Sincerely, Yours

by Charlotte Barnes

  ‘DS Brooks,’ Marcus interrupted me. ‘DS Brooks and I were just talking about you.’

  I swallowed down a bubble of nerves that I couldn’t quite explain. ‘Brooks is there?’

  ‘Looking for you, I believe.’

  Why hadn’t she called? ‘About the break-in stuff?’

  ‘Is there something else for her to talk to you about?’ he asked, and I could hear the smirk. But I was unsure what information the smirk stemmed from: his knowledge of me and Brooks; or his knowledge of me and what he thought I’d been doing over the weekend. ‘Should I tell her to come back another time, or…’

  I bit down hard on a bullet. ‘Put her on.’

  There was a long pause and a shuffle while he handed the phone over.

  ‘Sarah.’ She’d obviously expected me to be there. I wondered – worried – what Marcus might have told her. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I’d find you here or out hounding one of my colleagues.’ I could hear her smile.

  ‘Neither. Has my intern been hounding you?’

  ‘Not exactly, but his voicemails are so…’ she trailed off and I left space for her to think. ‘Awkward. So awkward that I thought I’d come and talk to you both.’

  ‘Elliot can’t talk to you alone. His head will explode if he meets a real detective.’

  She spluttered a laugh.

  I imagined Marcus’ face, watching the one side of the rapport between us. What questions will come out of this, I thought, leaning forward to rest my head on the steering wheel. ‘If he’s being a pain–’

  ‘Not a pain, Sarah. He just doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  ‘I’m back in the office tomorrow. I’ll be working from home for the rest of the day if you want me.’ It had been a stressful weekend. An afternoon with Wren Brooks would be a good recovery, I thought; not even for the sex, I realised, but for her company. ‘Or you can stop by the office later in the week.’

  ‘The former sounds like the better option.’

  I smiled. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  For the rest of the day I fenced emails from Marcus and missed four phone calls from Elliot who, I guessed, had caught wind of Brooks’ visit to the office. I was well into the afternoon when I remembered to text Landon to let him know I was home safe. I ignored his quick reply – ‘Get lucky?’ – then pulled up a blank message to Wren. I didn’t need an exact time for when she might arrive. But I did need to get my paperwork filed away and into my safe, stashed away inside a fake cupboard in the back corner of my home office for safekeeping. She replied within minutes to say something had come up at work, but she’d text when she was leaving. I swallowed the urge to ask what had happened, for fear that it would sound like the journalist in me asking, which, in truth, it likely was. I typed what I hoped would be a non-committal reply – ‘Okay, see you whenever.’ – and then went back to work emails.

  The day was cruising to a close when I came up for air. I’d replied to emails from various colleagues at the paper, as well as replying to my publisher about a string of events – anything to keep them off my back, I decided, before hungrily agreeing to their suggestions.

  With still no word from Wren, the next job needed to be to pack away the folders parked in the hallway. I heaved the box into the office and dumped them in front of the open cupboard. One by one I pulled them free and stashed them in the safe. For every other folder I paused for distraction, reading back through letters, notes, more letters; newspaper clippings; wild theories. It was only the sort of obsessive behaviour that I’d taken up when I was planning the first book. But I was losing conviction in the belief that this had anything to do with a sequel.

  ‘Where am I going to find you?’ I said aloud to no one as I thumbed through a packet of colour-coded copies of letters. Like an amateur forensic examiner, I’d even started to highlight words with a regional meaning; phrases that might clue me up on where he was from, or places he’d been. The man had to have a paper-trail, I reasoned, and I was right. ‘But the man and the killer are two different people.’

  I wedged another folder in the safe, then another, and watched it slowly fill with years of trauma until I’d run out of evidence to try to hide. Minutes later, I forced a stop in the work. I collected the pile of post that had gone untouched for the afternoon and wandered to the kitchen, phone in tow, to make tea and call Madison. The promise to ring as soon as I was back in the city had fallen between the cracks of other demands, but that wasn’t a surprise to me and likely hadn’t been to her. With Wren coming, too, I decided that an over-the-phone catch-up would be better than no catch up at all. I dropped the squat pile of letters on the kitchen work surface, wedged my phone between my ear and my shoulder, and filled the kettle. When Madison didn’t answer, I finished making tea and carried my handset through to the living room. I cradled the heat of the mug in my hands and tried not to think – or, tried not to think about him. But I knew it wouldn’t stick.

  I thumbed down to Madison’s number and called again.

  ‘Hey, Mad, it’s me,’ I spoke into her voicemail, ‘I’m back home safe and sound. The afternoon sort of got away from me.’ I forced a laugh. ‘You know what I’m like. I’m around for a couple of hours now, though, so if you’re free then maybe give me a call? Catch you later. Love you.’

  A heavy sigh rushed out and I rubbed at my temples. It was just a phrase; there was nothing disloyal in it. But using the words had made the thinking/not thinking/thinking even worse. I took what was left of my tea back to the kitchen with me and skimmed through a playlist on the walk. With Nothing but Thieves humming in the background, I started to flick through the post – starting with the flyers for new takeaways that had opened in the five minutes that I’d been away.

  ‘How many takeaways does one city need?’

  I scooped them into the recycling bin and letter by letter flicked through what was left. Each envelope boasted a window frame with my name inside – apart from one right in the centre of the pile, which was handwritten.

  In a cinematic style, then, the music cut out and gave way to a phone call: Wren Brooks. I took a step back from the letter and eyed the phone with a similar suspicion. But if he’d been here – if he could get in here – I decided that having a police officer on their way might not be the worst thing.

  ‘Wren,’ I answered just in time, ‘hey, when are you going–’

  ‘Sarah, I just got a phone call – Jesus…’ She paused and pulled in a greedy breath, and I felt my knee buckle beneath my weight. ‘I just got a phone call from a friend at the hospital. It’s Madison…’

  38

  Dear Sarah,

  Sometimes, Sarah, when I’m thinking of you, which happens more often than I’d care to admit these days, I think of how unfair this all is on you. I can’t imagine what it must be like to carry this around how you do. Although there are probably ways for you to make it easier. These letters mustn’t help much though, which I know is selfish of me. Maybe I’m a selfish person, Sarah, I just don’t know. We’re too close to ourselves to see our worst faults, aren’t we? I’m impulsive, I suppose, but not so impulsive that I’ll dash off to a new city without doing my research on the place. That’s something you’ve worked out for yourself already, though, isn’t it, Sarah, thanks to the comeback tour.

  The problem with tours though, Sarah, is that the dates are always changing. Have you ever had that happen? There’ll be a date or a location listed and you’ll think, yes, excellent news, I can make that; or I can be in town for that; or I can take time off work for that. You’ll make all these plans around this one specific date and location – which is fine. But then, out of nowhere, there’ll be a problem with the venue; the lighting; the back-up dancers. Who knows! It could be any number of complicated reasons that prevent a tour happening how the organiser has planned for it to. Sometimes, Sarah, people just change their minds about things.

  And that’s another thing that must make this hard on you: I always know something you don’t. I k
new where I was going to be the night your mum died – and all the other women. I still think about that night, Sarah, if I can be honest with you – the night with your mother. I don’t think about it how I think of the other nights – or the other women, I suppose I mean – because your mum was just so special, don’t you think, Sarah? Of course, you’ll agree. Is there a young woman in the world who doesn’t think their mother is special? The silver lining in this mess of ours, Sarah, is that you had a second mother ready to step in, didn’t you? From what I’ve gathered, Madison doesn’t have children of her own, though. Is there a reason for that, do you know? From afar at least she seems like a doting mother. She doesn’t know what you’re doing, though, does she, Sarah? I think you’ve been keeping all of this from her – keeping me from her. Then that makes me wonder, is it because you want me to yourself, Sarah? Or is it because you don’t know what you want me for?

  Maybe you need to spend some time thinking about that.

  I’ll be sorry to miss you this weekend, Sarah, because I really do enjoy whatever this mess is that we’ve made for ourselves. I have business elsewhere though; a change of schedule to the tour, you might say, something to keep me closer to home. Still, I’ll call ahead to find you in Oxford, Sarah, to make sure you’ve arrived there okay. Maybe you’ll salvage something from the weekend, some downtime. You really do need the break from things, Sarah, because you work so terribly hard – not just at the paper, or the comeback novel. Hey, when are we going to see that second book of yours anyway, Sarah; when will I have given you enough material for it? I’m amazed we’re not there yet. Although it did take a mother the first time around…

  You’ve already lost one though. It would be remiss of you to lose two.

  Safe travels, Sarah. Be seeing you.

  Sincerely, yours –

  Part IV

  39

  2010

  ‘Witness comes forward…’

  It was days later when I realised I’d made a mistake when I killed Evelyn. That night, I’d left the house like nothing at all had gone wrong. But the headlines knew what had happened.

  Even then, without knowing for certain who it was, I had the clearest image of where they must have seen me. The woman – Eve to her friends so the early reports claimed – had said something before I’d gone into the bedroom. I’d assumed she was talking to herself. They do that sometimes, when they start to panic; talk themselves through the steps of hiding from me. I try to ignore it when it happens and I’d ignored it that night, too. But she hadn’t been talking to herself at all, I guessed, as I started to read through the beginnings of the newspaper reports. She must have been talking to someone.

  I clicked from one article to the next to try to find more details.

  ‘Nasty business,’ the cleaning woman at work narrated from behind me. It was too late for me to click out so I agreed with her, offering a hearty nod as I carried on looking through the screens. ‘They’re keeping that witness well out the way.’

  ‘They certainly seem to be.’ I didn’t look away from the computer and she eventually took the hint to move on.

  The articles didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know about Evelyn – apart from the fact that she liked to be called Eve. It made her too real, so I tried to skip over the detail whenever it came up, which was more often than I expected it to. It said a lot about how little information they had, though, and I took some comfort from that. Whoever the witness was, they hadn’t told the police enough to catch me.

  I repeated this cycle of looking through the newspapers every day. It was an easy enough endeavour to pass off as normal browsing. It was my lunchbreak; I was entitled to skim through the internet over a sandwich. With every lunchtime, though, more information filtered through. One day I was eating a tuna and mayonnaise sandwich with aged lettuce and vicious red onion, cheese that could have been used to erase pencil, and that’s when I saw the reveal: a child.

  ‘Police have since confirmed the witness to Evelyn Wainwright’s murder was her daughter, Sarah Wainwright…’

  ‘Sarah.’ I rolled the name around in between mouthfuls. ‘Sarah Wainwright.’

  ‘Detectives are working closely with Sarah Wainwright to ascertain what she can confirm, relating to her mother’s murder. A statement is due to be released later today to outline the next steps in the investigation with this witness in tow…’

  I wasn’t anywhere near as nervous as I thought I perhaps should have been. If anything, there was a strange sense of relief. Initially I thought it belonged to the reveal of the witness; if the police hadn’t banged down my door already, they seemed unlikely to on the testimony of a child. But that wasn’t where the relief had come from, I realised. Instead, the relief belonged to being seen…

  Sarah was a child of the social media age. Even when she wasn’t posting – which she often wasn’t, in the days and weeks after her mother’s death – her friends were still active enough for me to have a sense of what was happening. Without her uploading fresh material, I found myself drawn to a back catalogue of bad photographs and typographical errors that made up her accounts. She didn’t have especially advanced security settings in place – another thing befitting of her age – which made it easy enough to go through her history. But when I arrived at pictures of her and her mother together – ‘Day out with the bestie’ – I back-clicked out of the profile and took a comfort break. There were other people, other things to be checking on.

  I found it hard to pull away from Sarah, though, even though I knew the risks of staying close. The letter was an indulgence, a careless one at that. But the more she was reported on as the child of a murder victim, the more I – the guilty party, the puppeteer – felt the need to reach out. It wasn’t redemption; no person in their right mind would forgive what had happened. It was a kind of closeness, though, and I needed it. It was selfish of me. But maybe I was a selfish person.

  The letter – handwritten, even though no one appreciates penmanship anymore – would make or break my relationship with Sarah, I decided. She might read it and go straight to the police, or she might do exactly what I asked of her. So, I watched carefully in the days after it arrived. She didn’t seem to be taking extra care with her whereabouts – if anything, she looked even more eager to be left alone. But her friends and her surrogate – Madison – made it hard for her to get any breathing space. I could see Sarah struggling with that. But even through the struggles, there still weren’t extra news reports; there was no headline flash about contact with the killer. I knew, then, that Sarah and I might have something.

  Time stretched out between us in the years that followed. I did my best not to crowd her, to let her grow and advance despite it all. But there were times when I experienced such a swell of feeling – it might have been misplaced pride, or something like it – and I couldn’t stop myself then. When there was talk of a book; when there was an interest in a journalism career; when there was talk of a sequel, before the first story had even hit the shelves. It occurred to me, then, Sarah was holding on to me as tightly as I’d held her. I liked that. All my women had felt special before. But after Evelyn, I lost track of who was more special: the women, or the one who’d watched.

  40

  2017

  In the minutes before people die, their faces fall into different displays of feeling: hurt to disbelief to denial to – quiet. Evelyn’s expression had been one of panic for most of the time that I was with her. Initially I’d assumed it was her fear of death. Later, I realised it would have been her panic at whether her daughter was next. It’s just like a mother to put someone else first like that. That’s why I never would have attacked her if I’d known. Since Evelyn I spent more time with women before letting anything happen. Sarah had been easily missed from the outside of Evelyn’s home – a teenager with an active social life especially – because I hadn’t been able to be there all the time. And I still couldn’t be there all the time. But I made a point of being ther
e enough to know whether there was anyone else in the household who might suffer the fallout of my actions. It was one thing to ruin one person, but to let someone else carry the weight of that felt like an unnecessary cruelty.

  When I wasn’t watching the women, I was busy making a concerted effort to be around for Sarah as much as I could be, especially during times of crisis. When she pulled out of the garage underneath her building, I recognised her mother in her for the first time. They both wore the same panic.

  I pulled out from the street opposite and followed from three cars behind. I’d got used to this safe distance. Although I wondered whether she felt the same creeping sensation as I did at close proximity. It didn’t seem likely, but still.

  The radio was white noise to our car chase. I half-listened to news reports relating to the local area – further break-ins; plans for citywide developments to the road structures; opportunities for a regional festival – all the while thinking how much better Sarah’s reporting was. She had a cutting style that she took into every article with her. I admired that. From the way she carried herself I imagined that she might talk in the same way that she wrote: firm and to the point, never saying more or less than she needed to. That’s how she’d appeared in television interviews; although it wasn’t how she sounded on podcast episodes, so I knew there was a balance somewhere.

  She was driving like a lunatic, though, and this wasn’t the first time I’d followed her, so I knew from experience that she wasn’t a reckless driver. When she made a sharp turn left, then right, left, left, and right again, I understood the aggression – the panic: The Queen Elizabeth Hospital. She pulled into the first empty parking space she came to, leaving me to loop around the multi-storey’s layers until I found a spot.