She’s changed, hasn’t she, our Sarah?
You’ll see from my other letter that I’m being open and honest with you in terms of the women I’ve spent time with over the years. It’s a bit like pulling a starting pistol years too late, because Sarah really is on her fourth or fifth lap around the course now. Maybe you’ll catch up with her, though, and then you’ll be able to publicly reel me in. Then, think of the letters they’ll put before your name, Wren. Wouldn’t it be worth catching me before she can, if only for that?
I look forward to the news coverage of my other letter. Be seeing you, Wren – on the ten o’clock news, I suspect. For now, though, do take care, and keep an eye on Sarah…
Sincerely, yours –
50
I didn’t know what it was meant to do. But the letter brought Wren and I closer – for an hour or two, at least. She went back and forth in pacing, leaving track marks in the carpet behind her desk that ran the length of the room. ‘I can’t declare this, Sarah, it could ruin me,’ she eventually announced, once I’d read the letter through another two times.
‘Okay,’ I agreed flatly. She’d looked surprised, but I didn’t know what she’d been expecting. It was her letter; she could do with it what she wanted. I had to have that attitude, I decided, because look at what I’d done with mine…
‘You need to be careful. He knows us.’ She winced. ‘You, he knows you.’
Between us we drank four and half cups of coffee in the ninety minutes that followed. I told her he was right: things would be over soon. She just needed to wait.
‘For what?’
I shrugged. ‘A sign? You’ll probably know when it’s over.’
She asked me to let her know my whereabouts – in an unofficial capacity. She didn’t say as much, but she wanted to know I was breathing; upright and walking through the city still. After everything, it seemed a reasonable request. During that same conversation I told her about the flat, and how I’d come to spend less and less time there. But it didn’t seem worth it anymore.
‘Why not?’
We were walking from her office when she asked, nearing the end of the closeness.
‘Because getting myself out of the way was never intended to put someone else in the firing line.’ I flashed a tight smile and risked leaning in to kiss her cheek. She didn’t pull away. ‘He knows where all of you are. And I’m not letting it happen again.’
Sleep was an abstract concept that night. Instead of lying awake and staring into the ether of an unfamiliar flat, though, I decided to start packing. Most of my clothes had never left the bag they’d been brought over in. But the living space – which was much more like an office space – would take some careful attention. There were corkboards balanced around the walls, with a year’s worth of work and then some. I had the canonical victims’ pictures pinned to a board on the right-hand side of the room; although Mum was missing. She wouldn’t approve of this, I didn’t think, and the imagined disappointment had been enough to leave me bent double in the room late one evening. I wrote her name instead. It wasn’t like I couldn’t call her face to mind whenever I needed a reminder of what this was for.
On a corkboard to the left-hand side of the room, there were the non-canonical victims. Their deaths had caused flickers of interest in their respective cities. But nowhere near the interest that I imagined they’d get when Wren released the letter to the press; assuming she was given authorisation to make that move. For now, though, I had what little information the newspapers in different locations had provided. That, at least, had been enough to know names: find social media profiles; learn professions; make the women back into humans. Their faces hung in chronological order with details scribbled and pinned beneath. They were all markedly similar in appearance, still, which hadn’t been a surprise. The same could be said of the women on the opposite side of the room.
They all had an average body-type. Mum had loved food, but she’d also loved her morning runs and her weekend rambles around hillsides. The other women were the same, I imagined; although I hadn’t been able to find definitive evidence of it. None of them wore glasses – although I couldn’t say whether contact lenses were being worn in any of the pictures – and none of them wore especially heavy make-up. They looked – natural, untouched. Their hair was dark brown, some were slightly darker shades than others, but all wore it long, with a wisp or a curl. If I span around the room I could make a kaleidoscope of their faces.
I took great care in unpinning them and packing them in an order that would make sense when I found them again further down the line. Each box was marked up on the outside with no more than three names, and then a number. When the victims’ boards were empty, there were four cardboard containers, their lids lifting with the stored information, stacked by the front door of the apartment. The boxes were stacked in couples, and it was the closest I’d come to having furniture in the place. It was an empty apartment when I rented it, on a month-by-month lease, and I hadn’t been the least bit interested in making the space a home.
The remaining boards in the living room – another three in total – were taken up by letters. I’d scanned and printed copies of them, too many times over to remember, to highlight, annotate, circle key words. The only thing missing from it all was a network of red string tying one piece of information to another, and I would have been a private eye from a classic detective film.
In the year since Madison, he’d been more open than before. I didn’t know whether it was a deliberate decision, or whether things had started to slip out. After this long, though, perhaps it was more surprising that he hadn’t told me more about himself sooner. But now, across the hazy photocopies of letters that had been staggered over a ten-month window, I thought I knew enough. I unpinned them carefully, as though they were precious artefacts; in some ways they were. I imagined these things becoming a kind of legacy – I just didn’t know what for. One letter at a time, I reread the highlighted snippets…
…Work has made it too easy for me to leave the city. You might have guessed already, Sarah. There are times when I long to be in this city, though, in our city for longer than I’ve been allowed. Although, I suppose, in many ways that’s worked to my advantage. No one even knows about the other cities, Sarah, no one has pieced it all together. It’s only you…
I layered them in their respective boxes and tried to keep them bunched by topic. In March, there had been three letters that arrived close together – closer than he’d ever written things before. The first had arrived before Mother’s Day – a day I steadfastly ignored in every calendar I owned – and the second two just after.
…It must be a hard time of year for you, Sarah. I think of you so often during the weeks up to Mothering Sunday. Do you miss her, I wonder? Of course, it’s a silly question. Perhaps, I more wonder whether you’ve got used to life without her…
…I think it’s a blessing, parenthood, one that not everyone is fortunate enough to come by in their lives…
He showed too much in the second letter, I thought. I realised then that he likely wasn’t a father and I wondered why that was: was it a missed opportunity, or was he physically unable? What kind of dad would you even make? I wondered, as I packed another sheet away. Then, there was the final letter from that month.
…My own mother wasn’t a special person. The woman who cared for me after my mother was, though, Sarah, and that’s why you must understand I had nothing to do with Madison. What I said, in that earlier letter, I harbour a lot of ill-feeling toward myself for that, Sarah, truly. I never would have taken one mother. I certainly wouldn’t have robbed you twice…
I skimmed through the middle portion to rush to the last paragraph.
…I was glad to be rid of my own, in many ways. The woman who cared for me, though, I’ll carry her always.
There was a burn of bile rising to the back of my throat and I swallowed hard to push it down. I didn’t read the rest of the letters, only packed them neatly like g
rim soldiers into their boxes, and then added the containers to the stacks by the front door. They were a morbid scrapbook, and reading them through in a near-empty flat with bare bulbs overhead made for a sorry show – and an uncomfortable swell of emotion that formed a lead weight in me. When they were physically out of sight I felt better. But even then there was still a final thing or two to pack away. Most significantly, the revised comeback tour…
I stood a safe distance from the map of Birmingham tacked to the board in front of me. There were several street addresses circled; bar one, that was looped around with a bright red circle and marked with a black cross. The last stop, I thought when my eyes landed on it. I looked from point to point, then, each of them adorned with a fluorescent orange Post-it note beneath to detail the significance of the street name. To start with, there was the police station; that was the letter to Wren, I guessed. It wasn’t quite the same as leaving a body behind; he was still looking to cause damage, though. Alongside that there was my office; Landon’s office; Landon’s home. I pulled in a greedy mouthful of air and tapped at my collarbone as I moved around the city. Jessie and Tyler’s address, Wren’s. And, finally, marked with the black X: Madison’s.
‘Where it all ends,’ I told the room, as I unpinned the top right corner of the map.
51
I dialled Landon’s number and let it ring once when I arrived outside the studio. Nearly a full minute passed when he pushed the back door open and emerged with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He raised an eyebrow and offered me one. I’d been trying to quit for months on end, but it wasn’t sticking – and now hardly seemed like a good time for it to. I admitted defeat and pinched the offering from him. While I was sparking up, he fumbled with half a brick between the door and its frame to wedge the entryway open.
‘I was starting to think you were AI,’ he said as he flicked his lighter.
I exhaled upward. ‘AI?’
‘Do you know this is the first show we’ve done in three months where we’ve actually been in the same room as each other for it?’ He lit his cigarette and took a deep pull. I thought I heard his chest crackle. ‘I missed your face, Wainwright.’
I grabbed him tight against me and kept my right arm outstretched to keep the burning cigarette a distance away. Neither of us said anything for the hug.
‘I read your notes for tonight’s show,’ he said when I pulled away. I was trying to judge his feelings from his tone, but he sounded too steady for me to know anything. He waited a full in- and exhale before he carried on. ‘Are you sure this is a nest you want to kick?’
‘You don’t?’
‘It’s not about me.’
Wren had held a press conference two days ago to reveal the contents of the letter. Since then, a very public discussion had started about the non-canonical victims of the so-called Sincerely Yours killer. I imagined he quite liked the moniker.
The news reports had been patchy. But Marcus had started to hold my calls at the office because, never mind being able to cover the story, there had been umpteen requests for me to be a part of it. Brooks had hardly finished the press conference and there were other newspapers – local and national alike – contacting me with interview requests.
I’d forewarned Tina, too, that a story was about to break and when she’d watched the coverage she called me with her firm hand and kind advice: ‘Do nothing that doesn’t serve you, honey, do you hear me?’ She told me people would ask about the second book: ‘Is this the long-awaited sequel? I can hear them now, honey. You be careful what you say about that.’
‘I want to cover the story with Landon, for Canonical.’ I floated the idea, not knowing which way she’d land on it. The podcast had generated and upheld interest in the first book over the years though. I didn’t see a reason why I shouldn’t be using it to build a foundation for the second.
‘You’re a good thinker, honey,’ Tina said. ‘Use it. Be careful.’
I’d sent an outline over to Landon within the hour and asked whether we could record.
‘Look, I’m game for it, if you are,’ he said, after an uncomfortably long silence had passed between us. ‘I’ve always imagined I might die young and pretty anyway.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ I flattened my cigarette against a wall. ‘There’s nothing in that outline that isn’t true.’
He pulled me into a second hug and set a hard kiss on my forehead. ‘That’s what scares me a bit, Sarah, that’s all.’ He moved away, then, and turned to kick the makeshift doorstop out of the way. ‘But if you need this, or want it, or– fuck, I don’t know, if you’ll benefit from it, I’m in. Just make sure I get an acknowledgement in that book you won’t tell me anything about.’
‘Hey,’ I said, following him in, ‘you might even be in it.’
We sat at opposite ends of the table in the recording space. While I fumbled with my headphones, Landon did the customary count-in with three fingers held high to let me know when recording would kick in. He walked through the advertisement on his own – something about a clothing store that had opened on the other side of the city – and then our usual introduction jingle followed.
‘Welcome to Canonical,’ Landon announced as the music faded. He sounded confident, at least, and I wondered whether he was – or whether it was something that came with years of practice in front of a microphone. Despite having engineered the interview, I had enough nerves then for the both of us. ‘I’m your host for the evening, Landon Hughes and, in a schedule that runs slightly different to usual, Sarah actually won’t be hosting this episode with me. Instead – and turn up those headphones, folks, because you want to hear this right – Sarah will be giving a Canonical exclusive interview about the Sincerely Yours killer and his victims, canonical and otherwise.’ He hit a button on the keyboard in front of him and a burst of dramatic music followed. That wasn’t in the plan, I thought with a raised eyebrow. But he had a flair for the dramatics that listeners had always enjoyed. ‘Sarah Wainright is the closest thing living, that we know of, at least, to being a survivor of the Sincerely Yours killer. A man who’s been active up and down the country for longer than the police might care to admit…’
Also not in the script, I thought with a sigh.
‘…investigations have now started into the sheer number of victims that he might have collected during his time as an active killer. And, on the top of him being an active killer, his career looks to have a longer lifespan, too, than we were previously led to believe. Sarah, why are you in a position to tell us about the Sincerely Yours killer? I’m right in thinking you’ve been– what, keeping an eye on him?’
I laughed. ‘That’s one way of phrasing it, I suppose.’
‘For people who don’t know, although I’m sure most of our listeners do, your own mother was one of the canonical victims of this killer.’
‘She was.’ It felt different, hearing it all in someone else’s voice. I wasn’t sure I liked it. ‘Mum was the second victim in a cluster of three–’
‘And he killed in threes initially, is that right?’
‘Yes. Three victims, in different cities. But when he broke his pattern, he became harder for the police to track, I suspect.’ I paused for a tactical sip of water. ‘I can’t stress this enough, though, the police really haven’t done anything wrong here.’
‘It doesn’t seem like they’ve done a massive amount right, though, either?’
‘Landon, I think that’s unfair.’ He was going off-script already; I’d counted on it happening, but perhaps not so soon. ‘This man has made himself difficult to track in so many ways. He doesn’t leave behind evidence, either, which adds to the mystery of who he is. There’s no sign, for example, of this being a sexual thing–’
‘Why do you say that?’ he interrupted me.
‘The women aren’t interfered with.’ I felt a prickle of something at the back of my throat. ‘I watched– I watched what he did to Mum, and there wasn’t a sexual thing in that. He just– he only wan
ted to kill her.’
‘You’re a brave woman to be able to say that, about your own mother.’ His words were cracking, and I saw a swell of feeling flush his face. I hadn’t thought how hard this all might be for him, too. ‘Aren’t you angry, though, that she– that what happened to your mum happened so early in this case history, and they’re only now finding the man responsible?’
‘Well, they haven’t found him yet.’
‘And doesn’t that pi–’
‘It pisses me off every day,’ I finished. ‘But what can I do other than what I’ve been doing?’
‘And there’s the crux of the interview, Sarah. What is it that you have been doing?’
I pulled in a greedy amount of air. ‘The killer’s behaviour changed midway through his career and the police misinterpreted that change to mean that he was no longer active. I didn’t believe he’d given in quite so easily, though, and I started looking for signs that he wasn’t inactive but had simply changed tactics.’
‘Is it common, for a serial killer to do that?’
‘I’m really not well-versed enough to say. I assume not, given that the police didn’t entertain the idea themselves. Maybe it comes down to my personal attachment to the case, as to why I didn’t want to let go of the possibility that he might still be out there somewhere – or, I don’t know, that he might still be catchable.’
Sincerely, Yours Page 20