even though it was too hot, but at least it was a different kind of feeling.

  DC Brooks picked up. ‘Can you tell us what was happening immediately before the–’ she faltered. ‘The break-in.’

  ‘Mum and I were in her room.’ I swallowed hard and felt a small pebble land in the back of my throat. ‘She’d brought a load of new clothes today. Payday. And – she and I, we’re–’ I shook the present tense away. ‘We were the same size, so I was skimming through her wardrobe. It was a joke we had.’